Working effectively on a team isn’t always easy. Personalities clash, communication styles don’t match up, and work habits don’t always align. It’s normal. Collaboration is a soft skill that is often easily overlooked and underdeveloped. You can’t get certified “collaborative”. It doesn’t show up on the CV under skills. Yet, effective collaboration is critical to any team’s success.
Are some people born more collaborative than others? Richard Dawkins’ 1976 theory from The Selfish Gene posited that humans are inherently self-focused. Much like Adam Smith claimed, humans are after all serving their own self-interest.
More recent research has found that skills like cooperation and collaboration are the natural go-to for a good 50% of people, with another 20% going either way. Further research looking at the value of cooperation shows that groups make certain types of decisions much better as a group. From an evolutionary perspective, working together is (more often than not) in our self-interest.
Collaboration can be learned. There are tactics, ideas, and approaches that can make your workplace relationships healthier and more effective.
Whether you’re working as a designer or developer, an SDR or CEO, being aware of your collaboration style (or lack thereof) is essential. From simple tips to more complex team-building exercises, here’s a list of 101 proven ideas for better collaboration that will help you build and maintain stronger and more productive workplace relationships.
The Right Tools to Enable Collaboration
1. Take Responsibility
Remain accountable for your part of shared projects and responsibilities. Show your colleagues you’re reliable by following through on commitments, meeting deadlines, and communicating proactively when there are delays. Take ownership of your mistakes and share challenges openly.
2. Understand Async vs Sync Work
Understanding the difference (and when which is more appropriate) between asynchronous and synchronous work and communication can boost your team’s productivity and collaborations.
- Synchronous: Face-to-face communication, a phone call, and videoconferencing. Feedback and communication are shared in real time.
- Asynchronous channels: Task management, note-taking, or review tools. Communication received can be more thoughtful and considered.
3. Use Loom for Explanations
Rather than scheduling a 30 meeting to cover a 5-minute explanation, share videos with instructions or explanations via Loom or a similar self-recording app. Teams can view it at their convenience, contributing to better async collaboration.
4. Implement the Right PM Tool
Keep your team running smoothly. The adoption of efficient PM software enables team members to collaborate seamlessly, share real-time updates, and access relevant project data, resulting in smoother workflows, increased transparency, and more effective collaboration.
From research and testing to picking the right tool for your team’s needs, there are some universal best practices for implementing new collaborative software.
5. Simplify File Sharing
Poor file sharing habits kill collaborations. Word docs sent by email or Google docs shared online can be sufficient for a one-off share. However, when multiple versions come into play, it’s risky to allow anyone who has access to make a “copy” and add revisions that get hidden, lost, or become inaccessible to other stakeholders.
Simplify file sharing (and revisions) by keeping all assets in a single, centralized location for the duration of a project’s entirety.
6. Balance Cybersecurity with Usability
Security breaches or hacks will of course slow down team efficiency. Alternatively, wildly restrictive policies are likely to destroy momentum and collaborative efforts. Aim to balance the two, adopting policies to limit the large bulk of attacks without making daily operations tedious.
7. Make the Feedback Cycle Convenient
As with the importance of keeping communication and files to a single platform, feedback and comments from stakeholders should all be kept in the same place, too. Projects can include images, videos, PDFs, web files, and more. Keep feedback together for easy access and versioning to avoid miscommunications.
8. Manage Distractions
Whether in a team or solo, there are always distractions to deal with. In a group work environment, distractions can have a compounding effect. Mitigate this by establishing clear guidelines, boundaries, or expectations for behavior from coworkers.
9. Reciprocate Proofreading
No matter how well-versed you are in the rules of grammar, it’s always difficult to proofread your own work. And typos can be embarrassing.
Buddy up with a co-worker to proof each other’s emails or writing projects before sharing them with anyone else. They’ll likely catch things you didn’t realize you’d missed.
10. Brand Collaborations
Collaborations aren’t just internal. Co-branding with other organizations or companies can be an effective way to reach wider audiences. Utilize the diverse audiences of collaborators to establish new connections within networks.
For branding and advertising teams, investing in co-branding opportunities can be a great way to extend reach and build collaborative relationships with other brands or companies.
Just look at what these types of campaigns can achieve.
11. Simplify Workflows
To coordinate simpler workflows for your team, it’s important to identify key tasks and create clear steps to complete them. Regular communication and feedback can help ensure that everyone is on the same page. It ensures that workflows remain effective and efficient.
12. Practice Patience
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and healthy workplace relationships don’t happen overnight. Be patient with yourself, your teammates, and the development of your shared process.
13. Run a Post-Mortem
A great practice is to do post-mortems where you review completed projects post-publication or delivery. During this process, you can identify opportunities to improve how work was done.
14. Meet Your Deadlines
Build trust among coworkers by meeting your deadlines (or owning up to it if they are missed).
By consistently delivering on time and taking responsibility for your actions, you establish trust, foster a positive work environment, and enhance collaboration by instilling a sense of reliability and dependability among your colleagues.
15. Remember the 3 Cs
Successful group work will always involve these three guiding principles: communication, coordination, and collaboration. Aim for efficient communication to align on goals and progress, coordinate schedules, deadlines, and direction, and collaborate effectively with methods and tools for task, creative, and project management.
Improve Communication
16. Ask for Help
Learning how to ask for help from colleagues not only allows you to be more productive but also makes you a better team player. Asking for help creates a more open network of communication with colleagues. It also helps others feel more comfortable asking for your knowledge and assistance.
17. Encourage Questions
Encourage team members to ask questions if they lack clarity. Questions help avoid misunderstandings and preventable mistakes. Plus, you never want a culture where people hesitate to question the way things are being done.
18. Be Concise
There’s an art to being concise. When communicating with team members make sure to keep your messages brief and to the point. This is especially true with emails.
Conciseness demonstrates respect for the time of others.
19. Take Feedback Well
Hillary Clinton“Take criticism seriously, but not personally.”
To be a better collaborator, develop a positive attitude toward the idea of getting feedback and constructive criticism – be it from coworkers, colleagues, superiors, or clients.
20. Give Useful Feedback
In return for getting useful feedback from others, learn how to provide helpful feedback, utilizing your own areas of expertise or experience. And be proactive about providing feedback – not just when things need adjustments.
When giving feedback to coworkers or colleagues, a great way to practice healthy collaboration is to focus on what’s working. Positive and open feedback cycles are essential to good collaboration.
21. Be Specific…
Be specific with feedback, suggestions, and requests to make it easier to achieve the desired outcome. Leaving room for interpretation can cause confusion and misunderstandings.
22. …But Allow Creative Autonomy
Avoiding being over-prescriptive with your creative feedback allows team members to exercise their creativity and come up with new and innovative ideas. It also fosters a sense of autonomy and trust within a team, leading to a more collaborative and productive environment.
23. Temper Initial Reactions
It’s natural to let emotions take over when we receive negative feedback or criticism of our work. Work at tempering your initial reactions both when receiving and giving feedback.
If you can’t provide an emotionally neutral response, let the other person know you’ll take some time to think and consider before replying.
24. Verify, Don’t Assume
Assumptions don’t lead to positive communications. To prevent miscommunications, misunderstandings, and long-lasting conflicts with coworkers, it is essential to ask questions and gather facts before making assumptions. Taking this proactive approach helps ensure clear communication and fosters positive working relationships.
25. Hone Your Listening Skills
Active listening is a crucial factor in building mutual understanding, trust, respect, and empathy. These elements are essential for effective communication and collaboration.
Try maintaining eye contact with the speaker, taking in non-verbal cues, listening without judgment, and reserving your opinions until the end.
26. Hone Your Talking skills
Listening skills are important, but how cognizant are you of how you share your ideas and questions? Are you speaking effectively? Being too quiet or too loud can both be problematic. Timing and tone are important.
More than that, learn how to talk through your challenges. Getting it off your chest in a neutral space means that when you return to the issue, you are in a more nuanced position.
27. Understand Non-Verbal Cues
Most of us are aware that maintaining eye contact indicates attentiveness and engagement. How many more non-verbal cues are you missing?
Successful collaboration requires a strong understanding of body language and non-verbal cues – both reading them and expressing them.
28. Offer Communication Training
Organize communication training and workshops for employees, including managers and supervisors. These workshops should focus on various aspects of effective communication, such as active listening, conflict resolution, giving and receiving feedback, and assertiveness.
29. Show Gratitude
“You were integral to the success of this project because…”,
“Thanks for your hard work on this…”,
“I appreciate your input on…”.
When people feel valued and appreciated, it goes a long way. Remember to show gratitude to other stakeholders and collaborators to maintain a positive working relationship.
30. Break Down Silos
By eliminating barriers between teams or departments, you’ll promote better collaboration and innovation. In breaking down silos, you create the ability to leverage diverse perspectives and expertise, resulting in improved problem-solving, efficiency, and overall success within the organization.
31. Avoid the “Blame Game”
Be it targeted toward others or yourself, taking responsibility, focusing on solutions, and avoiding finger-pointing are necessary to foster trust, respect, and teamwork in any collaborative endeavor.
32. Recognize the Symptoms of Broken Collaborations
Are your collaborative workflows broken? Keep an eye out for the following signs of broken workflow symptoms:
- Missing stakeholder comments and notes
- Requiring frequent clarifications
- Unnecessary revisions
- Unclear task ownership
- Unsatisfactory creative output
Self-Care & Continuous Learning
33. Avoid Burnout
Avoid letting stress pile on, which can cause you to burn out. Part of being a positive team player means ensuring you’re in the right state of mind to support others.
To avoid burnout know how to identify the signs of chronic stress, address recurring stressors, and find lasting solutions. Above all, don’t be afraid to seek help.
34. Manage Your Digital Wellbeing
Improving digital wellness is crucial for establishing and maintaining healthy personal and professional relationships.
Digital well-being helps to establish clear boundaries for when to engage with things like you email, which can enhance collaboration and promote a healthier work-life balance.
35. Encourage Physical Exercise
Did you know your morning run or afternoon yoga session can actually contribute to better collaboration at work?
Studies show a clear link between physical exercise and heightened levels of inventiveness. To offer better ideas and elevated innovation to your team meeting, try incorporating more movement.
36. Add “No” to Your Vocabulary
Saying “no” can actually make you a better collaborator. Saying yes all the time might make you friends in the short-term, but it can result in you struggling to deliver or leave you feeling burnt out.
If you’re wary of declining opportunities or requests, try a positive sandwich. Two yeses and a no can feel positive and constructive, rather than rejection-based.
37. Share Your Struggles
Be open and transparent about your own setbacks and failures. Not only will your struggles provide learning opportunities for those around you, but being vulnerable by sharing your setbacks can build trust and better working relationships.
38. Encourage Local Involvement
Getting involved with IRL organizations at a grassroots or local level makes for stronger group identity forming and pride in your mission. It also provides a form of social contagion – where the feelings of a positive charitable contribution rub off onto a team’s daily work.
39. Prioritize Continued Learning and Upskilling
Find ways to continue building on your skills and knowledge. The same goes for your team; people feel supported and more fulfilled when they have options and opportunities to advance their careers with their company’s support.
Masterclasses, continued-learning university courses, or even free Hubspot Academy tutorials can be great ways to advance and broaden the skills that everyone can then bring back and share with the team.
40. Broaden and Grow Your Creative Support Network
A solid and diverse creative network provides inspiration, motivation, feedback, and creative ideas. To build your network, find (or found) a community through virtual forums, social media, or by exploring niche industry tags. This will improve all your collaborations and collaborative output.
41. Build Creative Confidence
Imposter syndrome is a source of friction for thriving collaborative relationships.
Building up your confidence as a creative, fosters a sense of self-assurance that translates to the entire team. When you feel confident in your creative abilities and control self-doubt, you’re more likely to contribute ideas and engage in productive discussions. This leads to effective collaboration and stronger, more innovative outcomes.
42. Embrace Proximal Development
One learning theory, coined by psychologist Lev Vygotsky, is the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development. Essentially, when learning new skills, there is a limit to how much you can teach yourself.
To expand your mental framework, you need an expert (or someone smarter than you) to guide you. Embrace Proximal Development to expand your skills and your network.
Team Building
43. Challenge the Team to an Escape Room
A scavenger hunt or escape room is a fun team-building activity where participants are locked in a room and must work together to solve puzzles and clues to escape. These types of activities encourage communication, problem-solving, and teamwork.
44. Don’t Abandon Check-Ins
Though meeting-free days and async hours are useful, so are regular check-ins with teams, colleagues, and clients. Check-ins allow time for discussing progress and challenges and getting aligned. They are a great opportunity to see who needs help with what.
45. Adopt a “Yes, And” Mindset
Instead of dismissing ideas or immediately suggesting alternatives, practice using the improv stage technique of “yes, and”. Find the value in the proposed idea and see how or where you can build on it to make it even better.
46. Aligning Purpose
Create a sense of shared purpose by aligning team goals with the organization’s mission and values.
47. Organizational Capital
Think social capital but for teams. Focus on building connections within a team to deliver greater belonging and reduce the risk of system failure. Simple things like bi-weekly drinks, Friday breakfasts, holiday parties, and even active Slack channels all contribute “capital” and strengthen interpersonal connections.
48. Group Mindfulness or Meditation
A group yoga session can be the perfect team-building activity. Not only will it help your team feel more comfortable and connected, but it will also reduce stress, help people relax, and improve the overall vibe of the office.
49. Soften Hierarchies
Hierarchies are inevitable, but when a manager fails to promote teamwork, animosity can form. This can lead to a negative competitive culture where one-upmanship overshadows the pursuit of shared objectives. Smooth out hierarchical relationships through positive reinforcement and by promoting mutual respect.
Better Collaborative Leadership
50. Consider All Contributions
For everyone on the team to feel heard and valued, make a point of listening to all feedback and contributions. Ensure they know their suggestions are being considered and take the time to explain why or why not contributions will be utilized.
51. Purposefully Gather Different Perspectives
When brainstorming, problem-solving, or establishing creative ideas, it’s likely that there will be different perspectives on the issues or problem at hand. Although someone may see things differently than you do doesn’t mean they are wrong. Take the time to actively gather perspectives from others – it will lend to a more well-rounded perspective of the situation.
52. Value Trust and Autonomy
Great leaders know that great collaboration is bred from well-established trust and autonomy. Try to avoid swooping in to manage small details (you know…micromanaging). Give employees or coworkers the chance to get it right on their own before you intervene. Hire great people and give them the space to create and succeed.
53. Praise Rather than Criticize
“If you water a flower it will flourish, if you praise a person, they will flourish.”
Richard Branson
Leaders often prioritize correcting mistakes and failures over celebrating successes. However, fostering healthy teamwork involves acknowledging achievements and praising coworkers to build a stronger, more positive culture. Richard Branson advises Virgin managers to motivate their staff by emphasizing success rather than criticism.
54. Practice Empathy
When coworkers are aware of your willingness to see things from their perspective, they will feel comfortable sharing and expressing their ideas. Additionally, you will enhance your ability to receive and further develop those ideas.
55. Be Available
Ensure everyone knows what days or hours your office door (virtual or real) is open. Your coworkers should know they can come to you with suggestions, concerns, or questions – this will create a more open, collaborative environment.
56. Walk the Collaboration Catwalk
When it comes to collaboration, lead by example. As a leader, modeling positive collaboration strategies can help your team feel inspired to pursue their own collaborative techniques and team-building behavior.
If modeling isn’t enough, practice group exercises and offer methods for increasing collaboration among team members (hint: share this list with them!)
57. The Suggestion Box
Open suggestion-box-style questions can help employees feel heard. Anonymous surveys covering leadership, communication, company culture, and employee satisfaction can be a good strategy for managers to learn where there’s room for improved collaboration.
58. Be Transparent
Tell them why. Transparency with everyone involved in a project promotes trust, accountability, and effective communication at all levels within a project or organization. Companies like Buffer are inspirations – and it leads to great results. Transparency eliminates politics, creates belonging, and delivers a sense of pride in results.
59. Provide Proper Training
Proper job training ensures that employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their job effectively. With the right training, you’ll see improved communication, increased confidence, and a collaborative work environment that fosters better teamwork and productivity.
60. Be the Motivator in Chief
A leader is responsible to, well, lead. That means when there is the inevitable lull in motivation – maybe due to a missed deadline, struggles with a client, or creative block – you need to light the spark and rile up the crowds.
61. Identify Bad Apples
As a leader, it’s important to empower and nurture your team. When you identify someone who’s not contributing, or worse – having a negative impact on the bunch – don’t wait to address and resolve the situation.
Workplace Culture and Respect
62. Build a Focus on Company Culture
While many of the strategies and ideas on this list contribute to an overall positive culture at work, it’s also important to be actively aware and proactive about instilling strong company culture among teams and employees.
According to Forbes, companies with a strong culture have 72% higher employee retention.
63. Prioritize DEI
For effective collaboration, you must create an environment that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. Everyone should feel like an equal member of the team in order to feel comfortable engaging in discussions and providing valuable contributions. It’s not about altruism. It has significant business upside.
64. Use Visual Aids
To collaborate effectively you need to recognize that everyone perceives and learns differently. An audio explanation might be sufficient for some, while visual aids can make the difference for others.
65. Keep Accessibility in Mind
Though accessibility has come a long way in recent years, there’s still a long way to go. Practice accessibility within your team by adapting or providing the tools and resources everyone needs to get the information they require.
Screen readers, ALT text on websites, text-to-speech software, alternative input devices, captioned presentations, and image descriptions are all important aspects of digital accessibility.
66. Stay Away from Gossip
Gossip and office politics are another fact of the workplace but are very rarely helpful or healthy. Keep the water cooler talk free of gossip.
67. Instill Zero Tolerance for Verbal Abuse
Having zero tolerance for verbal abuse helps foster a respectful and productive work environment.
68. Show Respect
Aim to treat everyone with respect. When employees or team members feel heard and valued, they are more likely to take pride in what they do. This correlates to better collaboration through higher employee retention – not to mention greater productivity.
69. Be on Time
Punctuality is just plain good manners. Don’t make people wait. Show you respect their time – and they’ll respect yours.
70. Instate Meeting-Free (Wednes)days
To collaborate better, work separately – at least part of the time. Meeting fatigue is not conducive to effective collaborations.
Take advantage of async hours by integrating meeting-free Wednesdays (or Thursdays or Fridays). Larger blocks of async time can help employees improve concentration, focus, and overall quality of collaboration.
71. Reconsider Presentations
Too many meetings can be a time-wasting habit that leads to inefficient collaboration.
Before sending that invite to everyone on the team (or company), consider whether they need to be there. Can the presentation be viewed asynchronously? Could a few bulleted notes be sufficient for their use?
72. Create Structure
Whether in-office or remote, synced or async, good teams need a certain level of structure to function effectively. The structure can look different for every team. This doesn’t necessarily mean structured work hours. Find what works best for you.
73. Be Timezone Aware
When teams, collaborators, or clients are working from different time zones, it’s important to maintain effective communication. Respect their on and off hours to keep collaboration positive. Find times to sync up that work for everyone as much as possible.
74. Be Realistic
Putting people, especially coworkers, on too high a pedestal (or on a really low one) is not conducive to healthy collaboration. Avoid overwhelming collaborators by being realistic about your expectations of them.
75. Stay Open to New Ways
Be open to change. Learn to adjust your methods and tools as needed. It will help you adapt to new ways of working. Change is good. At least it can be. Know how to recognize good versus bad change.
76. Encourage Individuality
Trust that poster reading “Be Yourself”. Individuality is good for collaboration because it brings diverse perspectives and ideas to the table, encouraging creativity and innovation while avoiding groupthink.
77. Know When to Apologize
Knowing when to apologize is crucial for fostering better collaboration in the workplace. Recognizing and taking responsibility for our mistakes or missteps helps build trust, resolves conflicts, and paves the way for open communication and teamwork.
Creative Collaboration
78. Establish Roles Early On
Don’t leave people wondering where they stand or who is in charge of what. A well-thought-out project kick-off process can help to establish roles and responsibilities from the get-go.
79. Make Time for Group Ideation
Allocate time for group brainstorming sessions. Small workshops can lead to highly creative outcomes. Organize professional development sessions that allow individuals to gain insights into each other’s work and receive valuable feedback on their own. This encourages collaboration and invites diverse perspectives, ultimately enhancing projects.
80. Brainstorm The Right Way
A bulk of ideation and brainstorming should be done prior to stepping into a meeting. Show up to brainstorming sessions prepared to show you’re willing to put in the effort to provide a meaningful contribution. A key part of being a valued contributor is demonstrating respect for others’ time.
81. Use the Whiteboard
Seeing ideas and thoughts laid out in front of you can help nudge compounding ideas into larger concepts. Brainsketching and using a whiteboard during meetings can be a great way to collaborate within a creative team – getting everyone’s ideas into a shared (physical) space.
82. Try Pixar’s Brain Trust Exercise
The famous “Brain Trust” exercise used by the team at Pixar involves periodically getting together with other creatives and leaders to analyze one another’s works in progress. Making opportunities for feedback less threatening can lead to better ideas and more mistakes getting caught early on. Ed Catmull has shared that this exercise is empowering when creatives provide their honest thoughts on the project in discussion.
83. Account for Tech Divide
Keep in mind that not everyone you work with will be on the same level or have the same skill sets. Account for the “tech divide” by being respectful and mindful of others’ level of knowledge or skill by avoiding jargon, explaining technical terms, and providing resources when possible.
84. Experiment with Rapid Ideation
Encourage collaboration by implementing rapid ideation techniques within your team’s brainstorming sessions. The objective is to generate numerous ideas or solutions within a limited timeframe, without any judgment or evaluation. Rapid ideation fosters innovation and stimulates out-of-the-box thinking.
85. Have a Beachball Conversation
During a virtual meeting, throw an imaginary ball from one person to the next, and have them toss their idea in as they catch it. Or, if you’re meeting in person, you can actually use a ball!
The beachball method can help your team generate solutions and gather information. The idea is that a topic or problem is proposed, and everyone throws out an idea or solution, one at a time.
86. Stay out of the Echo Chamber
Surrounding yourself with people with the same experiences or perspectives can create an echo chamber, resulting in confirmation bias.
Effective collaboration is best with broad and diverse inputs. Invite other teams to join you for brainstorming or meetings to get a range of perspectives.
87. Avoid Social Loafing
While well-structured and thought-out collaboration can yield great results, there are some downfalls to collaboration that should be considered.
As project teams expand, individuals may experience decreased work performance and output due to the diffusion of responsibility – also known as social loafing. To mitigate this, measures like establishing clear accountability and assigning specific tasks can help foster ownership and counteract the “someone else can do it” mindset.
88. Beware of Groupthink
Groupthink, a phenomenon identified by Irving Janis in 1971, occurs when dominant individuals in a group suppress dissenting opinions. This can lead to conformity and poor decisions.
To prevent groupthink, it is important to foster open discussion, encourage dissenting voices, and hold follow-up meetings to address any lingering doubts, particularly for contentious decisions.
89. Identify False Consensus
The false consensus effect leads us to assume that our limited experiences are common among others. In group projects, if a manager believes the project is progressing well, they might incorrectly assume unanimous agreement and neglect viewpoints from other stakeholders.
To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the project’s status, it’s crucial to actively identify and address opposing viewpoints. This practice promotes effective collaboration and helps prevent costly mistakes.
90. Be Like the Avengers
Cross-functional teams (like the Avengers!) are a group of people with various skills and experience, sometimes from different levels within the organization. Oftentimes, these teams can be a way to address challenges that are too large for any one type of role or skill. Complementarity is resilience.
91. Align on Project Vision & Brief
Before diving into a new project, ensure that everyone involved (from creatives to CEOs) is aligned on the vision and goals. Depending on the type of project, you can create stronger alignment by making a shared outline, roadmap, or vision board.
92. Respect Group Norms
Group norms are the fundamental principles that a team agrees to abide by, creating a well-defined structure for all collaborative efforts.
These norms can dictate the preferred mode of communication, a particular meeting format, the team’s creative workflow preferences, or a systematic approach to crucial decision-making.
93. Balance “Me” and “We”
Collaboration requires balancing individualism and collectivism to achieve a cohesive group outcome. This can be challenging as it can require dialing down the ego. It also requires taking pride in the collective work as well as in individual contributions.
94. Use a Tailored Approach
Tailor tasks and processes to accommodate the unique characteristics of each team member. People have different personality types, learning styles, and abilities that influence how they work.
When assigning roles and responsibilities, consider a diverse range of factors. Emphasize leveraging individual strengths and skills while carefully coordinating personalities and processes. Putting in that extra bit of energy to figure out where everyone fits will let everyone shine and thrive.
95. Try Bad Ideas
It’s easy to get stuck on a challenge in a spiral of wrong solutions. Trying out one of those “bad” ideas, however, can give your team a foundation to build on.
It’s easier to say, “How can we make this better?” than “Where do we start?”. In highlighting what doesn’t work, you might use the why not to find the why yes. So maybe accept that your colleagues bad ideas could be inadvertently lead to the next sliced bread.
96. Approach Opportunities with an Open Mind
Promote a collaborative mindset by approaching every work partnership with an open mind and a shared goal of exploring possibilities together. Embrace the question, “What can we make possible together?” to foster a culture of collaboration and unlock innovative solutions.
97. Exit the Comfort Zone
Focus on regularly putting yourself outside your comfort zone – whether exposing yourself to alternative viewpoints, acquiring new skills, trying new collaboration tools, or organizing team-building activities – different perspective enables stronger collaborations in so many ways. .
98. Respect Others’ Comfort Zones
It’s okay to challenge yourself and even others to a degree – but go too far in pushing them and you’ll be avoided like the plague.
99. Reflect on Your Collaboration Style
Take time to self-assess. Are you a good collaborator and communicator? What can you do to become better?
TIP: Saving this list of ideas is a great place to start!
100. Respect Different Processes
Everyone works differently. Respect different processes, even those in contrast to your own. Work toward building a workflow for your team that acknowledges everyone’s challenges, respects their contributions, and aims for balance.
101. You’re In It Together
With changes and developments in workplaces, there may be an inclination to move more of your work to solo tasks or async productivity. Going at it alone might earn you a short-term win, but as successful people and teams know, strong collaboration and shared goals will get you much, much further – in the long term.
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
