Would you like better relationships, be more productive, engage better with employees, and have better customer satisfaction? As an expert who focuses on the positive side of collaboration and the negative side of minimizing pain as a conflict resolution specialist, in this article, I share with you the benefits of collaboration, how you can use this to expand opportunities, minimize risk, build value, and maintain a culture of teamwork. Think of this both in terms of your firm and for your career development.
What are the benefits of collaboration?
Helping clients with strategic planning, I have found that having strategic partnerships that are well thought out, incorporate trust, and create new opportunities are essential for growth. This can be in the same industry or across industries. The needs are the same in manufacturing, real estate, or service industries. Consolidation and partnerships are a reality in today’s world. Either be acquired, acquire, or partner for growth and survival. Instead of reinventing the wheel, if you can partner with others already there, this saves you research, marketing, learning curve, and market development time. You need to research to consider who might be an appropriate partner, not only on the bottom line, but also a cultural fit that operates with the same level of values that you have and are known for. Otherwise, this may turn out to be a painful process. From a career perspective, whom do you need to network with or have as a mentor? What skills do you need to enhance, or partner with someone with whom you can complement and work together?
Expand opportunities with collaboration
Collaboration can expand your markets and, more importantly, significantly extend your business capabilities. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. Who can help you overcome your weaknesses? Given your strengths, might they not want to partner with you so that both of you might do better in the future? May you not improve your service quality, ability to enhance logistics, expand in client or customer services or products, and be seen as a leader in your field? This can fuel your desire to be known for excellence and to be able to exceed customer expectations. You have a current reputation in the market, but might collaboration with a key partner with similar values that can help you overcome your weaknesses make a lot of sense for you and your business? The expression when they do better, we all do better makes a lot of sense in a collaborative environment.
Minimize risk with collaboration
Going it alone regarding employee resources, product development costs, marketing, scaling up, cash flow, financial risk, and unknown risks due to a lack of understanding of expansion can be killers. Partnering with others you trust and know can work with you to minimize risk, which makes a lot of sense. This may enable you to enhance your own capabilities for success. By taking the initiative to consider partnering with others, exploring your cultures, needs, interests, and abilities, you may be able to find amenable partners in the future. Once discovered, explore strategically the upside and downside risks of collaboration. Carry this out strategically.
Explore your mission, vision, goals, purposes, and stakeholders. Consider how the external environment is changing. What are the forces and trends that are changing? What does the market look like regarding key resource controllers like clients, customers, payers, members, and regulators? What are competitive and other collaborative forces?
What is happening with your and their internal environments? How are things changing? What does that mean for your and their future? Think in terms of technology, people, and resources. Consider resources such as people, economics, information, competencies, and culture. What is your current overall strategy? Look at departments, business processes, and functions. How are they performing regarding business metrics, results, and history?
Armed with this information, consider your strategic approach and the strategy you might want to take with a potential partner. Map out how you may approach the other party and come up with a preliminary plan for what you may be able to accomplish strategically. This will give you a leg up on enticing your prospective partner to want to partner with you.
Build value with collaboration
Your clients or customers will see value added with your expanded capabilities: you and the potential to become a one-stop service for all their needs. With a collaborative effort, the ultimate client or customer will not have to reach out to various areas of expertise, because you can provide all the expertise they need. This also allows you to expand innovation and efficiency as you capitalize on each other’s expertise. This will build additional customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can partner to enhance timing and logistics. This will allow you to underpromise and overdeliver, demonstrating that you genuinely can provide what you have stated. This builds repeat customers.
Maintain a culture of teamwork with collaboration
Both parties have to be committed to a successful collaboration. Both parties have to be straightforward and operate with honesty and integrity. There has to be a commitment to open communication so when problems develop, there is no blame, but rather a determination to address the concern, learn from it, and apply lessons learned for the future. Finally, there has to be accountability and ownership responsibility for getting the job done. Commitment has to be to doing the right thing, doing what it takes, and yet having fun along the way.
This is accomplished by regularly meeting, team-building exercises, and enhanced listening to each other. Allow everyone to raise questions, encourage concern-raising, and look out for each other. When this comes together, lasting collaborative relationships can thrive.
Pause and reflect on goals, values, and accomplishments. Recognize and reward accomplishments. Regularly meet and share both the good and the bad. Share what is and is not working. How can we overcome obstacles together?
Make every effort to listen to each other. Be an active listener. Develop positive collaborative relationships and learn from one another. In the end, you will be able to drive business through collaboration.
If you want to learn more about my publications on collaboration, conflict resolution, or enhancing your servant manager skills, which focus on leading by serving and understanding the needs of your team members, feel free to reach out.