How to Collaborate with Your Team

Here are some of my thoughts on team collaboration.

Collaboration drives creativity because innovation emerges from a series of sparks — never a single flash of insight.

-B. Sawyer

Well maybe not always from a series of sparks, but a vast majority of times anyway. No question. And certainly, a great reason to work with your team on collaboration. It takes a great entrepreneur with a vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and the collaboration of many people to make it a success.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is much more than the intersection of common goals. It is a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.

Collaboration is an attribute that cuts across many businesses and business processes. We need to make it an intentional process and cultivate it into any team’s culture. That’s where leadership comes in as a key ingredient, to drive the collaborative process to make the whole team better than the sum of the parts.

It all starts with individual traits and skills with team members of your group, but then it extends to learning collaborative group skills. You need both … they are very interactive obviously.