Collaboration is a powerful business tool that can create the spark to help transform organisations.
Today most commentators place coordination, cooperation and collaboration under the single banner of collaboration. But the important skill is knowing when to collaborate, cooperate or coordinate.
Some simple definitions may assist here:
Coordination
Everyone is working separately to achieve the overall goal of completing a specified task or project. Only a modicum of trust is required (that’s trust in the system) to get the job done.
Cooperation
Cooperation is, for example, when you meet with your team to work out a project review process?
Here we are cooperating with our colleagues to deliver a task that we all know needs to be done. When we cooperate there is often a medium level of trust involved (trust in each other’s competencies and character) – the value of the activity tends not to accrue directly to the participants cooperating and, in most cases, someone else is driving you to do it.
So what is Collaboration then?
It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self-interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own.
Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to reconceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.
The important factor is mutual self-interest – indeed self-respect. When people create things they really want to create, and it is good for the company and its clients, it energises and engages people like nothing else.
It is also important to consider therefore the value of collaboration between synergistic firms to the overwhelming benefit of the client – this is vital, for example, in the context of working with Family firms – where the various aspects of the Family Business dynamic (the family, business and ownership dimensions) require a client centric, multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach.
