In the last installment of this two part series on the do’s and don’ts of collaboration, Eric and I lead you down a rocky road of a project with challenges at every turn. Sometimes it is necessary to experience setbacks, as painful as they may be, to understand how we truly want to be treated and how best to treat others. Unfortunately, collaboration took a knock on the chin in this project, but thankfully it got up, dusted itself off, and is ready for the next engagement.
Part 2 of Collabor-YEAH / Collabor-NEAH is a story about collaborative success. The key to this success is based upon a balanced equation of an equal part effort plus a mutual openness toward co-creation, as we developed our presence on the internet. Admittedly, our website is not complete, but we have created a good foundation for it to develop and reflect our values about the importance of collaboration.
To create our website, we had a clear, tangible product and deliverable. ICO had the text; the web designer and our visual content developer partnered to develop the graphics. We kicked off our meeting with our aspirations for we wanted from the website and for our business.
We set up a collaborative space in the Cloud, and shared thoughts, files, graphics, and got right to work. There was openness, mutuality, responsiveness, and we shared values of doing good work that does good in the world.
We started off on a good footing. The proposal was clear. The commitments and deliverables focused on what we wanted to achieve. We talked through timelines to accommodate commitments, and we all gave our best effort. We launched a bit behind schedule, but we were in very close contact with each other throughout the process so we knew where we were and what was needed at every step. We were able to over deliver on the initial presence of our website, including 2 pages, links to our blog, twitter, and email, and a privacy policy--elements that we hadn’t expected to be able to complete in the first iteration.
We had the makings of a beautiful website up in record time. It is just the beginning of our presence on the internet. Our visual content developer purred with contentment because he was loving the partnership with the web designer. The web developer also valued the process. He took our ideas, shaped them, shared them with us at every turn.
The end-result was pleasing to all. More than pleasing, we were thrilled to see our ideas come to life almost like magic. But, it wasn’t magic. Here’s our recipe:
1. Clear goals and outcomes; purpose and values in alignment
2. Agreed upon deliverables and timelines
3. Collaboration established up front; collaboration was a value, a principle and a practice
4. Tools to facilitate collaboration: online space for sharing files and communicating; online meetings at critical junctures with webcams (it is important to see each other)
5. Processes that build collaboration: check-ins, open communications, asking questions with skillful inquiry, sharing ideas freely, inviting feedback, welcoming and accepting it. Listening to each other with a willingness to be influenced.
6. Feedback invited, accepted, valued. We built on each other’s ideas in a creative process.
7. Shared leadership; no one was boss; everyone’s ideas and opinions valued. Everyone did their own piece of work, met their commitments, and communicated effectively with the rest of the team.
So why did this project work so well and the other didn’t? Well, there were some mitigating factors that exasperated the proposal process for GPM project. There were also more people involved with and effected by the GPM project. Regardless of the size of the project, the underlying reason for success can be contributed to an overall willingness, openness, and commitment to working together with shared leadership. Without that fundamental component ideas don’t get conveyed, deadlines don’t get met and projects don’t come to fruition.
