Credit, Contribution & Collaboration
The positive outcomes generated by collaborations are, of course, the fruits of the work of many. Yet, it is all too common for partners in a collaboration to take credit for those outcomes in ways that attempt to elevate their own stature and diminish the contributions of others. This need for credit can crush a collaboration.
In more than a decade working for and supporting dozens of cross-sector collaborations, I have observed there are two types of collaborators: contributors and credit takers.
Contributors are confident that their organization’s contributions to collaborative effort will be honored by others. Others will give them credit; they have no need to take it. Contributors can clearly articulate why the collaboration produces value for their organization and their constituents. They also clearly state their outcome goals and report their outcomes against those goals. Contributors are high performing organizations or at least aspire to be so. Contributors aren’t shy about celebrating their good work – no one should be. But they don’t overstate their role or diminish the role of others.
Credit takers, whether they are a large, well-funded organizations or resource-starved, are insecure. They fear others will get credit, so they make sure to take it themselves. Credit takers excel at asserting their value to the community, but don’t have either measurable goals or outcomes to back up their assertions. Resource-starved organizations may be trapped in a cycle where they feel compelled to take credit to secure funding. Funders that value cross-sector collaborations can alter the behavior of such organizations by building up their capacity and providing multi-year general operating support. Larger organizations that devolve into credit takers are more challenging. Such organizations often have a strong, talented leader who manage their board and stakeholder relationships so well that the lack of goals and outcomes are ignored. Transforming a large, well-funded credit taking organization usually only occurs after changes at the board and chief executive level.
Cross-sector collaborations can minimize the damage of credit takers and encourage more contributors by establishing clear expectations early on about how partners in the collaboration will communicate their roles. For example, a collaboration of funders supporting a workforce effort agreed to collectively announce their financial commitment rather than having each issue individual announcements. The individual funders could have each taken credit but agreed that it was more important to the health of their collaboration, as well as the workforce effort they supported, for them to speak with one voice. In contrast, an economic development collaborative collapsed after partners feuded over the announcement of a successful business attraction deal. The announcement fight exposed the lack of trust among the partners, as well as the inability of some partners to clearly articulate their value proposition. Collaborations cannot be sustained in such environments.
Diverse organizations communicating as one is challenging. It requires planning, branding and messaging. Sometimes collaborations don’t have the capacity for such demanding work. Nonetheless, the partners need to have clear expectations of how the partners will describe and celebrate their collective work. Without such clarity, contributors will become frustrated by the behavior of the credit takers and reduce their commitment to the collaboration. And when a collaboration is driven by a bunch of credit takers, it won’t be able to produce the type of positive outcomes for which they are so desperate to take credit.
