Collaboration is a key ingredient in any team recipe, but you can extend the field of collaboration beyond your immediate team for creative results. As a team leader, you should work to create and maintain an atmosphere of collaboration both within your team and externally to your team.
Why Collaboration Is Important
Collaboration is the key to leading a successful team. Without it, a great idea can remain only as an idea, instead of the team implementing the idea in a practical way. Often an individual can come up with a great idea but has no way of implementing the idea. However, other team members may be able to find ways of bringing the idea to fruition.
Without a spirit of collaboration, the team is merely a group of individuals and not a unified team. One person cannot come up with all the components to make a project work, but the team who works together, and accepts ideas from every team member and builds on those ideas together can create amazing projects.
How to Create Collaboration
As a team leader, you have a pivotal role in helping your team to build a collaborative spirit, moving individuals away from holding onto ideas for personal gain to sharing the ideas for the benefit of the whole team.
Encourage your team members to share ideas, not only group meetings but via the email system or by chatting in small groups outside of the team. Sometimes, two or three people will be able to nut out an idea and present a practical, viable solution to the rest of the team at the next team meeting.
During team meetings, you may like to a whole team brainstorm session to generate initial ideas and then ask the team to break into smaller groups, with each group given a particular idea to discuss in more detail and report the pros and cons of that idea back to the whole team before a final decision is made on which idea to recommend to the board.
Who to Collaborate With
As well as creating a collaborative spirit with the team, you can collaborate with other people on the project. You may find that discussing the project with people who have no stake in the project can help you to see the problems or issues with the proposed solutions.
Look beyond your immediate circle of friends, or team members for input on some issues. Key stakeholders within the company may be able to give your team information on the practicality of implementing your team’s ideas. You may want to pass a drawing, model, or sample of the finished product among the people on the manufacturing floor, and people in the marketing department for thoughts, suggestions, and input, before your team suggests a brand new product to the board.
You can also collaborate with people outside your company but within the industry. Be careful not to share confidential company information, or to give your competitors’ an edge by sharing too many details, especially if your creative team is responsible for designing a new product. However, you may find that collaborating with other people in the industry can help your team. If another company has tried a similar project in the past with disastrous results, finding out what did not work can only improve your team’s chance of success.
Any good team leader should work towards creating a collaborative spirit within your team and with appropriate other people in the company and in the industry.
Do you have any tips on how to improve team collaboration?
What do you think makes an effective team?
