We use the word collaboration so much these days it is in danger of heading in the Bullshit Bingo direction. It’s the sort of word you keep finding on creased pieces of flipchart paper after team away days.
But the act of collaboration at work has so much value we can’t dismiss it purely as a fad.
Compete with your competitors, collaborate with your colleagues
Competition has great value where you want to be better than, to beat and to be the best. However, where you want to problem solve, innovate and improve, collaboration works better. We work with clients who intend to work well within and across teams, but sometimes get derailed. Here are 5 things we encourage them to do to get collaborative working back on track.
- Create team and well as individual goals and talk about them to other teams. How are you working to together to achieve results and are your systems and processes set up to support this?
- Listen first, talk second. As any good salesperson will tell you, the more you talk, the less you learn. By listening to the needs and challenges of other team members or indeed other teams, the more you can learn how to work with not against each other. Listening works magic on the person on the receiving end of your genuine attention. If they feel properly listened to, they are more likely to listen back.
- Share your priorities. People love to plan and prioritise in secret. They shouldn’t. Plans fail because they are not connected to an overall plan. The more you share priorities with colleagues, the better you see where you are dependent on each other’s success, where deadlines and rigid and where there is some flexibility.
- Pick your times to meet. Collaboration meetings are rarely a mistake but the timing of them can be. Even the most willing collaborators are twitchy on Monday mornings, Friday afternoons or a when a deadline is looming. Plan your meetings with a collaborative spirit from the start and establish people’s best and worst times to get together on something.
- Reward the behaviour you want, call out the behaviour you don’t want. If you want collaborative working to be a habit, you have to notice it and recognise it explicitly, so people know it is part of your culture and is valued. If people see it linked to recognition and reward, they’re more likely to do it.
These are just a start but they are a good start. We work with teams and leaders who have struggled with collaboration yet realise its value. They just don’t know what to do to make it happen and that is where we come in. Talk to us about building a collaborative culture and we promise it’ll be way more than a word on the wall where you work.