Business Fit Magazine August 2017 Issue 1 | Page 40
38 Article
The goal of a collaboration can be varied and range from solving a
business problem, to developing a new product or service, bundling
services to enhance the client experience or being able to enter new
markets through a strategic partnership.
Collaboration has become an even more critical skill these days as the
workforce became more connected around the globe through new,
emerging technologies that enable collaboration across distances.
In addition markets, companies and employees are more and more
specialized and a combination of these various skills lead to superior
products and services. Individuals are mostly not able anymore to
provide an end to end service at the same level. This trend can also
be seen in the way companies have started to collaborate with each
other. Modern terms like “Go to market deal” or “Business Incubator”
reflect this trend in business. Whilst in the past companies have been
mainly acting as competitors, more and more companies are looking
for strategic partners to be able to provide new and superior services.
So what makes a collaboration successful?
In their “The art of collaboration series” the Virgin group e.g. lists 9
habits of highly effective collaborators as follows:
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Be transparent
Say what you are going to do and follow through
Allow for a little give and take
Listen to understand, not to respond
Stick to your guns
Know which battles to fight
Be authentic
Be kind
Step up
All of these attributes would warrant a separate article going deeper
into what it means and how to apply them effectively. So let me pick
on a few of them, like “Be transparent”. Transparency is critical overall,
but specifically in a collaborative environment. As outlined earlier, the
goal of collaboration is always to “create” something new. This means
that team members need to come up with new, innovative ideas,
which very often requires thinking outside of the box. These new
ideas and concepts can only be fully digested and understood from
the rest of the team if there is transparency in the communication.
The same applies if ideas are discussed and evaluated. Also here it is
critical that people provide constructive feed-back which also requires
transparency in the communication. This is the more required the
more diverse the background and interests are, e.g. as in Business
partnerships. The end goal is to create a win-win situation, which is
only possible if both parties fully understand and respect the interests
of each other. Certainly one of the fundamentals in order to be able to
be transparent is to operate in a trusted environment where people
feel comfortable sharing their perspectives and ideas freely.
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