Teamwork & Collaboration
The feeling of being on a highly effective team is unmistakable. I once had the opportunity to listen to former Navy Seal commander and best-selling author Rorke Denver speak, and he introduced the concept of harmonic gait. He described vividly the moment that an animal's pace hits its perfect stride. I've witnessed animals achieving their harmonic gait only a handful of times (most often in the mountains and when the animal is running). It's as if the movement is effortless, and the animal is almost floating. It's the same way I would describe working on a highly effective team. It has not happened often, and it steals my heart when it does.
In a recent blog, I introduced durable versus perishable skills and I shared our Centre for Teaching, Learning and Innovation's (CTLI's) student core competencies. CTLI’s list of durable skills includes teamwork and collaboration which truly are make-or-break competencies within organizations. I'm sure everyone has experienced the pain of working on a team that is not getting along or working effectively. I'm not sure anything has negatively impacted my energy more. Fortunately, teamwork and collaboration are skills we can learn.
I've been fortunate to walk into work situations where teamwork and collaboration were missing and see a tremendous change in a matter of months. There are a million little things that helped shift the dynamics, not least of which were:
- a clear vision
- tapping into shared values
- nurturing peer-to-peer recognition
- a whole lot of communication (check out my last blog on communication )
- and this might surprise you, but light-heartedness and FUN
CTLI describes teamwork and collaboration as follows:
Teamwork and collaboration involve building collaborative relationships, products, and services with others who represent diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, religions, abilities, lifestyles, and viewpoints. Developing this competency includes working within a team structure as well as negotiating and managing conflict.
Negotiating and Managing Conflict
Oooh, this is a juicy topic! I love the last line of CTLI's description: "working within a team structure as well as negotiating and managing conflict.” What!? Negotiating and managing conflict? Did I sign up for this? If you are part of a team, you absolutely signed up for both! It's important to acknowledge that we each have a unique relationship with the words negotiating and conflict. I have realized negotiation and conflict can have negative connotations in my many years of leading people. Bringing awareness to the story we tell ourselves about them is an important first step. Take a moment and think about how you feel when you hear the word negotiate? How about conflict? Is your story serving you or holding you back? Is it accurate? Can it use a little challenging?
Many of us likely need to do some work on the understanding that negotiation and conflict are a normal part of everyday life. Kids are brilliant at negotiating. They do it without hesitation, fear of rejection or backstory. They see something they want to do or have and jump in with both feet to negotiate their desired outcome. Somewhere along our journey, many of us shift away from our childlike innocence, writing new stories based on our lived experiences. For me, the sting of rejection was all too much. I firmly imprinted the feeling and stopped asking for what I needed and wanted. And to my detriment, I brought my story into every negotiation. Recreating a new story around negotiating and conflict took years of self-discovery. I now see both as a healthy and natural part of life.
Collaboration
In 2021 I was introduced to the book Strategic Doing by Edward Morrison, Scott Hutcheson, Elizabeth Nilsen, Janyce Fadden, and Nancy Franklin. Their description of collaboration has been beneficial for me, and I regularly bring it into team conversations. They compare different activities along the collaboration continuum as follows:
True collaboration is at one end of a continuum of joint efforts. When people come together, they usually start by just exchanging information about who they are and what they do - we often call this networking. A bit more involved is coordinating. We alter our activities to some extent; for example, civic groups may decide to schedule their fundraising events so that they don't fall on the same weekend. Still further along the continuum is cooperating. When we cooperate, we agree to share some resources with one another. Employees in a small business may decide to cooperate by arranging to cover for one another so that everyone can take an annual vacation, for example.
All of these activities are good - but they are not collaboration (although we may claim otherwise in a presentation!). Collaboration involves linking, leveraging, and aligning resources in ways that enhance one another's capacity to create a shared outcome, a mutual benefit. It can sometimes be difficult to tell if two groups are truly collaborating. Beyond the kind of work they are doing together, we can ask two additional questions. What is the level of trust that network members have of one another? and, conversely, are network members still holding onto their turf? In moving along the continuum toward collaboration, trust increases while turf decreases.
The authors described networking, coordination and cooperation as steps towards collaboration, arguing that collaboration is more complex and involved. Trust was part of my blog on communication, and I appreciate how the authors of Strategic Doing describe collaboration as high trust and low turf. I saw the negative impacts of low trust and holding onto turf in a past position. The siloes between departments grew wider and wider, and the teamwork entirely vanished. Everyone was looking out for themselves. Compare that to another environment where we intentionally worked on trust and understood that holding on to turf did not serve the greater good. The atmosphere was so much lighter, and oh, by the way - we got a ton done!
Teamwork and collaboration are multipliers, and they enrich our experiences with one another beyond that. With a bit of effort, anyone can improve their teamwork and collaboration skills. My hope for all is that you experience the joy of finding a team that walks in their harmonic gait.
I'd love to hear your perspective. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter