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: • • • • • • • • • 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. www.BusinessFitMagazine.com