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Key Takeaways
- Effective collaboration creates significant collective impact and helps teams and organizations achieve ambitious goals.
- When managers proactively seek and encourage collaboration within their teams, new or innoative ideas can emerge, and team members can feel energized, empowered and engaged.
- Breaking down silos and navigating hybrid teams enhances smart collaboration and ensures inclusivity.
Test Your Collaboration Skills
When people work well together, their efforts combine to create collective impact. High-performing organizations benefit from teams that collaborate well together to achieve ambitious goals.
We’ve used research from the Mindtools Impact and Insights Team to create a 12-question assessment tool, to help you assess how well you collaborate and encourage collaboration in your team.
Your Self-Assessment
Coming up are 12 questions that ask you about your collaboration skills. To answer them, consider your experiences over the past three months.
Be as honest with yourself as you can. There are no right or wrong responses, and you’ll have a chance to review and change your answers before you submit them.
Look at the statements below and choose how much you agree with each by selecting the most appropriate answer.
When you have completed the diagnostic, press “Calculate My Total.”
Your Result
Take a few moments to reflect on your result. Does it surprise you or confirm what you already know? Now give yourself a few minutes to think about what you’d like to get out of this experience.
If your result shows you could communicate more skillfully, or better support others to play a full role in collaborative tasks, you can learn techniques to remedy that.
If you scored well, this resource will help you to make further improvements.
Let's Act
Having reflected on your score, pick one of the following areas to take action on in the next week or two:
- Think back to one or two situations where you have collaborated with others in the past. What went well? What could you have done better? And what benefits, and opportunities did collaboration bring? (See questions 1, 2, and 3.)
- Working effectively with others requires intention, as well as capability. Identify one or two actions to proactively seek collaboration with your team. (See questions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.)
- Collaboration is a two-way street. Identify and put in place some specific steps to encourage and support others to collaborate with you. (See questions 9, 10, 11, and 12.)
Take Your Learning Further
Understand the impact of team roles
Understanding what everyone brings to the table is important for effective collaborative working. Belbin's Team Roles model can help identify team strengths, manage conflicts and appreciate each member's contribution during collaboration. However, don't rely solely on this theory; it's just one of many factors for successful collaboration.
Break down silos
It's not unusual for cliques and silos to occur in organizations – we naturally categorize things in life. Silos can stifle collaboration, though. Understanding how to break down silos to enable smart collaboration will help you tackle this issue.
Navigate hybrid teams with ease
Collaboration can be just as effective in hybrid teams as it can in person. Knowing how to enable cross-team collaboration in a hybrid setting is a great skill to have in your manager toolkit so no one feels left out or forgotten about.
