How do you rate your capacity for real collaboration?

Cooperation is often considered collaboration . . . But efforts applied to the former can seriously inhibit the latter . . . All approaches to real collaboration benefit from the parties’ competence at navigating conversational complexity and differences . . . Typically, people over-estimate their ability for this, trusting that the necessary skills will somehow become available if and when required, even though they have insufficiently practised and mastered them . . . Most seem unaware of their own part in impeding the process . . . Remedying this state of affairs has become critically important and urgent . . . How well prepared are you for real collaboration? How do you know? 

Why collaboration matters

“How to bring about more effective collaboration about the most pressing problems and most dangerous challenges of the 21st century is a question of the utmost importance.” [1]

Supporting organisations’ capacity for improved functioning by enhancing interpersonal practices for collaboration has been my role in a long career as a professional leadership coach. The work is driven by clients’ recognition of the important part those skills play in creating teamwork and constructive responses to increasing, turbulence, volatility, disruption, complexity, divisiveness, stress and uncertainty. 

Scrutiny of occasions where collaboration is intended – in business, civic, science, health, education and community organisations – commonly reveal dialoguing and relationship management behaviours that disrupt it.  

Whenever those practices are enhanced, efficiencies and other helpful developments occur with greater ease. Even where only one or a minority of the parties have the necessary competence, difficulties are relieved and better progress is made.

Collaboration misunderstood

The words collaborate and collaboration are currently in common use. While this may indicate desirable intentions for accord and teamwork, mostly their use relates instead to occasions involving cooperation.

Cooperation arises when people support achievement of purposes other people want or require, even when overpowered or manipulated into doing so, or ‘going along to get along’ in hope of avoiding or disguising discord and difference.

Dictionary definitions are unhelpful. Most fail to distinguish collaboration from cooperation, offering one as a synonym for the other except where they refer to ‘traitorous cooperation, collusion or connivance with an enemy’.

Real collaboration

Real collaboration involves people’s fair and even-handed involvement in collectively determining, considering, planning for and acting on matters in which the parties have an interest and believe are worth striving for. 

Fair and even-handed involvement arises from mindsets and dialogue practices designed to ease discovery, exploration and understanding of each party’s ideals, ideas and perspectives, find common ground among them and bring together thinking across whatever disagreements and divergences emerge.

Responding beneficially  to disagreements and divergences involves an uncommon ability to navigate conflicts (of intentions, ideals, attitudes, perspectives, needs and desires, for example); a higher order of interpersonal skill and attitude self-management competence than is usually developed or deemed necessary for less challenging conversations.

The central challenge for collaboration

Many aspects of interpersonal disagreements and divergences activate alarm and unhelpful reactions in people who have yet to master [2] self-management habits which deal with or mitigate them. Very many people haven’t, though they rate themselves ‘good communicators’ able to draw on competencies they ‘hold in reserve’ for those occasions if required.   

That’s the origin of the central challenge: everyday mindsets and behaviours become hard to break habits. Belief that practices more sophisticated than those in everyday use can be readily accessed for seriously challenging circumstances is a commonly-held delusion. Skill means ability habituated through practise.

Higher-order, more constructive behaviour is difficult to access if we habituate only or mainly the ordinary practices they are intended to replace.

A new guide and workbook

Collaborative Dialogue investigates the self-management practices at the heart of collaboration, comprehensively addresses the causes of and remedies for common impediments. It will help you examine and assess your own behaviours and develop greater competency based on and what you know or discover about your development needs.

Intended as a practical guide to improvement* rather than a prescription for perfection, it provides a useful companion to self-development over a 12-18 months or longer period. The book:

* “Improve” doesn’t mean “fix.” It means making things a little better. Improvement is incremental. Once you make things 5 percent better, it’s easier to make them 10 percent better. Then it’s easier to make things 20 percent better, and so on. [3]

Ethical basis

The book’s guidelines are not about choosing between being polite or uncivil, imposing our will on others or yielding to theirs. Their ethical basis is a firm belief in the importance of relating to others with respect for our mutual status as equal human beings, whatever differences exist and however we are treated in return. They emphasis personal reflection and agency, clarity, kindness, candour and harmony; not the absence of conflict and other interpersonal challenges but the composure and presence of mind that can carry us through them.

[1] Kal Raustiala.

[2] Masters of any discipline (those who possess comprehensive skill) hold clear ideals and high standards they consistently strive to follow. They sometimes fall short in their application but discover their lapses and recover the conventions of mastery sooner than do novices.

[3] Steven Stosny.