While most people cooperate with others and want to help their colleagues, a highly collaborative team seldom happens organically.
Presuming a team or organization will naturally develop a highly collaborative spirit of working together doesn’t make it so.
True collaboration — where colleagues at all levels willingly show up and stand for each other, support each other’s projects, pitch in when needed, share information and resources freely, make newcomers feel welcome, seek feedback from each other, and resolve disagreements respectfully — is actually quite rare.
In highly collaborative workplaces, support and cooperation are not affected by status or authority.
When it comes to supportive behavior, everyone is seen as a peer, and the most senior, tenured, experienced, and influential team members are just as willing to lend a hand to a junior colleague as they are to their leader.
Better yet, they don’t wait to be asked or requested to pitch in. They inquire throughout the day about who needs help or support and what they can do to assist.
It’s not that most teams are low in collaboration. They just haven’t reached the consistency of seamless cooperation inherent in highly collaborative teams. Developing such a collective team spirit almost always starts with an explicit expectation by the leader.
Leaders who want to develop a highly collaborative team don’t leave the possibility to chance. They tell everyone repeatedly that collaboration, and the behaviors that comprise it, are expected every day.
They not only model these behaviors but also privately confront any violation of the expectation. Colleagues who are too busy, distracted, or uninterested in supporting others when they need it are reminded of the importance of this shared and prized value.
Building a highly collaborative team takes time, consistent effort, and messaging. The best leaders are highly persistent in discussing and explaining the ethic for how the team must work together.
They cleverly remind the most seasoned team members as they reintroduce the expectation in group settings to new team members. They recognize high collaboration whenever they see it and prefer to call it out in group discussions.
They simply reinforce it over and over until it becomes the team norm.
Research confirms that teams high in collaboration are more engaged, more productive, more innovative, and more adaptive to change. They solve problems faster, share knowledge and learning more effectively, and reach higher-quality decisions because of how they work through issues.
Molding your team into a highly collaborative work group is a goal worth attaining.
Do you lead a highly collaborative team? It all starts with you as the leader. When you expect everyone on the team to operate collaboratively, it sets the stage.
When those too busy or important to support others learn from you that their behavior is unacceptable, they quickly get in line and conform to the group norm. That itself illustrates the power of the cooperative spirit.
