For everything from bad management to under performing teams nowadays, collaboration should be the solution. Good ideas should also do magic across the modern open offices. However, in reality, collaboration does not always work. There are times that it is unproductive and noisy and somebody has to make a decision. How can business leaders keep a healthy cooperation and collaboration among every team member? When is the right time to implement hierarchical leadership? How can you accomplish this while ensuring everybody feels valued?
Below are the smart strategies on how you can balance decision-making and collaboration:
Set Some Expectations and Communicate with Them Clearly
Once you have determined the amount of collaboration that’s appropriate for your business, communicate what’s going to happen clearly. Set some expectations and establish objectives and goals. For instance, once you ask for ideas on the ways to enhance the safety record of your company, you have to be clear about the next steps. Through setting expectations up front, you will be able to prevent misunderstanding and frustration about how much the team members can collaborate and participate in the process of decision-making.
Create Collaboration to Corporate Culture
Before bringing the right combination of decision-making and collaboration to your workplace, you have to analyze what types and how much collaboration are appropriate. It is also essential to recognize the limits and realities of your corporate industry and culture. Several workplaces are more collaborative naturally than others. For example, the real estate firms and ad agencies depend on full-blown teamwork to launch an effective creative campaign.
Encourage Respectful Conflict Resolution and Participation
Once you try bringing a more collaborative, inclusive style to your workplace, you will also need to build the conflict management skills of your team. For conflict-averse, it could be an uncomfortable concept, most especially if they associate conflicts with unpleasantness. It could also help persuade reluctant participants once you reframe conflict resolution as constructive suggestions, discussion, listening, and consensus-building. If only some are offering ideas and discussing the advantages and disadvantages in a meeting, invite quiet team members to voice their concerns and ideas.
Planning Can Make a Difference to Collaborative Success
Take note that planning plays an important role to make collaboration effective. It lets your group establish and follow data and guidelines to get the results. Collaboration without plans will frustrate detail as well as deadline-oriented employees, making them feel like they are wasting time or doing more than their work. So, make sure that the collaboration must be done in a respectful and friendly manner to make the business stronger.
Never Overburden the Top Performers
Collaboration is not the salve to heal every business wound. Ill-structured or poorly planned collaboration may impede productivity and be frustrating, particular to your workers. The high performers might also be dissatisfied once they feel the right decisions are not being made timely or the collaboration is a buzzword, which results in them doing all work. This is why it is essential to analyze how much collaboration is good for a company, project or department.
Posted by Randy Blakeslee – GetnSocial
