Want to Increase Productivity? Collaborate!

What a great time to be writing about collaboration, I thought as I watched the Winter Olympics!  I saw so many examples of successful collaborations. While there are lots of individual events in the Olympics, it appears the organizers are attempting to build in more and more team events—like the team ice dancing event and team skiing events.

One of the best examples of collaboration has to be team sports like hockey.  Even though the women’s gold medal hockey match was on TV in the middle of the night, I was glued to the action and riveted to the outcome when the U.S. women won gold.  Watching their unselfish play, it was clear they knew that to win, they each had to play their role and do it flawlessly.

Collaboration is essential to business success in our highly competitive business environment, and yes, maybe even to our survival as we are in a global economy. Most of us have learned that silos are deadly, and hoarding knowledge kills collaboration and stifles innovation.

Collaboration at work means having a clear understanding of the goal to be achieved and what role each person plays to achieve the goal. The end result of collaboration and teamwork is often the same—when people collaborate, they’re working together toward a stated goal!

However, one of the things that either makes collaboration effective is when work groups respect what each person brings to the team, and people put their own ambitions and need for personal satisfaction aside order to achieve the team goal.  This isn’t easy for many people in our business world today, but it can make your organization much more productive.

Here are some actions leaders and managers can take to encourage collaboration:

• Set clear objectives for success
• Identify potential obstacles to success and remove as many as possible
• Get to know your team and have them get to know each other
• Take responsibility for mistakes
• Recognize and respect everyone’s contributions
• Encourage open discussion of goals and objectives
• Brainstorm solutions and encourage creativity
• Build consensus on group projects
• Listen to input from everyone
• Compromise when necessary to move forward
• Celebrate successes and learn from mistakes

Collaboration can have a positive impact on productivity and innovation, so encourage it whenever possible. For more information on how to maximize collaboration at work, watch for our latest book, The Manager’s Answer Book, which is available now on Amazon for pre-order and will be released in June, 2018.

Up Your Game in 2018

A new year is here and with it brings all the trials that come with people management. We’d like to offer not a resolution, but a challenge to managers – up your game and let us help.

We’re starting the year off by finishing our manuscript for The Manager’s Answer Book – scheduled to be published this spring. This has given us the opportunity over the past months to consider, discuss and write about those traits and skills that make a manager great – curiosity, courage, and collaboration – just to name a few. 

Here’s a preview of what we have to say about those traits:

• Curiosity.  Curiosity is one of the most important tools managers should be using in their management journey. Curious people are always learning because they're always asking questions, reading up on topics outside their field of expertise and generally exploring. Be curious about what’s going on in your organization. Find out what other departments or teams are doing. Ask about the challenges your external and internal customers face.  It will help you gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the organization and industry. 

• Courage. Courageous managers speak out, take opposing points of view, and confront unpleasant situations and bad decisions. In addition, they suggest and advocate for ideas and positions that may be unpopular.  They are not afraid to put the interests of an employee, their team, or even the larger organization above their own self interests.  They move beyond the “what’s in it for me” mentality, sometimes to their own detriment, because they have the vision to see greater, long-term outcomes. 

• Collaboration.  Build collaborative relationships with your peers. No one person or department stands alone.  Work is interdependent. Seek out your peers and explore common business and personal interests. Determine how you can support the work of each other's department or operation. Agree on those things that your can do to support each other and develop a follow-up plan. Be sure that plan is ongoing and commit to maintain it. 

Throughout the year we’ll be looking at these and other attributes that define a good manager. We’ll also be sharing stories from our own experiences and asking you to share your stories about managers who demonstrated the particular traits that we’ll be writing about. We want to make sure that 2018 is about Making People Matter.

From Conflict to Collaboration

Conflict is about differences while collaboration is about working together. Conflict is about opposites and collaboration is about being on the same side. Conflict is about two or more directions. Collaboration is about oneness and unity. Conflict easily assumes something is better and stronger and the other is worse or weaker. In conflict, there tends to be a right and a wrong or good and bad. In collaboration, two rights create something that is better together and they are two strengths that both become stronger. Collaboration is working together using all available information, knowledge, skills and resources to create the intended result.

In any situation where there is a conflict, you have a choice between remaining in a mode of conflict or creating an approach of collaboration. Let me state this strongly, you and I always have that choice. So why do we choose conflict and battling? (Often, because of our devastating human characteristic of the “need to be right.”)

The Big Book of HR, in chapter twenty-eight, has many great insights regarding moving from conflict to collaboration. Here is one small quote that I want to focus on: “Conflict is often growth that is trying to happen.” It would be very wise of us to memorize that statement. (Maybe even write it on our foreheads.) So, when we find ourselves about to enter the arena of conflict we can consider these two things: First, we can remember and recognize that in the midst of conflict, we have an opportunity for growth. Second, we can choose to move into the garden of growth and learning of collaboration versus the bloody battleground of conflict.

I’m also using five options of dealing with conflict from the book yet, adding my own twist about each of the options. Here they are:

• Compete: We can do battle and have a declared winner and loser.
• Accommodate: One person gives in to avoid the conflict and both sides lose out on growth.
• Avoid: Both sides avoid the conflict and little or nothing gets done.
• Collaborate: Everyone wins and everyone benefits from the best possible results.
• Compromise: The result of compromise is cooperation which is good, yet both sides have sacrificed something of value and the result is usually something less than the best possible outcome.

What conflicts have you been a part of recently? What are the conflicts that you are avoiding right now? I could give you a list of my own regarding both questions. The critical question right now is, knowing what you now know about the choice between conflict and collaboration, why would you not choose collaboration? Are there benefits for you in doing battle? Did you not know you had a choice? 

With collaboration there are benefits of learning, growth and enjoyment. There is also accomplishment, pride and many more surprising outcomes. Conflicts typically become problems which take a lot of time, effort and resources. Collaboration decreases or even eliminates problems.

Bernie Linnartz

This article first appeared on May 12, 2016, in the Taos News.

Conflict and Collaboration

Every time we enter into conflict, there is an opportunity for us to learn and grow. It takes awareness, internal motivation and a conscious decision to move from the mindset and “stuck-ness” of conflict to whole-heartedly grasping a focus on learning and growth. By doing this, you are creating a transformation of mental and physical “life-force” from conflict to growth. This is “magic” of a divine kind. I encourage you to ponder on this.

Growth includes change, learning, expansion, development, insight, awareness, discovery and a growth like the budding leaf on a tree telling us that Spring is about to arrive. Now let’s attach these words to conflict and identify aspects of growth.

• Conflict can inspire change of mind, heart, position, perception, understanding and what we know or believe.
• Conflict can result in learning something new about ourselves or someone else.
• Conflict increases our blood pressure and stress level yet also expands our knowledge about our ownership and passion of what is important to us.
• Conflict can help us identify and learn about our own values.
• Conflict can help us develop discrimination between what is healthy or unhealthy for our body, mind and spirit.
• Conflict can give us insights about our emotions and what triggers others’ emotions. We can gain insights about what hinders or helps us grow.
• Conflict can make us aware of differences we have with each other, as friends, enemies, family or a spouse.
• Conflict can help us discover different things about who we are and how we live and work.
• Conflict can help us use vulnerability to realize and manifest potential new buds and blooms of our humanity.

Here are some ways to move from conflict to collaboration:

• Choose to grow and learn from each other versus doing battle.
• See differences as good, necessary and connections of oneness.
• Focus on the blending and merging of uniqueness.
• Pay attention to strengths, skills and wisdom that you have in common with others.
• Consider the harmonics of a barbershop quartet and visualize harmony that you and others can produce together.
• Check out the many new available resources of all kinds that result in working together.
• Combine information, knowledge and visions of what can be.
• Share questions and desires.
• Explore what you know and don’t know.
• Take two great teams and create an even better team of unbelievable synergy.
• Look for connections where we usually see differences.
• Create new relationships out of old estrangement and indifference.

Moving from conflict to collaboration enables and creates a new life and world for everyone. The journey from conflict to collaboration is about a path purpose here on earth. EnJoy collaboration!

Remember: Check out “The Big Book of HR” by Barbara Mitchell and Cornelia Gamlem, it has great additional information about the topics of this entire series.

Thanks to Bernie Linnartz of Empowerment Experts This article was originally published in Taos News on May 19, 2016.

Stay in Your Lane?

I am frequently on a road where I see a sign that says, “Stay in Lane”.  The area is under construction so there’s lots of equipment entering the road so I kind of understand why they have that sign but seeing it reminded me of an executive I worked with some years ago.

We’d be in a staff meeting and ideas were being exchanged and suddenly someone would offer up suggestion outside their sphere of influence.  For example, the discussion would be on sales and if I, the HR executive, would chime in with a thought, he would say, “Stay in your lane.” This happened all the time until we all stopped participating in these discussions.  I would only speak if the issue pertained to me.

Did this work?  Not at all!  Business slowed down and slowly but surely, each of the executive team found other jobs. Last I heard they were acquired by a larger firm and no one I worked with there survived—especially the leader who wanted us to stay in our lane!

What savvy executives try to do is to not put their people or their functions in lanes but encourage staffers to learn and support the business as a whole and to collaborate to find the best possible solutions.  This is especially true for those of us in human resources—the more we know and understand the entire business, the greater our impact is on the organization.

In our book, The Big Book of HR, I share the story of the” late Pam Farr, the brilliant and strategic HR executive at Marriott International who used to tell the story that she would time herself in senior leadership meetings…and wait at least 20 minutes before bringing up a HR related issue. All the while, she would be actively engaged in the marketing or finance discussions.  This positioned her as a valued partner to other executives who saw her first as a business colleague and then as the HR leader she was.”

What if she’d “stayed in her lane?”  Would she have been as successful as she was but more importantly, would the company have been as successful as it is without her input?

My advice to you is to cross lanes when you can. Learn as much as you can about the business you’re in and speak up. Add your voice to any discussion and see where it takes you!