How we help teams collaborate more effectively

Today on the podcast, we’re talking about how we help teams collaborate more effectively. From defining collaboration to understanding your personal and collective experiences with collaboration, we hope to help any team better understand how to work together.

This episode is the first episode in a four-part series where Brian and Linda Schubring are discussing our approach and philosophy for helping teams thrive through our Team Engagement Series. During this Team Engagement Podcast Series, we talk about the topics of Collaboration, Communication, Conflict, and Change. These four episodes can stand on their own but it will be helpful for you to listen to all of them to get a more complete understanding to help your team thrive.

Before we dive into the topic of Collaboration, it will be helpful to explain the Team Engagement Series process.

What is a Team Engagement Series?

At Leadership Vision, a team engagement series consists of four, 90-minute sessions on a given topic. In addition to the Four C’s (which you’ll be learning about here over the next few weeks), we also have sessions on Knowledge, Purpose, and Trust, Emotional Health and Well-being, Courageous Leadership and Strengths-Based Team Development.

The Four C’s series was created when we found that teams who could Collaborate, Communicate, handle Conflict, and work through Change well together, seemed to be the most successful.

When we work with teams around these topics, sometimes they can be in a crisis situation, but most often we work on these competencies to better prepare a team to handle them when they inevitably do come up.

We also approach these sessions first from the perspective of the individual, then the team, and finally the overall culture. They weave together to create a cohesive approach to helping teams thrive in ever-changing environments.

How we help Teams Collaborate

The first step in the Collaboration process is to help teams define what Collaboration is. Each person, and then the team, have to define this for themselves. Collaboration is incredibly contextualized which is why we don’t try to impose a specific definition on any given team context.

Next, we ask each individual to reflect on previous experiences and memories of when they were in a collaborative environment. What went well? What didn’t go well? What role did they play? Is that a role they play often? How do Strengths influence their role as a collaborator? This always leads to some surprising conversations as team members are asked to feedback on what they hear.

Finally, we ask each participant to embrace the fact that they are a shaper of culture when it comes to Collaboration. All of us shape culture positively and negatively. We end these sessions by asking participants to answer the same question: how am I a shaper of culture? It allows people to take responsibility for the culture, and not just sit back and expect someone else to do it.