Articles

Collaboration Skills for Everyday Work

Jana M. Kemp

Brainstorming, collaboration, problem-solving, dialogue, and even command-and-control are all processes for interacting with people. Here’s a great book for building your collaboration skills: Radical Collaboration by James W. Tamm and Ronald J. Luyet. (Collins, 2004).

Authors Tamm and Luyet guide readers through self-discovery and five essential skills for collaboration, including truthfulness, self-awareness and awareness of others, and problem-solving. Their premise is that collaborative capital is the collective ability of employees to build effective collaborative relationships and that this capital is as important as an organization’s intellectual capital and its financial capital.

Building collaboration with people begins with a focus on improving our own skills for handling conflict. To collaborate effectively we must build our own awareness and our own skills first and then work with others to get things done. Radical Collaboration delivers more than 50 ways to improve your “great communicator” self.

The book is well organized so you can read straight through or jump to areas that are most useful to you as you build your collaboration skills. Chapters two and three help you uncover your own defenses and how that can inhibit your ability to collaborate.

The title of Chapter 9, Breaking Free of the Past One Thought at a Time, gives a glimpse of the self-development work that must occur before we can reasonably expect to collaborate with others. Strategies for collaborative success are the focus of Chapter 10.

The ten strategies for building collaboration wrap up with “use interest-based problem solving to negotiate disputes.” This discussion begins with a reminder that “conflict is a regular and natural part of any ongoing relationship.” The key of course is mastering communication tools that allow for the conflict to be handled in a productive, creative and collaborative way so that an ongoing relationship for accomplishment can occur.

Chapter 16 is subtitled Inventing Creative Solutions and is packed with great and useable ideas and approaches for collaborating, including 10 Guidelines for Inventing Creative Solutions. The closing Chapter 18 has 15 tips that are similar to the “action item” approach used to close each of these columns. So, dive in and improve your ability to collaborate. In the words of the authors, you’ll be building your own capital and that of your organization.

Action Items: Commit to one act of collaboration this week. Read Radical Collaboration by James W. Tamm and Ronald J. Luyet.

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Reprint Permission: The author is willing to grant reprint permissions. Please contact Jana Kemp: jana@janakemp.com or call 208-367-1701.