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, how UPS improve teamwork and collaboration makes a big difference.
I have always found the ability to learn from collaboration with others to be a fantastic gift: free of charge, limitless of 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.
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
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? Lots to consider, at least for me. How about you?
In General Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to transform the Special Forces in Iraq, he ran into similar challenges trying to get diverse teams to work together. Yet he saw that by building connections between units he could build a “team of teams” that was able to effectively coordinate action. In One Mission, his aide-de-camp, Chris Fussell, describes two strategies used to achieve this effect.
The first was to leverage high-performing liaison officers to build personal connections among disparate units. The second, called the “O&I” forum, was a daily video conference that was designed to create informal connections between officers at an “operational cadence.” Since leaving the military, McChrystal and Fussell have had similar success implementing these strategies in civilian organizations at their consulting group.
In thinking about exploring, imagining, creating, learning, and collaborating with others, the following thoughts and ideas cross my mind:
UPS teamwork and collaboration … openness to others
Openness is not achieved by reading about it in a book or from 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.
UPS teamwork and 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 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.
UPS teamwork 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).
That is certainly my belief.
How to improve collaboration … 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.
UPS teamwork and collaboration … 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.
Go at it with gusto, ok?
UPS teamwork and collaboration … 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.
Team collaboration activities … 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 connection.
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.
Works very well for me.
UPS teamwork and collaboration … it is not a meeting
When my friends 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 for us all. Try it.
Make it voluntary
When I think of workplace collaboration that has worked, it had only happened when it was voluntary. John, Linda, and I 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.
UPS teamwork and collaboration … mutual trust
For four years, I used to meet outside of school with another friend, James. 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 something
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.
And that is most powerful.
The bottom line
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.
So in the future, we will all need to learn how to collaborate with machines much as pilots do. In effect, rather than depend solely on our personal databases of experience, we will apply the sum total of human knowledge to our everyday and professional tasks.
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 at 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 to learn. The sum of the team collaboration is always greater than the work of each.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
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Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
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. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy 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 them on G+, 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. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on mentoring from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
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? Building collaboration in the workplace is not an easy job, is it? But we’d all agree that the payoffs certainly outweigh the efforts, wouldn’t we?
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
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.
In General Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to transform the Special Forces in Iraq, he ran into challenges trying to get diverse teams to work together. Yet he saw that by building connections between units he could build a “team of teams” that was able to effectively coordinate action. In One Mission, his aide-de-camp, Chris Fussell, describes two strategies used to achieve this effect.
The first was to leverage high-performing liaison officers to build personal connections among disparate units. The second, called the “O&I” forum, was a daily video conference that was designed to create informal connections between officers at an “operational cadence.” Since leaving the military, McChrystal and Fussell have had similar success implementing these strategies in civilian organizations at their consulting group.
Creative convergence depends on group collaboration … how well do you work in groups?
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.
For example, consider this example. It takes a great entrepreneur with the vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and the 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
Examples of collaboration in the workplace.
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 adoption of these capabilities internally is a 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.
Successful collaboration in the workplace.
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.
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to share their knowledge and collaborate as a team?
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 them on G+, 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.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
