In a long list of the benefits of collaboration, learning is one of the all-time stand outs. Every business manager knows that organisations that intend keeping their light on year after year must be ‘learning organisations’. And one of the massive benefits of collaboration in business is learning from interaction with others. In the day-to-day pressure of business performance guided by monthly sales figures, there is every chance that even the best strategic minds in your business will simply treat the idea of becoming a learning organisation as something that would be nice if there was time, money or whatever else. In reality that is a poor excuse. In fact be one of the most cost effective ways of fostering a learning organisation may be through collaboration.

Sincere thanks to those who have suggested articles for this edition of Roadmender Recommends.

Making Collaboration as Pervasive as Dial Tone

The problem with most workplace collaboration technologies has been that to actually boost productivity, they have to be widely used, and they have to be widely trusted. If either of those is not true, employees fall back on phone and email. As an executive at RingCentral, I have nothing against phone calls. Knowing when to pick up the phone, rather than using some other form of digital communication, is an essential business skill. As a technology, making and taking phone calls reliably may not be novel, but it’s essential – and as a cloud phone service, we can add sexier applications on top of that base. Despite being often…READ ON

Improve Collaboration with a Safe and Trusting Culture

As a leader, do you create a safe and trusting environment where your people can express concerns and share information freely? That might be a difficult question for some of you to answer. In our new book, Collaboration Begins With You: Be a Silo Buster, my co-authors Jane Ripley and Eunice Parisi-Carew and I describe how to build trust and take responsibility for creating a culture of collaboration. In the previous post I introduced the UNITE acronym to describe the five elements that every person must adopt to make collaboration a part of the corporate culture. We encourage everyone to Utilize differences; Nurture safety and trust; Involve others in crafting a clear purpose, values, and goals; Talk openly; and Empower themselves and…READ ON

Maximizing Opportunities & Fostering Collaboration

At a recent mass, I was listening to the homily that talked about Jesus taking his twelve disciples to a place to spend time with them. When Jesus asked them who had any questions, no one asked because they didn’t want to be looked at as inadequate, as each one of them thought that he should be number one in Jesus’s eye. As I reflected on this statement, it dawned on me that it is akin to management offsite meetings, where the head of the organization will take their senior leaders to strategize and plan the upcoming year. This is also an opportunity for their constituents to spend more time with the leader and get to know the leader…READ ON

5 Steps to Creating a Truly Collaborative Work Environment

I recently had an opportunity to sit in on a webinar conducted by Ken Blanchard, Eunice Parisi-Carew, and Jane Ripley, coauthors of the new book Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster. As they talked about the book, the three authors shared five key ingredients for creating a collaborative culture on a team, department, or organization-wide level. Using the acronym UNITE, the authors explained that the creation of a collaborative work environment rests on five foundational principles. Utilize differences. Organizations need to appreciate and be open to people and ideas that may seem at first to be outside of the mainstream. The best companies seek out creative thinking from all corners…READ ON

3 Reasons for IT to Embrace Modern Collaboration

IT is in a powerful position to provide mission-critical technologies across the enterprise. When it comes to communication and collaboration, organizations are often dealing with a myriad of complex options in addition to maintaining or deprecating legacy systems. In order to empower modern business collaboration, IT has to move beyond maintaining clunky legacy collaboration tools and instead embracing true, mobile-enabled, cloud-powered collaboration that meets the needs of every member of your modern organization…READ ON

Bringing people together to build urban resilience—a new collaborative project between the City of Skopje and UNDP

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the City of Skopje are working together with stakeholders, residents and experts on the development of Skopje’s first ever collaborative strategy to tackle climate change. Over the next few weeks, the ‘Resilient Skopje’ project will gather people’s views and expert opinions to draw up a series of measures and recommendations to make the capital more resilient to the negative impacts of climate change. The risks of natural disasters in towns and cities are increasing throughout the world with the onset of climate change and the unprecedented growth of the global urban population…READ ON