At your place of work, are you collaborating or just working side by side?
Collaborating is often defined as “working together”. But the word “collaborate” has creative and intellectual connotations as well.
Most of us think of collaboration as a way to create something new or tackle a difficult challenge by combining the diverse skills, knowledge, and creativity of two or more people.
In the business world today it is widely accepted that collaborating should be a regular occurrence. We hope that by working together with others, we’ll create something that we couldn’t possibly accomplish by ourselves.
The fact is, it doesn’t matter whether that something is building a skyscraper, manufacturing a microchip, or executing a global marketing campaign; collaboration is the only approach that makes sense.
When you are engaged in thinking that involves analysis, creativity or problem solving, two heads are almost always better than one. Because when smart capable people work together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Right?
Let’s stop and think for a moment. Are you truly collaborating with your colleagues at work? Do you often find yourself saying, “this would be much easier if I just did it myself”?
Unfortunately, studies have shown that ineffective methods of “collaboration” can mean that the whole of a group’s output can actually be less than the sum of the parts. You may know this from your own experience.
The theoretical advantages of working together are often cancelled out entirely by the complexities of conflicting egos, personalities, communication styles, and all of the other things that make humans wonderfully unique. These differences can be used to the groups advantage, but most of the time they aren’t handled well and just end up being terribly frustrating and irritating to each other.
In a typical workplace, when we say people are collaborating they are often just making ineffective attempts to work on something together.
The best collaboration happens when people work together in a way that lets them truly connect efficiently and effectively.
Real collaboration allows the full weight of each person’s knowledge, skills, and talents to be brought to bear on the challenge at hand. Only then can you, and your business or organization, realize the benefits of true collaboration.
