Collaboration is about Relationships and Goals

Truth be told, I’m not that smart.  Just the other day, my 11 year old son asked me what a trapezoid was and I just growled with a fatherly “go to your room and never say bad words again” while I looked for a new bar of soap only to discover the world has turned into a liquid soap society…at least in my house.

So, to better understand anything, I always try to break it down to its fundamental pieces, understand them and then when I put it all back together the big picture becomes a lot clearer.   So I will do the same with collaboration. 

Collaboration fundamentally is where 2 or more people work together.  Let’s just stop there and dissect what we know.
 
First, collaboration has to consist of 2 or more people who require an understanding of relationships and second, collaboration involves work that generally results in an outcome or goal.  Ok, now we can say that collaboration is the fusion of relationships and goals.
 
If we understand Relationships and Goals and learn why we fail at them (like a good aviator who studies accidents so they don’t repeat them) we can improve collaboration throughout our businesses and the projects that we participate in.

We’ll start with Relationships.  What are the primary causes of breakdowns in relationships?  Well let’s look over there in our personal lives…the relationship we have with our family, friends and the ultimate, our spouses.  As you might expect, there are many reasons for bad relationships to manifest so I have chosen the top four.  I call it having a bad case of the CCD’S; Contempt, Criticism, Defensiveness and Stonewalling.

As for Goals, I have chosen 4 apocalyptic horsemen that I call FADS; Fear, Apathy, Disorganization and Skepticism.

We can generalize and probably come to a quick consensus that…ok…yes, these 8 Relationship and Goal busters only scratch the service.  That’s ok.  Getting by these 8 will certainly get us a whole lot closer to doing the right thing.  So in my next post I will focus on the CCD’S and help determine the level of infection so we know how big’a needle we’ll need to fix it.