“Collaboration is key for a company… to tell a believable story”
– Lou Ann Hutchison, Executive
No matter the size of your business, or which sector it operates in, collaborative teamwork is an essential key to productivity and innovation. With the increasing diversity of today’s workforce, this element becomes more difficult to achieve with each passing year.
A team that collaborates effectively benefits from countless advantages, including greater productivity, more effective problem solving, and enhanced brand engagement. Creating a culture that is inclusive and diverse is essential is achieving the optimized levels of collaboration. Studies have shown that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones by 35% if they can overcome the challenges diversity can bring to leaders. These challenges include:
1. Communication: Leaders can set bad precedents by using mass emails to communicate with their employees. Employees tend to copy the behaviors exhibited by their leadership, and personal communications are vastly superior to mass emails in almost every case.
2. Vision and Ideas: Creative minds working together will often come up with competing ideas, helping them focus on your company’s vision will lead to more effective collaboration.
3. The obvious one: Hostilities. High-pressure situations brought on by vital projects can lead to tense working environments. Workplace policies that discourage negative and abusive behaviors while encouraging respect for diversity can help offset these conditions.
Bonus Video Resource
Traciana Graves, CEO of The Visionary Leader Network, talks to leaders and professional authorities about the meaning of collaboration and teamwork. She highlights the fact that collaboration and cooperation are deliberate mindsets and that culture must be honed and intentionally practiced in the workplace. In the video above she lists the three most effective ways to own the space of professional and corporate collaboration.
