The years teach much which the days never knew. A very interesting quote by Emerson, isn’t it? In your career, how many smart people have you been exposed to? I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to many. It never ceases to amaze me how just a few moments of discussion, or sitting and listening to well-thought-out debates, can open your mind to ideas you can’t believe you didn’t think of on your own. And at the time, we probably didn’t think too much about it. But over the years, ways to improve business collaboration make a big difference.
Check out our ideas on building innovation.
I have always found the ability to learn from collaboration with others to be a fantastic gift: free of charge, and limitless in value.
Limitless of value because the pearls of wisdom you can pick up can be connected to some of your ideas to produce something greater than what you might have created on your own.
I’m not naturally drawn toward collaboration. I thrive on autonomy. Too many external ideas can create a crowded mental space. Maybe it’s a selfish thing.
Maybe it’s an introvert thing. Maybe it’s both.
But I also love collaboration. For the past six months, I have worked with two others, planning out creative marketing designs. We scribble out our ideas on the whiteboards, break tasks up between us, and ultimately develop designs that are better collectively than what we could have created on our own.
It has me thinking about other creative collaborations. My favorite projects, both personally and professionally, have been collaborative. So what makes collaboration work? How do create spaces where actual collaboration occurs?
In thinking about exploring, imagining, creating, learning, and collaborating with others, the following thoughts and ideas cross my mind:
Openness to others
Openness is not achieved by reading about it in a book or in a class. It comes from lots of focused practice. It comes most readily in those that have achieved a sense of self-confidence as they live in a widening circle of individuals from other backgrounds and persuasions.
Business collaboration … imagination and exploring
Imagination is the ability to see what is not there. Creativity is applied imagination. Exploring is being open to and experimenting with, new ideas. And innovation is putting good ideas to work. All are stimulated through effective collaboration.
Curiosity
Curiosity tends to emerge from growing personal experience in as many areas as possible from growing experience in widening groups of people. It too doesn’t just come to you … It takes lots of engaging practice, engagement, and collaboration.
Creativity and learning
Creativity is not a quality that is only found in the chosen few, but not everyone is as good at finding it as others (though everyone can improve with practice).
Have a shared vision
I don’t think this has to be spelled out in a vision statement or written down as a list of values. But intuitively, you need to have a shared vision of what your group represents and what you want to accomplish.
Focus on innovation
Creativity and innovation by necessity require different people with diverse perspectives and expertise to cross-pollinate with fresh ideas. Set the bar for innovation very high and creative collaboration becomes an expected part of the culture.
At that stage, people have no choice but to start silo-busting.
Full autonomy
I remember sitting through department meetings where we had to cover information that the department chair had talked about through the leadership team.
The entire meeting was top-down and hierarchical. By contrast, I remember planning meetings when I was a tech coach. Chad empowered us to own the process and the product.
Eliminate biases
Do not get branded by your job description. Think well outside those bounds … all the time. Add as much value as you can, as often as you can.
Ideas from others
Build on other people’s ideas. Do not knock them down and try not to start on the ground floor. Connect ideas as often as you can.
Take notes and review them periodically for more connections.
Linkage and enrichment
Collaboration anywhere offers great possibilities for linkage and enrichment rarely obtained without it. Collaborative learning through widening linkage is among the most powerful and enduring methods of understanding.
It is not a meeting
When Kyle, Iris, and I sit down to plan, we don’t refer to it as a meeting. We don’t go over norms. We don’t fill out a handout explaining what we did.
Nobody takes minutes. Instead, we laugh. We smile a lot. We crack jokes. But we also focus and find ourselves getting passionate about our ideas. We often hit a state of flow as a group.
The result is a fun experience.
Make it voluntary
When I think of workplace collaboration that has worked, it had only happened when it was voluntary. Keelan, Lynette, and don’t have to meet. Nobody told us that it was part of our job description.
But we chose to collaborate because we knew that this would lead to better courses. However, we have all experienced some of those meetings that felt like a chore or even a punishment; times when a meeting could have been an email.
Mutual trust
For four years, I used to meet outside of school with another teacher, Javi. Together, we built a blended professional development platform, created a service learning program, planned a STEM summer lab school, and planned out a 1:1 personalized, project-based social studies curriculum.
There were some tense moments. We were 100% candid with one another. But this only worked because we trusted one another – and it was the kind of trust that only happens with mutual respect and even vulnerability.
Helps to design a product
It helps when you are making something. There is something powerful about creating something with fellow collaborators. It might be a system or a product or an event. But when you decide to make something, your group grows stronger.
You trust one another on a deeper level.
We are all very busy: personally, professionally, and socially. One of our scarcest resources is time. Time to sit and think. To stretch our limits. To learn new things. Time to imagine, create, explore, and experiment.
Collaborative leadership
The following lessons represent my favorite lessons on collaborative leadership that I believe could make the biggest impact. If I was starting my career over and could take collaborative leadership lessons back in time with me, these are the ones I would choose:
Create an environment of continuous learning
It is absolutely necessary that business people be good learners. They need to instill this in all their team. They must learn from their mistakes. To be most successful, managers must acknowledge, understand, and improve on their shortcomings. And they must encourage their team to also focus on continuous learning.
Be a multiplier
Multiplier business managers know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is NOT the lone genius. Rather, it is the genius who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone in the team.
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Build connections
Both managers and leaders know their job with their teams is about building lots of connections. They make people feel they have a stake in common problems.
Encourage feedback
It is vital that you let your team know you are interested and will listen to their concerns and ideas and contribute to solutions to any and all problems.
Offer recognition and always share success
Focus on building team confidence by publicly recognizing their efforts and achievements. Think of it this way; anything is
possible if you share the glory. Giving others a chance to claim credit is an easy, and effective, way to magnify results.
Be decisive
One of the key jobs of a manager is to be an effective decision maker. Employees are never comfortable with managers who make slow decisions and frequently change their minds. Quality managers make decisions quickly and stick with them.
Building and maintaining trust
Always do what you say and set good examples. Demand from yourself the same level of professionalism and dedication that you expect from others. Trust, once broken, is seldom restored to its original state.
It is the most fragile yet essential attribute of leadership and management.
An interesting change
In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Bain & Co. partner Michael Mankins estimates that while a typical executive in the 1970s might have received 1,000 messages a year, that number has skyrocketed to more than 30,000 today and argues that we may “have reached the point of diminishing returns.”
I think just about everyone can see his point. Today, the number of meetings, emails, and IMs we receive can seem overwhelming and it’s increasingly hard to find uninterrupted quiet time to focus and concentrate. However, the nature of work has changed.
The real reason that we communicate more is that today, we need to collaborate more to be effective.
We should put more thought into how we adopt and use our newfound communication assets. Surely, we all spend time attending meetings and conference calls, reading and responding to messages that could be used more productively.
That’s frustrating.
However—and this is a crucial point—we don’t know those interactions will be fruitless until we actually have them. While it’s easy to remember the frustration of having our time wasted, it is not much harder to recall times when we have come across a random thread of information that we were able to capitalize on by sharing with colleagues.
It is also those chance encounters that often lead to bigger things, precisely because we are able to share them, get diverse viewpoints and mobilize the efforts of others. Increasingly, we live in a social economy with collaboration at its center. It is no longer just efficiency, but agility and interoperability that makes collaborative firms successful.
The bottom line
As Emerson said in the quote above, time can often be a teacher. Let it.
But if you are as impatient as I am, look to your colleagues, your friends, your mentors, and to yourself to challenge you to reach new heights. Tap into the parts of your brain you may not use every day. The parts of your brain you may not even realize you can tap into.
Most of all, reach out to others to collaborate and learn. The sum of the team collaboration is always greater than the work of each. |
