Lately we have been thinking about and redefining our corporate values, and one of them surrounds collaboration. At Communiqué PR, we highly value collaborative relationships with our clients, co-workers and business partners.
Given we place a premium on collaboration, I decided to do some reading about what it means, why it is important, and how to best establish collaborative relationships. Let’s start with the definition.
According to several sources, collaboration is working together to achieve a common or shared goal. Nonetheless, the quest for harmony and working together to accomplish a shared goal is not always easy. People may share a goal, but may have very different ideas about how to achieve it.
Consider the University of Washington’s (UW) 150th anniversary. The PR and marketing teams at UW may have a shared goal of leveraging the anniversary to raise awareness of the institution and its impact on our community, but they may have had very different ideas on the strategies and tactics to employ to achieve this goal.
At Communiqué PR, we often have differences of opinion around how to achieve various objectives, and it is incumbent on us to come to consensus or resolve our differences so we can move forward in a constructive and harmonious manner.
This is a common challenge for many organizations as I discovered when reading a Harvard Business Review article titled, “Want Collaboration? Accept – and Actively Manage – Conflict” written by Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes.
According to the authors, true collaboration only comes when people realize and overcome conflict. To address this conflict, they offer strategies for managing disagreements at the point of conflict as well as strategies for managing conflict upon escalation. The strategies for managing disagreements include:
– “Provide people with criteria for making trade-offs.”
– “Use the escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching.”
Whereas to manage conflict upon escalation the strategies include:
– “Ensure that managers resolve escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts.”
– “Make the process for escalated conflict resolution transparent.”
I found the strategies and their detailed explanations to be very interesting, and am considering ways to make them actionable in our organization. The authors also provide insight on three common myths surrounding collaboration as well how managers at IBM coach to resolve conflict.
If you are interested in ensuring you’re working in a collaborative manner, I recommend purchasing the article. While it was published more than seven years ago, I think some of the concepts are still highly applicable today.
For more on collaboration and the importance of agencies working well together, I would also encourage you to read Rod Brooks’ blog post titled, “Tip 8 – Advice for Agencies Looking for An Edge – A Clients Perspective.”