Formal collaboration doesn’t come easily within large organizations. In a number of cases, whether it be corporate culture, the brand leadership’s mindset, or competitive resistance, it just doesn’t happen in a natural way.

Last week, I helped facilitate a client’s global social media summit. Dachis Group was asked to share the latest and greatest in social business and lead discussion among corporate and their portfolio of brands. The best part of the day, in my opinion, was the brand roundtable. As managers from each brand presented on the coming year in social media, they turned to us for validation, additional insight, and expert advice.  Then, as they presented their past year in social, they began sharing and discussing the pros and cons of their tactics, internal best practices, and areas where they’ve fallen short.

It’s the last part that I was truly impressed with. In our experience many large companies struggle with internal knowledge-sharing; it is practically non-existent. In fact, some of the companies we’ve helped see competitive relationships between their brands. In some cases, none of the brands wanted to share successes or warn others of potential failures. It’s not all that surprising, given the structure of some portfolio inter-company relationships. Typically, each brand has their own budget, resources, and agencies. So, it takes a vested interest on behalf of corporate to coordinate an event for all of their brands and a thoughtful framework for collaboration to encourage sharing.

It was refreshing to see successful and organic collaboration happening during the summit, especially given that a number of our strategy projects to date have included a strong focus on setting up frameworks for people to collaborate and have open discussions. This injection of structure and creation of a forum for open conversation sets the stage for collaboration.

To organizations that seek to foster internal-sharing, the most important factors are the intentional creation of structure and the involvement of a neutral, third-party participant (who can provide value to all parties involved). Once a framework is in place and a reliable moderator has been chosen, brands can begin sharing their ideas: big wins, potential pitfalls, and future action items to help each other achieve common goals.