How many times in your business career have you been in an organization where real energy was expended to building collaboration and sharing? How successful were these efforts? To build team collaboration and sharing is not an easy job, is it?
Know collaboration and sharing.
But we’d all agree that the payoffs certainly outweigh the efforts, wouldn’t we? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: The years teach much which the days never knew.
Over the years in my career, I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to many smart people and worked as part of many teams trying to build collaboration and sharing.
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.
Creative
convergence depends on group collaboration … how
well do you work in groups?
Related: The Small Business Crash Course on Creative
Business Ideas
I have always found the wisdom of others to be something of a gift: free of charge, no limit to its value. No limits to its value because these pearls of wisdom can be connected to some of your ideas to produce something greater than what you might have created on your own.
External collaboration.
For example, consider this example. It takes a great entrepreneur with a vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and collaboration of many people to make it a success.
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a
recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to
realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is
more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to
reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building
consensus.
Collaboration is an attribute that cuts across many
businesses and business processes. We need to make it an intentional
process and cultivate it into the team’s culture.
We recently came across an interesting IBM Report: Charting
the Social Universe.
In an atmosphere
where your value is defined by your ability to share your expertise rather than
safeguard it, collaboration is crucial. In this Center for Applied Insights
study, Charting
the Social Universe, respondents were asked how they
defined the term “social business.”
Their response? It’s all about collaboration: 74 percent defined a social business as one that uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees, and partners.
Collaboration
doesn’t happen overnight. To better understand organizations’ approaches to
adopting social, they were asked which social capabilities they had deployed,
and for what business purposes. From these questions, four important ideas were
derived:
Drive both
internal and external collaboration
Build and
educate employees
Gain
customer insights and engage them
Use what you
learned to improve business processes
Let’s examine driving internal and external collaboration, which was the most common entry point for organizations. This idea includes social capabilities such as collaborative apps, enterprise social networks, and social media marketing.
The study outlines some additional key findings, but here are the insights from organizations focused on driving internal and external collaboration:
Because this
ambition is often a company’s entry point into social, many are still in a
relatively immature phase:
43 percent
of respondents say they’re in the early stages of adopting these types of
capabilities. But that will soon change as 53 percent say they’ll have an
enterprise-wide strategy for these capabilities in the next two to three years.
69 percent
have no formal qualitative metrics to assess the effectiveness of these social
capabilities. Instead, they have a general, informal sense of their
performance. But, interestingly, their #1 concern when deploying these capabilities
is uncertainty in the return on investment.
It’s all
about encouragement:
What was
their #1 catalyst for deploying these capabilities? 39 percent say employee
evangelists championed the use of these social capabilities.
52 percent say the best way to drive the adoption of these capabilities internally is regular encouragement.
And two
wildcards jumped out to the study team:
54 percent
have a published set of guidelines for these capabilities.
For social media marketing, Facebook is most commonly used, followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Are you looking to
drive internal and external collaboration within your organization? Want your employees to
share their unique knowledge and expertise instead of keeping it to themselves?
Here are a few tips
you need to consider:
Develop
formal metrics to prove the value of your social efforts.
Pursue an
enterprise social strategy.
Identify
employee evangelists to spread the word about social capabilities.
Focus on
employee adoption – keep encouraging them to use social, and remind them why.
The bottom line
Creative ideas on how to build collaborative teams must include exploring, imagining, experimenting, and learning with others. Most of all, it requires reaching out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.
So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to
share their knowledge and collaborate as a team?
Related: 7 Creative Ways to Support Innovation With
Team Collaboration.
What do you believe is a fundamental requirement to support innovation in a team environment? We believe collaboration and teamwork are fundamental to good innovation sessions and we work hard in our workshops to build these qualities.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight
gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you
can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the
section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
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