About How
Collaboration has become a 21st century buzzword, but are we really recognising its strategic importance? Solutions to complex problems can be achieved more quickly and competently if knowledge, skills and resources can be pooled and shared across our teams (CIPD, 2017). Don’t forget… not only does team collaboration enhance day-to-day productivity, it also helps to develop strong working relationships, critical for wellbeing.
Lets build effective collaboration
Before you read any further, take a second to reflect … are your people managers encouraging strengths-based collaboration? If ‘collaborative working’ simply means firing tasks and questions across the office or squeezing in brief (and often uninspiring) team meetings every now-and-again, the likely answer is no.
Due to intense pressures and continual deadlines, our stressed and overloaded managers may feel unable to connect with their team regularly and delegate tasks more thoughtfully. This means that jobs become more difficult and less enjoyable, performance slows, and motivation falls.
Help make collaboration simple for teams and managers
25% feel their strengths and weaknesses are overlooked by their managers and 40% of these people feel disengaged at work. How can we expect to achieve and succeed with such disconnected and unhappy teams?
Our strengths-focused Performance Motivation programme can help your people managers recognise the diverse range of strengths across their team. They will learn how to collaborate more intelligently by aligning tasks with strengths, skills and experiences as much as possible, to boost motivation and wellbeing and empower teams to achieve the best results.
We’ve developed a series of six 45-minute workshops, teaching people how to apply their strengths in different workplace scenarios. They can be delivered online for up to 500 people, face-to-face for smaller groups or in Train-The-Trainer format. That’s not all… our Performance Motivation Conversation Mat is a self-facilitating tool designed to open group discussions and tackle difficult topics as a team, with immediate impact on results.
Reignite that sense of ‘team’ now
Want more? Check out our article, drop Eleanor an email at ea@baileyandfrench.com or call us on 01273 830830.
Don’t hesitate any longer… start building collaborative teams.
Happy collaborating!
P.s. We’re looking forward to speaking at a British University’s Finance Directors Group Conference on 17th April, sharing some of our innovative tools and strategies that support people’s wellbeing and resilience in the workplace…come and take a look.
About Are
In the next of our articles on applying strengths in the workplace, we look at working together:
What does collaboration mean to you?
For many of us, it comes in the form of sitting in meeting rooms talking about things that are unnecessary or irrelevant, potentially with the wrong people. Or shouting questions across an open plan office (a bad habit of mine!). But I’m pushing for a different concept of collaboration – one that draws on the best of each person and leaves everyone feeling valued and happy. That is, strengths-based collaboration.
Everyone has strengths: things they love doing and are great at; and when we recognise what these are and enable people to spend more time doing these things, we boost their wellbeing and results. Although it may seem obvious, the reality is that most people don’t take the time or effort to collaborate intelligently.
I believe that this comes from a combination of two things: being too busy to be thoughtful about the delegation of each task; and our mirror-imaging bias – the belief that others view things through the same lenses and viewpoints as us, and therefore love and despise the same tasks as us. The reality, of course, is that teams are made up of people with different personalities and strengths, who enjoy and thrive doing a range of different tasks.
So, here are three simple steps to build more intelligent and positive collaboration in your teams:
1. Discover your strengths, and the strengths of the people around you (check out how you can do this here)
2. Review work currently going on (or coming up), and agree how to collaboratively manage it to play to peoples strengths, skills and experience as much as possible
3. Empower every person to be confident in calling out opportunities where the team are/aren’t playing to strengths, creating accountability and sustainability
Playing to our strengths allows us to get into flow more easily, perform better and enjoy our work more. It is also clear that the best performing managers align talents with projects and emphasise strengths over seniority when moving and managing talent2 (read my last article for more on this). By understanding the strengths of the people around us, we can delegate work more intelligently, weighing up skills, knowledge and strengths to get the best result whilst boosting motivation and happiness.
To help individuals and organisations use their strengths most effectively, we’ve developed a series of six 45-minute workshops teaching people how to apply them in different workplace scenarios – find out more here.
Happy collaborating 😊
2 Clifton & Harter, 2003
