It is amazing what good collaboration can do for any endeavor or project, but good collaboration is not always possible. How can we work for better collaboration?
First, it is important to consider if the team wants to collaborate. There are teams that are not interested in collaboration. These tend to be teams thrown together due to circumstance rather than good planning, and sometimes with teams like this, people simply resist any kind of positive collaboration for all kinds of reasons. When this happens, you can try to promote collaboration, but if that doesn't work, you'll have to mostly go it alone or find another team to work with. To try to create team when there's not appetite for that, is a dead end street.
Some rules for good collaboration, however, include the following.
- Make time to meet to create collaboration parameters for communication. Everyone communicates a bit differently and coming to some agreement can create positive communication which in turn will lead to positive collaboration.
- Make time to divide and conquer with regard to the jobs. Not everyone has to do every job, by splitting up the tasks, you lighten the load.
- Decide on when and how you'll meet regularly to assess the work as well as decide on next steps.
- Make a few rules about how you'll communicate and what's not acceptable for your team--that will help everyone stay on the same page.
- Keep the objective of your teamwork front and center, know exactly what it is that your team is trying to do.