How to Achieve Productive Collaboration

During my corporate career I managed a variety of teams both unionized and non-unionized, ranging in size from four people to upwards of thirty. What I found was that regardless of the industry, working environment or age differentiation within the team, the greater my ability to support the team in achieving productive collaboration, the more valuable the outcomes from the team.

Examples of the value that was achieved through productive collaboration included :

• Faster response times to customer inquiries
• More robust decisions that could be acted upon quickly
• Higher levels of morale amongst the team

So what is Productive Collaboration?

I define the point at which a team reaches what Bruce Tuckman referred to “Performing” in his theory of the Stages of Group Development. Ultimately Productive Collaboration is the point at which a team works together to find solutions to collective challenges.

Although Bruce’s model helps us identify the various stages that a team will transition through as they work towards Productive Collaboration, the goal then for any leader is to assist their team in transitioning through these stages as quickly as possible to achieve the highest levels of productivity.

In this brief video I outline several methods to increase the performance of your team helping make the transition to “performing” as quickly as possible.

Question: Is your team performing to your expectations? If not, consider how you can incorporate the ideas contained within the video above to build a stronger and more productive team.

© Shawn Casemore 2015. All rights reserved.