Collaboration Among Professionals

Your success is compounded when you collaborate
Janine Garner

Collaboration Definition

Virtually every imaginable job in today's workplace entails at least some joint effort by team members in order to accomplish goals, making cooperation an essential skill in most sectors of the work world.

What is Workplace Collaboration?

Collaboration enable workers to interface productively with others on the job.  Successful collaboration requires a cooperative spirit and mutual respect.  Employers typically seek employees who function effectively as a part of a team and are willing to balance personal achievement with group goals.

In some cases, teams that collaborate may be members of the same department working on ongoing activities that require coordination. In other cases, interdepartmental teams are assembled to carry out a special project.  

Collaboration can occur between many different types of partners. Collaboration often occurs among members of a work team in the same department. However, collaboration can also occur between bosses and subordinates or between members of different departments who form a cross-functional team. 

Service providers can collaborate with clients to achieve goals, and vendors can cooperate with customers to implement products or services. Collaboration can also occur with individuals outside one's employer such as business partners, customers, clients, contractors, volunteers, and suppliers.

In fact, Collaboration is everytime, everywhere if any professional want to succeeded in collegue, in your life, in your professional life.

Four Tips on How to Have a Successful Collaboration

1. Be open and honest. There is no such thing as a perfect collaboration (or relationship), but open and direct communication is absolutely necessary to establish the mutual trust needed for a successful partnership.

2. Take the long view. When you are first starting your lab, it is easy to focus on authorship or other accolades. Recognize that if you behave respectably and share credit appropriately, then everyone will benefit.

3. Have fun. It is important to like and want to spend time with your collaborators, otherwise the work is no fun. The same characteristics that make a good friend can also make a good collaborator. 

4. Give without expecting anything in return. This is particulary important to do on bebee. It is human nature for people to be focused on wanting to receive something for themselves or their business. Read more at https://www.bebee.com/producer/@javierbebee/give-without-expecting-anything-in-return

Collaborate With Co-Workers

A team should be more than the sum of its parts, with the individual strengths of the teammates contributing positively to the bottom line. A collaboration is only useful if it works. Many factors affect success or failure, including too much time spent in meetings and leaning on others to the point of laziness. When collaboration is successful, it is an incredibly useful tool for productivity and innovation in the workplace. 

How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate

There’s a world of difference between merely working together and truly collaborating with one another. Collaborative activity is the secret sauce that enables teams to come up with innovative new products or creative, buzz-worthy marketing campaigns. But people can also collaborate creatively around a seemingly mundane project — like the installation of a new accounting package — and use that initiative to transform the way in which an organization does business.

Don’t be afraid of social media. People are more prone to collaborate with others who are similar to them. So how, then, do you get dissimilar people to collaborate? The trick is to find the common ground between such individuals, and social media — blogs, wikis, collaboration tools, etc. — play a huge role in doing so. Many managers have been fearful of using social media beyond marketing purposes. But those companies that have begun to use social media for internal purposes are starting to reap the benefits.

Collaboration is a key factor 

Collaboration is a key factor in building a small business because it works. People thrive in environments which free them to communicate and work together. When the company environment is focused on collaboration, team members naturally feel a part of something bigger than themselves. The best way to transition from an individual to a collaborative mindset is to equip each team member for active participation in the group dynamic.

An effective collaboration platform should include:

• A suite of social tools – Producing Collaborative Content, wikis, blogs, profiles, shared workspaces.
• Training capabilities – such as an elearning platform and Learning Management Systems.
• Communication Tools – to enable mobility, video conferencing

To Make Smart Collaboration Happen 

A small, strategic and supercharged network relies on collaboration and connection.
Janine Garner