Tag: collaboration

What makes collaborating teams tick?

On the surface everyone is a collaborator, and every team is a collaborating team. That is the ‘sell’ in contemporary workplaces. Businesses invest in collaboration as a part of their business strategy for a variety of reasons; improving organisational culture, trust, productivity, competitiveness or even, more imaginatively, to […]

De-risking collaboration

While collaboration has often been praised and promoted as a cure all, endorsing it in this way borders on irresponsible.  In business there are no easy, fail-safe ways of finding good business solutions to complex problems, designing winning strategies or delivering results that meet everyone’s expectations.  The appeal […]

Reclaiming collaboration

It’s time to wrest the subtle art of collaboration from the jaws of everyday spin. The famous co-founder of once widely popular start-up WeWork claimed that the majority (70%) of those who paid to use the WeWork shared space collaborated.  This always seemed like a possibility given that […]

Collaboration: newspeak, a euphemism or a real deal

We’re nearly at the 2-year mark since COVID 19 disrupted our universe.  Businesses have learnt many lessons, and many have embraced new strategies such as collaboration, even with competitors.  In fact, competitors tend to embrace collaboration with each other more often than is recognised.  This is not surprising […]

How to Avoid a Collaboration Recession!

People in the contemporary workplace (read: high performing, highly motivated, competitive and resilient) expect to be given three things: meaningful work, appropriate reward and ample opportunities to collaborate. That last bit often gets neglected by executive decision makers, who in many instances ascended to those positions via old […]

Roadmender Recommends

Every now and then collaboration can be frustrating.  Invariably it gets people wondering if it is worth the effort and in particular if collaboration is really possible given that humans are prone to both competition and collaboration.  How to reconcile the drivers?  In my first book (The Collaboration […]

Roadmender Recommends

2018 saw collaboration as a business strategy march towards mainstream practice. The proliferation of new research and material on the subject of collaboration is a clear indication that the value of good collaboration is a major ingredient of a sustainable and resilient business. This latest selection of recommended […]

Convincing your boss to collaborate

A couple of  years ago researchers at Berkley published a paper titled “Failure at the Top: How Power Undermines Collaborative Performance” which concluded that when asked to collaborate “groups of high power individuals performed worse because they fought over their relative status in the group, were less focused […]

Watch your language

I have been fortunate to have had opportunities to live in different parts of the world and to learn different languages. What I have learned in that organic process of adapting to new environments and cultures is that language skills are far more than an ability to communicate […]

ROADMENDER Recommends

Collaboration is rich ground for keen researchers. It is important that more research into collaboration is conducted as the discipline continues to mature. At the same time, as with all research, one has to be aware that findings are not automatically taken as truth. It is important to […]

Collaborator … know yourself!

This is not a paid promotion. It is not even a recommendation. Rather; it is positive feedback which is, of course, subjective. I am talking about the Kennedy app. ‘A minimalist journal that helps you contextualise your memories’, is how the app was described when it was launched […]

Rome wasn’t built in a day

The hype surrounding the start-up culture that has gripped western economies over the past decade or so has become a de facto yardstick for any kind of achievement. Essentially, one struggles to find enough people to understand that not all businesses should be built upon the start-up model; […]

ROADMENDER Recommends

Collaboration is a good thing. But it can be better when we understand its more challenging aspects. And as with all forms of business practice, it is of critical importance that collaboration be examined from a variety of angles. Recognising that collaboration is not a magic wand is […]