Sep
13
Collaboration leads to better decision-making, and by working together, people can achieve extraordinary things.
On a personal level, collaboration:
- Improves communication skills
- Stimulates critical thinking
- Enhances self esteem
- Builds confidence
- Motivates individuals to take risks
- Builds self-control
- Allows for evaluation of personal values and goals
- Builds empathy
- Teaches to listen with respect
- Develops conflict resolution skills
As a group, collaboration:
- Increases productivity
- Speeds up decision-making
- Encourages creativity
- Simplifies workflows
- Pools skills and resources
- Fosters diversity
- Increases profitability
- Brings balance to decision-making
- Encourages win/win situations
- And most importantly, builds trust
So the next time someone asks you to collaborate, perhaps you won’t need to ask “What’s in it for me?”
How do you normally respond when someone asks you to collaborate?
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As educators move from working within the four walls of their classrooms to a more collaborative model, it isn’t always easy for them to accept this ‘change’. Thanks for a post that presents a bird’s eye view of the value of collaboration. I look forward to sharing it with my team.
Thanks for opening this conversation in the container of Trust. Where else but among trust practitioners should such a sticky relational issue be examined? It’s a dichotomy that the functional benefits of collaboration, as you have so well listed, are not enough to shift embedded cultural reactions. Let’s give ourselves a break here. The left brain recognizes the evidential truth of the benefits of collaboration of course. (In fact, Peter Drucker nailed this decades ago, and you might think that the “father of management theory” would have had had a deeper impact by now. Ironically, I think he has.) But we are human. We are more than logic systems. For better or worse, the times have stripped us of the structures that muffled our human-ness. For example, silo-ed business functions, opaque decision processes are dissolving in the transparency of 24/7 all the time/everywhere ‘inside information.’ We are personally transparent, too. No where to hide. That’s why there’s such a strong consciousness movement now: as long as who we are is up front and center, let’s wake up and see what aspects of our behavior we want to carry over from the old days of opaque, competitive, I win/you lose culture — and which of those now knee-jerk reactions of fear we wish to transform. Trust is an inside job. Brava to you, Barbara, for once again revealing the naked Emperor so he might have a chance to choose his new wardrobe. Thanks for your courage, Elsie