What Makes Collaboration Work
Collaboration is sometimes made to sound like an ultra-smooth process of people working together seamlessly toward a shared goal. The reality is that few collaborating teams work for long without a certain amount of arguing, dissenting, and emoting.
Most of the time, this friction occurs for the simple reason that we differ from each other. We have different skills and experiences. Our backgrounds differ. We have different communication patterns and decision-making styles. These differences influence our perspectives. And, being human, we tend to hang on to our perspectives, reluctant if not resistant to consider the possibility of another way.
A post on the Lead Change Group website captures the issue perfectly, pointing out that the very word collaboration includes the word labor—collaboration—and there is no collaboration without labor. When collaboration is done well, it looks effortless, a give-and-take among all participants. As this post points out, successful collaboration is the result of deliberate work and attention.
The people who are best at collaborating are people you can trust to do what they say they’ll do. They’re pleasant to be around. They enjoy working with others. They cheer others on, especially if the project is faltering, and they don’t hesitate to challenge people in the interest of creating the best possible outcome. They recognize that collaboration represents a new culture distinct from the culture of the organizations from which the participants came. When conflict occurs, they don’t seek to squelch it. Instead, they develop methods to resolve it.
One of the simplest things a group can do to work well together is to pay attention to the environment. For example, people seated in a circle are more likely to cooperate. Interior designers believe that the very arrangement of an office can aid collaboration, and studies are now finding support for this view; people are more likely to achieve greater harmony and adopt a consensus-seeking attitude when seated so that everyone can see everyone else.
But don’t overlook a potential pitfall of collaboration. Researchers have found that people who collaborate sometimes become confident in their ideas and significantly less willing to seek or accept advice from those outside the collaborating team. However, that confidence isn’t always justified, and a decision made by the team may be no better than a decision made by a single individual. The caution, then: If you want to collaborate effectively, guard against overconfidence and don’t rule out the value of input from those outside the collaborating team.
