A Winning Combination: Collaborative Teamwork Equals Teamwork and Collaboration

Today, fostering collaboration is a hot topic in business. Some businesses are looking for answers on how you implement, teach the soft skills, and build a collaborative environment. Others are looking for ways to improve their technology game in order to make collaboration easier. According to technology experts around the web, some current trends in technologically-driven collaboration include using the Internet of Things (IoT), software as a service (SaaS), and your own devices. In this section, our experts will share some of their experiences developing collaborative teams and give tips on the best ways to get your team to collaborate and communicate well. 

Hyun Lee, Growth Manager, Qminder, says, “I've worked with small teams and big corporate teams. In my opinion, small teams are better in almost every way. In a small company, everyone knows each other. Small teams work the same way. If you find similar interests in growth, you can push each other to the fullest. I think ‘inspiring’ is hard to do every day. You must find common ground with your team and work together to achieve a common goal. Work with people's strengths and make sure the weaknesses are covered! For instance, my current content team consists of me (analytical, strategy, implementation), our content marketer (creative, illustrative work, editorial), and our writer. In one way or another, we cover each other. To a new manager, I would recommend getting to know your teammates. Talk to them. Find out what they like, what they dislike, strengths, and weaknesses. Play to strengths and cover weaknesses.” 

Jed Olson, International Speaker and Change and Engagement Expert, jedolson.com, offers these thoughts: “I was a corporate trainer for an international aid organization for 11 years. My job was to prepare aid teams to work well together before sending them out on overseas field assignments. Making our teams highly collaborative was the goal. When I joined, 38 percent of our team members were actively disengaged. Within one year, we dropped to 2.6 percent and had very engaged, collaborative teams.

 

For team collaboration, I recommend the following for managers:

• Care: Care about each member of your team. Know their likes and dislikes. Treat them to their favorite bar. Ask them about their family. Know their birthdays and anniversaries. Even more so, value their input, opinions, and ideas. A team will work together more easily when they know the leader and the team care about them. 
• Commission: Commission the team members to lead meetings, initiatives, and projects. Make sure everyone has a role they own in the effort. 
• Communicate: Does Bob prefer text, while Karen loves calls? Does Joe do well with FB Messenger but slack off on Slack? While having a unified communication system is ideal, it's not realistic — unless you have a system to integrate the different mediums. And, don't just know the communication medium each team member prefers. Know their styles. Bob may be more indirect, while Karen may spout out every idea that comes, and Joe may be a natural skeptic. It's hard to collaborate without first understanding how each team member communicates.
• Contrast: When endeavoring in a collaborative effort, contrasting and divergent ideas must be held together. Many innovative breakthroughs happen through lateral thinking and not from intense focus in one area. 
• Example from Failure: Before training other teams as a corporate trainer, I led a team of my own. A crisis occurred where I lost half of my aid team at a bus station in a city of 7 million on the way to the airport. Another team member with me lost her plane ticket (a 16 destination non-redeemable paper ticket). Instead of caring for this team member I was annoyed; instead of requesting input and ideas from the rest of the team for solutions. I focused on myself. I tried to find the team and the ticket back where we left them to no avail. I checked the only places in the bus station I thought them to be—not there either. Also, I had no communication mediums—we didn't have a local cell phone to reach the other group. It wasn't until a kind local lady gave me a suggestion to look elsewhere that I broke out of my narrow focus and found the rest of the team. Long story short, after the lady opened my thinking of where the team might be, I took a risk going to the airport one ticket shy of getting the whole team on the plane. Luckily, the risk paid off as the ticket was at the airport in the lost and found! From then on I decided to put the focus off of myself and widen it to the whole team.”

Lana Moore, Founder and CEO, MarTechExec comments: "I’m a surviving, former-corporate America executive, now entrepreneur, with experience launching, growing, and overseeing companies and marketing organizations. Most recently, I’m the Founder and CEO of martechexec.com — an online community where marketers can learn, share, and discuss marketing technology topics and solutions.

 

I can offer tips on what's worked for managing my team. Without goals and specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timeline objectives, it’s easy to veer off path and get caught up chasing what’s urgent instead of focusing on what’s important. I meet with my team every Monday to establish goals for the week. This is when we discuss goals for the week, blockers, suggestions, concerns, and so on. This is a hugely important part of our collaborative culture - everyone "owns" the success of the company as well as the success of their team and themselves.
 
Being ultra-collaborative is hard work, don't get me wrong, and that's why we take it seriously and work hard to make processes more efficient. Every week, we assess capacity and workload and collaborate on priorities in order to achieve balance. To ensure no one burns out, we adhere to a strict eight hour work day and frown upon work over the weekends. That way, we can all come in energized Monday morning and ready to tackle another week. We also use a bunch of collaboration tools. It’s important that we are in lock-step with each other."

Joshua Jarvis, SEO Manager and Owner, 4rd Marketing says: "When the leadership of the organization does things to foster collaboration between two teams, especially ones that have overlaps like marketing and SEO and developers for example, it truly helps. I've been in both environments where leadership encouraged it and where leadership cared nothing for it and I can tell you it's almost impossible to collaborate if the "larger" team doesn't see the value.

 

The number one thing any team can do (and it's the thing that works only as high as you take it) is build trust. Communication is huge and that's likely the kind of answers you will get, but communication like that only comes from trust.
 
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has a few guides on how to build trust. Asking about people's backgrounds and personal stories is a great one. It doesn't feel productive in the beginning.  

Small example: Let's say we're talking about trust and your perception of me is that I don't follow the rules and I'm disrespectful to authority. In general you perceive me to be a jerk so you don't want to communicate at all with me. In our trust meeting, I told you I came from a single parent household and my mom worked very hard but wasn't home, and as a result most of my life was spent on my own and figuring things out. Immediately (in this poor example), you see that perhaps I'm not doing anything intentionally, I hate feeling managed and like to figure things out on my own. I likely don't know I'm being perceived as a jerk for doing so . . . So much good comes from these meetings.
 
These trust meetings are good but they are much more powerful when the team can unify behind a common goal, a vision. Therefore, during these meetings it's important to reiterate what the most important thing is. If reducing costs is the most important thing to the company, then it changes what marketing plans we can implement and, in particular, might mean using our current resources and teams. If reaching a certain demographic is the goal, then how does the entire team work toward that? 
 
Often teams get departmentalized and sort of siloed and they don't realize that they can impede or enhance another team's productivity. For example, SEO work often involves editing htaccess files and doing 301 redirects and adding small javascript files to the server. If an organization moved all that type of work to the developers, then there's this crazy war around what is important. The SEO says he wants more traffic and the developers says they need to work on bugs. Both are right, but without a guiding vision, they won't know what the priority is."

Dr. Janice Presser, Co-Founder and CEO, The Gabriel Institute and Teamability.com: 

As a behavioral scientist and architect of the technology that powers Teamability®, she has studied team interaction in academic, clinical, and business settings for over 40 years, and has shared her expertise in the areas of HR metrics and measurements, workforce planning, and human capital assessment. 

 

In an era of digital disruption and change, Dr. Presser’s integrated methods are being used to design collaborative culture, and to produce business results.
 
“People like best what they do best, and they do best what they like best,” says Dr. Presser. Keys to developing team collaboration are:

• Align each person's job responsibilities (at least in part) with the specific kind of team contribution that person will find meaningful.
• Determine the modes of teaming that are most-needed for a particular team’s mission, and make sure that they are represented on the team.

Here is some helpful terminology:

• Role: A person’s affinity for one or more specific modes of service to the needs of a team.
• Coherence: Expressed as positive, flexible, constructive teaming behaviors under varying conditions of stress and ambiguity.
• Teaming Characteristics: Individual styles of responding and relating to others; subject to situational context. Understand and apply the following Elements of Team Operation (easily learned ways to communicate in alignment with a person’s mode of contribution): 

1. Role‐fit: An appropriate match between a person's role and their assigned set of job responsibilities, raising individual performance and engagement.
2. Team‐fit: Structuring a team to include the roles that are best‐fit to the team’s mission, to optimize overall team performance.
3. Role‐pairing: Known, replicable synergies between specific roles, which improve resilience and team chemistry.
4. Role‐respect: The unique manner in which people of different roles experience appreciation and respect, used in management to build trust and team stability.

Dr. Presser continues, “The most important thing to have when developing a collaborative culture is a clear understanding of teaming needs and challenges, and the most important thing(s) to look for are the teaming qualities that will ensure success under those working conditions. To build positive, collaborative team interaction it is essential to recognize that a team has a life of its own, and that different modes of teaming can be just as important to collaboration and productivity as different areas of expertise are to the work that needs to be done.” 

Don Barlow, Founder and Owner, Finyl Vinyl, says: "I have over 15 years of experience in the garden and landscaping business. As the owner of a company, I have had to take the leadership role, organizing many teams in various functions. Below are a few tips that I have found useful in fostering team collaboration: 

• Tip 1: First, make sure to communicate what constitutes the company’s standard of collaboration.
• Tip 2: Set mile markers for the team’s success.
• Tip 3: Create an atmosphere that allows for creativity.
• Tip 4: Build on team trust, and get to know individuals’ strengths.

Rick Lepsinger, President, OnPoint Consulting comments: "The focus of my work is helping organizations close the gap between strategy and execution, working effectively in a matrix organization, leading, and collaborating in a virtual environment. As the EVP of a the Northeast Consulting practice of Right Management, I led a team of 55 professionals and worked with colleagues around the world to coordinate activities in order to provide service to clients. As the Managing Partner of OnPoint Consulting, I have helped improve the performance of cross-functional teams in numerous companies across several industries. For four years, I was on the faculty of GE’s Management Development Course (MDC) and taught a one-day workshop on making GE’s global matrix work."

 

It is not enough to tell team members they need to collaborate. Managers need to put things in place to motivate people to collaborate and to enable them to work effectively together.
 
To create a culture of collaboration among team members (in tack teams or cross-functional teams) managers need to ensure three structural elements are in place:

• Shared goals: Required to make collaboration desirable and to motivate team members to cooperate.
• Clear roles and agreement on decision authority: Required to facilitate decision making and minimize friction among colleagues who do not have the authority to take action on their own.  
• Transparency of communication: Enhances effectiveness by ensuring team members have the information they need when they need it. 

In order to sustain a culture of collaboration, managers need to ensure team members have four skills:

• Building and sustaining trust: The foundation of any interaction.
• Conflict management: Differences of opinion are neither good or bad; it’s how conflicts are resolved that are positive or negative.
• Influence skills: Gaining the support and commitment of people over whom we do not have direct authority.
• Decision involvement: Knowing when and how to involve others in decisions to ensure high levels of decision quality and decision acceptance.

Alec Sears, Communications Specialist, Frontier Communications, offers the followng advice:
 
 

 

My recommendations for forming collaborative teams include:

• Give Your Team a Chance to Bond: In my experience, one of the first steps to building a collaborative team is giving them an opportunity to bond. This can be done in a variety of ways. You can go around and do introductions in a fun way, host a party, play video games, etc. The important thing is that you invest the time at the beginning to allow your team members to become comfortable with one another. This will accelerate the process of forming, norming, and storming so that you can quickly get to performing at your peak.  

Whenever a new member of my team is introduced, I like to take them out to a free lunch at a nice restaurant somewhere. Who wouldn’t be excited about a nice, free meal during work hours, and a chance to interact with your team on a more personal level? 

• Establish Effective Communication Channels: Once your team has had a chance to bond, be sure to establish effective communication channels so that they begin to collaborate and get work done. The channel might be different depending on the type of work you are doing, your proximity to your co-workers, and the technology you have available to you. 

There are also tools that help you to collaborate on projects together directly; you can experiment with platforms that allow you to work on projects in different phases and communicate with your team as you go.  

• Make Meetings Meaningful: One of the last steps to effective team collaboration is making sure that all the meetings you hold are meaningful. This is no easy process; it requires a lot of honesty, careful auditing, and open feedback from your team. Over time you can adjust how many meetings you hold, how long they are, who attends, and what you address.

With time, my team has come to like using the Scrum method. We meet for about ten minutes every morning and quickly talk about what we are working on, what progress we have made, and what roadblocks there are for our success. This allows projects to transition easily from one employee to the next.

Rohit Keserwani, Senior Business Analyst, Equifax shares his experience: "I have led successful teams across banking and technology sectors. I have noticed a few things about activities that help team building and eventually enhance performance. When it comes to developing a team spirit, any activity that requires collaboration among many people will do. It includes everyday activities like cooking together for the group or cleaning the office. Most of the organizations organize easy, accessible, inexpensive, yet fun events like office decoration competition to engage the employees in team building". 

 

Other points include:

• The more difficult (read engaging) a team activity is, the more effective it proves to be for inculcating a team spirit. Cooking at a picnic will naturally be more difficult than cooking in your kitchen. Hence, it will be more rewarding in terms of team building.
• Adding adventure to team building. Adventure sports like river rafting or mountaineering, which require team efforts, are dangerous but most engaging. People are required to entrust their lives to other members of the team and as a result, these kind of sports are the best team building activities that can be organized. 
• The last one that I am sharing is an extreme case and not the type one would want to participate in. However, this one is by far the most powerful one. A common thread among all the team-building activities is the presence of a common goal. Sometimes, teams form not because of a planned activity, but the presence of a common peril, which cannot be surpassed with individual effort. This peril may be a common powerful enemy, a person, a situation, an unreasonable boss, a potential mass layoff, or anything that hurts people equally. People form teams to collaborate in their agenda to fight this common misfortune and in the event of a win (or even a loss), the team spirit lingers on even long after the battle is over. My general observation is that relationships formed in the face of misfortune are the most lasting ones. They prove to be the best team building activities.

To get teams to collaborate, consider the following:

• I give them tasks that are not only impossible to achieve individually, but also challenging. These tasks are highly possible when attempted in teams.
• While choosing such a task, you need to plan carefully. The task should be neither too easy nor so difficult that it drains the team's motivation. In addition, every individual should be able to contribute to the task in a unique way. This helps everyone feel important and keeps them engaged.
• This sense of achievement translates into team bonding and has a visible positive impact on work. 

For new managers looking to foster communication, employ these tips:

• My first and most important tip is to have patience. Do not jump into team building with half-knowledge of the team members. When you start working with a team, you will get to know numerous aspects of their personalities and decide accordingly the best way to design team building activities. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Understand your team and then decide.
• Utilize this time to gel with the team. Try to build trust for yourself. Trust in the leader is the best guarantee that a team activity will be successful. Eventually a team-building exercise is also a team activity and requires support from the team.
• Once you have a handle on the team members' preferences and personality, engage them in a team task challenging enough to extract the best out of them.
• Try to not be in a supervisory role and participate equally. This helps to gain acceptance with the new team.

Brian Saab, CEO and Co-Founder, Unearth Technologies says: "Our company specializes in promoting a collaborative environment in construction, an industry that particularly struggles with collaboration. Every construction project requires a unique team for a unique build, meaning new communication networks and norms must be established from scratch each time. Combine this challenge with a propensity for defensive communication, and you have a recipe for collaboration disaster. Our software helps teams overcome these hurdles. We found that the best way to inspire people to collaborate is through democratizing project information. By making everyone aware of what is going on and giving them the software to interact with that knowledge, you create a shared sense of responsibility and openness that breaks down defensive communication and builds up positive collaboration.

 

 

Though we work primarily in construction, the same idea of demolishing information silos and providing collaborative tools can apply to collaboration in any industry. We believe it is one of the reasons that software [has] been so successful. Everyone can participate on these platforms and get open access to the information within.

People like to collaborate. Therefore, when you provide a way for them to work together that also shows the product of their efforts, collaboration will naturally follow. The trick is finding the right environment for your team. Do that and they will do the rest."

Roger Wolkoff, Professional Speaker, Coach, Trainer, and Founder/Owner, All About Authenticity recommends: "The first thing I always do is get teams to trust [each other]. To do that, I interview every person on the team to find out where they are concerning the project, what their motivation is, and if they believe in and agree with the project goals. Shared vision and trust are two major factors in getting teams to collaborate. I let them discover trust with one another by addressing what is most important to them. That is, by acknowledging what is important to them, I am better able to steer conversations and work to what motivates each team member. This makes accomplishing our shared goals easier."

 

The best way to collaborate with a team is twofold. First, learn what it takes to be a good facilitator. Know how to steer conversations, how to manage tangents, and when to cut dialogue when you have enough input. Second, learn each person’s communication preferences and learn to communicate with them on their level and inform them your preferences for communication. Lastly, if you have the ability to learn each person’s personality, strengths, or workstyle preferences, share those upfront or take one of the assessments. Knowing everyone’s preferences takes the guesswork out of communicating and working together.
 
The strategies I would recommend to a new manager to foster effective team collaboration are as follows:

• Know your role on the team. Are you steering, guiding, leading, or participating? 
• Stand by what you say. For example, be upfront with what you expect from the team. If you want their input so you can make a decision, let them know that so they don’t think they’re making the decision.
• Get out of the way. Trust your people to let their strengths shine. Draw them out and support them. 
• Be a cheerleader. Support the effort. Make sure to support the team effort and goals. 

Ajay Prasad, Founder and President, GMR Web Team: 

As a serial entrepreneur, Ajay has plenty of experience in putting together teams for this companies. He started his first company in 2004. He offers his advice on stimulating collaboration.

“The very first thing that you need to do when trying to inspire a team to collaborate is to explain the task at hand. This may seem like a fairly obvious thing to do, but many leaders forget this part and jump right into the work. Letting the team know the objectives, team roles, the importance, etc. will allow the whole team to have a common goal, something that everyone can impact and work towards. Another important aspect is the atmosphere within the team. There needs to be an apparent community. It shouldn’t be five individuals trying to get their own work done, but instead a group of five doing completing one big-picture task while doing separate parts. Respect, openness, and support are extremely important to establish in a team.

Giving your own personal opinion is very valuable when working with a team. You definitely do not want to stay quiet and let everyone else make the decisions. You could potentially be offering a completely new and different perspective that the rest of the team didn’t think of. There’s a reason you are on the team. But at the same time, allow others to voice their opinions and don’t shoot down any input. This will create a negative atmosphere and the team will be less willing to work with each other.” 

Jodie Shaw, Chief Marketing Officer, The Alternative Board, offers these throughts: "I like to build a collaborative workplace by having every new team member complete a behavioral assessment (DISC). The accompanying report reveals their strengths and weaknesses, which we discuss, as well as my own strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and those of other members of the team. From there, we can identify why certain behavioral styles are an asset to the team and where some might cause conflict and how to deal with it. 

 

I have found this simple tool helps teams forge greater appreciation for the diversity of work styles, while at the same time highlighting potential weakness and conflicts in the workplace based on behavioral style. Being aware helps with creating greater understanding. This leads to less conflict and greater synergies on the team."

Ryan Matzner, Co-Founder, Fueled, says: "I built a team from zero to 100 members, and now that team spans across several different time zones. I have many suggestions for creating successful collaborations from my experience. Every fortnight we do an all hands video conference to introduce members from across the organization and celebrate the company's success together; this bonds us through a sense of familiarity. From there, we mix people across projects, making sure we rotate new people in and out so you are always working with a new group of colleagues. This gets the ball rolling and encourages colleagues to learn how to work in teams. 

 

Another big thing we do annually is we send our employees from different locations out to conferences such as Apple's WWDC in California . . . It is a time that works in effectively bringing people together. I make sure to not use a top-down approach. Even as a co-founder myself, I value opinions from all members of the organization. With a company-wide understanding that you won't ever be ignored, this opens the floodgates for crucial communication, a necessity for future collaboration. Finally, lead by example and show them that you're there to support them on the ground level. Set goals, but don't micromanage. This will drive people to work great independently but with a fostered culture, this will later translate to effective team collaboration."

Christine Dura, Chief Development Officer, OrthoNOW ® and author of The Empowered Entrepreneur, shares her experience: "I have over 25 years of quantifiable sales and operations leadership experience in both the United States and internationally. This includes notable C- and V-level experience in virtually all business sectors including network marketing, SaaS technologies, technology, children, education, retail, food, health and beauty, senior care services, non-medical care, healthcare, wellness, hospitality, IBO's and broker networks, advertising, home services, accounting and financial, tax services, mobile, technology, professional and business services, and nonprofits verticals. As a Senior Franchise Executive, and Entrepreneur, I have been both an individual contributor and has successfully led world-class teams."

Developing an organically creative and collaborative environment, especially in a working world that relies on individual productivity and mobility, can be rather challenging. While “collaboration” has become a buzzword in business today, the reality is that in our era where technology is king, collaboration is the most effective method of problem solving. 

My first step is to create the right environment. This means not creating a culture where systems measure success solely on individual performance. These types of milieus create an atmosphere where workers focus on their own personal progress and discourage the very idea of collaboration. The goal is to create settings that reward independent efforts while including methods that incentivize teamwork in such a manner that collaboration is an integral part of accomplishing work-related tasks.

The second step is to use the right tools. Too often team members cannot collaborate easily due to disparate job roles or a lack of understanding regarding an organization as a whole. Find the right tools to build a bridge of understanding across departments and roles within your organization. 

The third step is to identify collaborative leaders. Keeping in mind that leadership styles vary, the key is the ability to identify and empower managers who empower the staff and thrive in collaborative environments as second nature. This is crucial to making the organization more collaborative overall.

Businesses today operate in an increasingly complex and ever-changing landscape. Therefore, now more than ever, companies must learn to rely on the intelligence and resourcefulness of their people to thrive. Collaboration is no longer optional. It is an essential ingredient for organizational survival. 

To energize teams, encourage creativity, and promote workers’ production and level of satisfaction, take the following steps:

• Deter and destroy silos. The mindset of hoarding information department to department will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture. A silo mentality becomes synonymous with power struggles, lack of cooperation, and loss of productivity.
• Build a collaboration strategy. Capture and communicate with frequency the cumulative intellectual capital present in the workforce. Educate your staff so that they understand that collaboration is more than the technology is supports. It includes a change in attitude and behavior of people throughout an organization. Stress that successful collaboration relies on the people who believe in it. 
• Manage through shared purpose and vision. Adopt and communicate your vision in a way that that drives people beyond the boundaries and limits of the past while realizing the true power of a vision can only come into play when the employees themselves have had some part in its creation.
• Build trust. Trust is the very foundation of collaboration. Trust is the belief or confidence in the reliability, integrity, and honesty of others. It is the glue that holds any group together. Suspicious and cynical employees will not collaborate. Sharing knowledge demonstrates that the leadership has put their trust in employees. 

I would advise a new manager that when building a team, finding the right ingredients for a high performing team isn’t always about getting the smartest people together - it’s about finding personality and skill sets that complement each other. I would also recommend the following principles:

• Keep communication lines open and respectful. Collaboration depends on communication. Every member of the team should be able to communicate equally and with authority, thereby, promoting openness, and, later, ownership of the outcomes.
• Foster individual perspectives. Teams offer diverse perspectives and unique ways of thinking. Make sure every team member is heard clearly and that their ideas are unique, valuable, and concise.  
• Define consensus and collaboration. Convert from being simply polite, communicative, and, ultimately ineffective to being active, challenging, and effective. 
• Respect collaboration. At its core, it [collaboration] is about pursuing new ways of looking at ideas and varied perspectives that allow a team to reach clearly stated goals and achieve better solutions.”