As a trusted leader, it's your responsibility to foster an environment where high-quality relationships thrive. Not only does your leadership foster a more pleasant workplace, it also contributes to increased productivity and job satisfaction. But often your job involves dealing with colleagues you don’t know well or may occasionally disagree with. Some of your colleagues may be in person and others may be virtual or hybrid. Here are 15 tips for educating and inspiring all of your colleagues to work better with one another, even when they have differences of opinion or limited interactions.
In order to build collaboration skills and teams you need the right tools in the right hands in order build collaboration. When people work collaboratively with one another being trained, with the right tools, they can apply their skill set with the rest of the team and are affirmed for their contribution to the team effort, you are far more likely to have a successful collaboration. Having researched this topic I am sharing with you key elements from a commentary by Workest entitled Building Collaboration Skills for Individuals and Teams. What follows is a summary of key points from their article with personal anecdotal commentary from experiences as a manager with over 30 years’ experience and with over 1,2000 employees. I am offering these insights that will hopefully help you.
As a person specializing in mediation and conflict resolution and as a speaker doing continual research in the area of collaboration, I want to share some insights with you about how to ask better questions. Why? Listening actively is the key to understanding related to both conflict resolution and collaboration. Taking this up a notch, asking even better questions will help you analyze the situation better, gain further insight, and produce better results.
As a mediation and negotiation specialist that focuses on conflict resolution and collaboration it is important for me to be authentic and care for myself given often stressful situations. Recently I heard a speaker offer a quote from Parker Palmer. I appreciated the quote, so I researched additional quotes from Parker Palmer. This got me to thinking. I wanted to share two of his quotes with you and provide you with some thoughts you may find helpful for yourself, and you may want to share these with others to promote your and their mental and physical health.
The focus of this commentary is on collaboration and how to apply best practices to assist in elevating your team. A framework is presented to help you see what actions you should consider as you promote best practices. Ideally you can apply these tips immediately. However, sometimes collaboration stalls and conflicts arise. When that happens, communication is the key. Tips on how to address these types of concerns are provided that can be applied in a high percentage of these types of situations.
Have you been in an argument, dispute, and/or conflict and wanted to know what you could do differently? The collaboration effect based on neuroscience suggests that you need be authentic and find common values to have a connecting relationship, listen actively, and then educate judiciously the way the other party wants to be educated to enhance your potential for success. Blogs on connecting relationships and listening actively have been offered the last two weeks. This week the emphasis is on an update to educating judiciously.
As a continual learner and speaker on the topics of collaboration, mediation and conflict resolution, and mediation and negotiation I am offering you a series of articles and blogs that can help you with the topic of collaboration. Below I have provided links to articles and blogs to what I think are some of the best commentaries to help you. These 37 sources have been categorized into 10 headings.
Working in the areas of mediation and conflict resolution, mediation and negotiation, and related areas I see the advantages of focusing on health, balance, and routines for success. This article provides you with several links to other sources to help with ideas related to health and balance in your work and life. Often parties involved with the issues identified above are stressed and may have a difficult time seeing closure. As a mediator I do not assume from my experiences to know their experiences. Knowing this I realize that we all have varying degrees of health and balance in our lives. Some of the elements below have helped me personally. I simply wanted to share these with you to see if they may help you. Let’s begin with the area of health.
Having been called upon to be a leadership keynote speaker I am always on the lookout for material to enhance my knowledge and share with others. Focusing on collaboration and both preventing negative conflict and promoting positive conflict management and conflict resolution using mediation and negotiation techniques I appreciated this article from Forbes. The article offers 15 ways to improve business partnership collaboration. In general, I find that most people including me can only remember about three things so the commentary that follows focuses on three of the areas, in particular with additional insights you may find helpful based on additional research.
Have you thought about the terms of conflict resolution and conflict management. Google shares with us research on key terms. Conflict resolution is at least three times as popular as conflict management. Perhaps that is because the initiative is on how to resolve a conflict rather than looking at a way to manage conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Collaborative conflict working together and exchanging ideas professionally focusing on the goal is ideal. The question is how to manage conflict to stay positive and focused to avoid it becoming negative, frustrating, and counterproductive. This is where conflict management comes in. Let’s look at both conflict resolution and conflict management.
Studies demonstrate that when scientific collaborators professionally challenge each other by asking questions and collaborate to expand on learning together to solve problems this can be very fruitful and positive. So, how do they do this and what can you learn from them? That is the focus of the commentary that follows
When you think about negotiations, you may think about a lot of things, but have you thought about racism and what it costs? I am not talking simply about bias. I have blogged on Women and Salary Negotiations, Business Valuers, the IRS, and Conflict Resolution – Part 1 and Part 2, Why Emotions Matter in Negotiations, and Conflict and Dispute Resolution in Cross Cultural Negotiations. These and related posts all tie into the cognitive, conscious, and unconscious bias we all have. Have you ever thought how much racial bias is costing our society? It all has to do with the big lie.
