Hello and welcome back to the Skills 360 podcast. I’m your host, Tim Simmons, and today we’re going to look at how to foster a culture of collaboration in the workplace.

“Collaboration” is a pretty broad term that people throw around quite loosely any time two people’s work intersects or overlaps. But it’s not the same as “coordination,” which is about organizing teams and their work with greater efficiency. Two different product teams might coordinate their product launches at different times. But that doesn’t mean they are collaborating.

And it goes a lot further than “cooperation,” which certainly involves working together, but doesn’t include the idea of shared accountability. The marketing team might cooperate with HR to create a new job profile, but they don’t have the same stake in the new hire.

Collaboration is much deeper than these other forms of working together. With collaboration, people create a shared goal or purpose. It involves a lot more sharing of resources, knowledge, and decision-making. And it involves much deeper trust and requires stronger communication than other forms of working together. Collaboration might look like several people from different departments coming together to create and implement a solution to a problem that impacts all of them.

So why should we work more deeply and broadly with others? Well, there are a multitude of benefits to collaboration. One big one is innovation. Innovation thrives on diverse perspectives. When different people with different ideas come together, there’s a great creative collision that generates new ideas. Every business needs this kind of cross-pollination of expertise and ideas if they want to compete and stay relevant.

Collaboration also supports shared knowledge and organizational learning. If one product team uncovers a new approach to project planning that makes them twice as efficient, wouldn’t it be great if that learning was transferred to other teams? If everyone continues operating in siloes, then it won’t.

Shared knowledge and learning also leads to greater strength and resilience. Think of a web of connections. The more that the different parts of the web are connected, the stronger that web is. If teams are sharing their experiences, if they know each other’s strengths, and they are giving each other knowledge, then when one team encounters difficulty, they have more people and skills to help out.

One other important benefit of collaboration is employee engagement. Shared learning and innovation aren’t just a boon to the company. They also give people a sense of meaning and accomplishment, not to mention connection with others. In the 21st century, college grads are entering the workforce expecting to be part of a team. There’s a move toward less hierarchy and more shared responsibility. And if we keep telling employees to just stay in their lane, they’ll begin to feel isolated and unappreciated.

Of course, collaboration doesn’t come with a flip of a switch. And it doesn’t come for free. There are always costs to an approach or way of working. If you want two departments to work more closely, or if you want a group of people from different departments to solve a problem together, it’s going to take time. So, if you want the increased innovation and impact that results from collaboration, you’re going to have to sacrifice a bit of efficiency.

It also requires us to give up control. If I say to a few colleagues that I want to collaborate with them, then I’m going to have to accept their ideas and approaches. If I insist that it’s my way or the highway, they’re going to see right through it. If I’m not willing to share the decision-making or compromise on anything, then the others are going to disengage. Or they’ll just go along grudgingly.

So, if you think collaboration is important and effective, as almost everyone says they do, then you need to understand what it takes to make it happen. And you’ll need to accept that having more diverse people working together, creates a higher chance of conflict. That’s why it takes great communication skills and trust. And it’s these conditions for collaboration, along with practical methods and systems that we’ll look at in part two!

That’s all for today. So long. And see you again soon!