Top Tools of 2021: Collaboration

I know – you are probably tired of hearing, thinking, and reading about collaboration. Your boss tells you to work with another department to meet a deadline. Or a funder is looking for you to partner with another organization in order to submit a proposal for an opportunity that perfectly aligns with the work that you do. Or (and we are all guilty of this in the past year) your company rolls out another new platform aimed at increasing intra-office collaboration. You are collaborating so much that you have forgotten what it feels like to sit at your desk (or, in my case, my kitchen table), by yourself, and just get work done.

I hear you.

I hear you so much, in fact, that one version of this article was, “Collaboration is good. It drives innovation and diversifies revenue, thus enhancing your financial sustainability. Collaborate.” The End. (By the way, despite the fact that I went with a slightly longer version of this article, in the end, those things are true).

But, as you know, collaboration is important. And it is not going away. So we need to talk about it.

What the What is Collaboration?

According to Merriam-Webster, to collaborate is, “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.” In and of itself, this definition is rather vague: are there limits on who qualifies as the “others”? What does and does not constitute an “intellectual endeavor”? How is, “work” interpreted?

Before we continue, I propose you engage in the following activity:

1. Grab a piece of paper and something to write with (or open a Word, Pages, or another electronic format document).
2. Take five seconds to shift your thinking to see things through the view of your company; not you as the employee (even if you are running the show).
3. Answer these questions from the perspective of your company:
   • How does your company define “work”? Or, alternatively, what does your company do?
   • What are the intellectual endeavors of your company? Or, what service and/or product does your company offer?
   • Who are the “others” your company relies on? Or, who does your company need to do the “work” to successfully develop and deliver on your “intellectual endeavors”?

I don’t know about you (though I would love to hear from you on how this activity went), but when I answered the above questions from Atrómitos’ viewpoint I regurgitated major components of our business plan.

Thinking about Collaboration

Searching for “collaboration” on the internet will inundate you with information about why and how to do it. Harvard Business Review talks you through eight steps on building collaborative teams. simpplr shares their thoughts on the importance of collaboration in business. Proofhub lists out 52 platforms your team can use to better collaborate. And so on and so on.

While these resources are helpful, their helpfulness is predicated on the understanding that collaboration is something your company does. That means that collaboration is something your company can choose not to do. With that in mind, let’s remember our activity from above.

If the way your company defines “collaboration” overlaps with your business plan, then understanding collaboration as something you can or cannot do equates to deciding whether or not you will follow your business plan. I will make a blanket statement here and say, pending your business plan needing modifications (which we can help you with), not following it is not an option. In that light, neither should collaborating.

So if it is not a choice, then what is it?

Collaboration is your business. Unless you are a single-employee business that only offers products or services to yourself, you have to collaborate.

You must work with your customers to understand what they need and how they want to receive it. With two-thirds of customers using social media for servicing and businesses who use Twitter for customer service seeing a 19% increase in customer satisfaction, many companies are partnering with their customer base to improve communication channels. Customers want to consume from businesses that respond to them, and businesses need customer engagement to understand what is and is not working.

Employees also need cross-team functionality to bring a product or service to market. Throughout my two decades as a working professional, I can count exactly zero times when, as part of a team, company, or business I successfully produced a needed outcome entirely on my own. Whether it is Finance explaining how many staff you can add to Research & Development to concept a new product, or leveraging your IT team to fix a glitch in your Electronic Medical Record, we all need our coworkers to get the job done.

And even if your company offers soup-to-nuts development of a product, it’s a safe wager that you still need vendors of some sort to stand up your infrastructure. Vendors in your supply chain rely on you for business, much as you rely on them for parts to get your product out the door. Technology vendors make paying your employees, tracking a patient’s health data, and analyzing your finances infinitely easier (most of the time). Many of these relationships are controlled by contracts, resulting from negotiations, which are driven by a desire to collaborate to benefit both parties.

I make these points simply to say: collaboration is business. None of us run a company or work for an organization that operates in a true silo or purely of its own volition. If you consider collaboration to be a decision to be made, you will spend considerable time and energy continually making that decision.

Collaboration Considerations

You know us at Atrómitos – we don’t like to bring up an issue or point without giving you some tactical next steps.

First, we recommend revisiting your Business Plan. This does not mean you have to redo it (unless you want to). Instead, find the spaces where collaboration is critical in making your business plan achievable. Then create and fortify that infrastructure.

Second, consider how you define what is “proprietary” to your organization. We all have information that needs to be protected—a.k.a. your “special sauce” or insights derived from your years of experience. These are, after all, what sets you apart from your competitors. But that same information can also be a complement to a potential collaborator’s skill set. As such, there is a risk of unnecessarily keeping that information too close to the vest; you may miss out on incredible opportunities for partnerships. As a starting point, the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce recommends answering two questions: (1) what information gives your business a competitive advantage; and (2) is that information publicly available?

Lastly, pay attention to where collaboration is happening outside of your organization because I am here to tell you it is happening. For our friends in healthcare, the transition into value-based care is continuing to drive partnerships as providers of all disciplines are realizing the expected outcomes are challenging to accomplish on their own. Corporations are identifying collaboration, specifically with start-ups, as imperative to success: 94% of surveyed corporates identify collaboration as essential to increasing their ability to innovate. If you are a non-profit, the idea of collaborating is most likely not new to you as 91% of non-profits surveyed by BridgeSpan reported having collaborated at least once in the preceding three years.

Regardless of what you do, collaboration is here to stay. While it may not always be straightforward and simple, it is essential. The key is not deciding whether you want to collaborate – it is figuring out how you want to accomplish it. And if you want to start thinking through that, I am happy to collaborate with you on that.