Episode 42 What Does Workplace Collaboration Require?

Want your team to work together well? What’s the one thing that’s necessary to make sure that collaboration in the workplace is successful? Regardless if you run a transactional business or a project-oriented business, you have multiple team members working together… and it’s critical that they can succeed.  

Getting a team to work together and work together well can be a challenge.  

Create a Culture of Listeners 

Listening is absolutely required for collaboration. As leaders, too many of us forget how important it is when working together as a team, and what’s far worse is some of us don’t listen enough ourselves— we aren’t leading by example.  

As leaders, we can be the guiltiest of not listening enough. More than any other employee, we are predisposed to skip listening, or not listen all the way through when our team is trying to communicate with us.  

We’re so used to applying the experience and foresight, when we anticipate where the conversation is going, and interrupt. Or maybe we have an idea or goal of where we’d like the company focus to go in, and as we listen to team comments that might lead the topic astray or down a different path… we cut them off.  

The reality is that people need to be heard in order to collaborate well. If they don’t feel like they have a voice, they will stop bring it out, or worse- they’ll disengage and stop listening to the other voices in the team.  

Leading by example, means that we need to listen well. We need to be the best listeners of our team. If we do that, then we can require proper listening from the rest of the team— giving them the tools to collaborate effectively.  

If somebody comes to you with an idea, instead of cutting them off, let them continue. Maybe by listening to their complete thoughts, you can then ask follow-up questions that engage or further describe what they’re getting at. Once you do that, then you’ve earned the right to say to somebody else who cuts people off, “Hey, let’s be listeners here in this meeting. As part of our culture”. 

This Week’s Take Away 

Listen, ask, listen, and then you can talk. This week you will have a situation where someone comes to you to tell you something, or to ask a question, or to communicate with you.  

Take that opportunity to listen to them. Hear them out fully, then ask a question. That will make it possible for them to go into more detail on the subject… and listen to that too. 

After that, then you can talk and give your point of view, except now you can do so with added context. More valuable than that, is that your employee can see you firsthand, operate as a fantastic listener. That will encourage themselves to listen more to their peers and incorporate listening into the company culture.  

This will make team collaboration smooth and effective.