Team collaboration — TEAMING WITH IDEAS

Apply What Mars Learned About High Performance Teams To Your Organization

The key to this High Performance Collaboration framework is the insights and theories that lie behind it. The name of the Imperatives and Practices are just labels; we encourage you to adapt this Framework to your organization and culture.

How To Cultivate Collaboration

You come to this third Practice knowing why your collaboration matters, which work requires collaboration, and who should be doing it. Cultivate Collaboration is the payoff for all that work. It is about contracting, connecting individuals to the work of the team. Cultivate Collaboration is about creating more intentional collaboration. In fact, it’s the only Practice that is directly aligned to Intentionality.

Focusing Collaboration on What Matters

“TOGETHER WE ARE COURAGEOUS ARCHITECTS OF THE FUTURE OF PETCARE”.

This statement is not only inspirational and aspirational, it’s also practical. For example, if a topic didn’t deal with the future of the entire petcare segment, if it wouldn’t make a difference to what the segment might look like 5 or 10 years ahead, that topic wouldn’t make it onto their agenda.

To Collaborate Better, Collaborate Less

Involve the total team in a project only when involving everyone will create more value than having it done by a small group or by an individual. Stated the other way around, if a small group or an individual can do a piece of work effectively and efficiently, why bother involving the total team? Collaboration in large groups is slow, complex and prone to unproductive conflict. That’s why we save total team collaboration for instances where the payoff is clearly worth the added challenges involving more people.

Team BuildingCarlos Valdes-DapenaSeptember 20, 2019Team collaborationComment

Strong Collaboration is Intentional Collaboration

We talk about collaboration as if it were one thing that we all understand in the same way. For this discussion, there are three points I’ll make about degrees of teamwork: most of what we call teamwork is some form of helpfulness; helpfulness is good, but it’s not enough and; what we need is more intentional collaboration.

Carlos Valdes-DapenaJuly 30, 2019Team collaboration, lessons from mars, overcollaborationComment

Teamwork: The Holy Grail

What do you mean when you use the word, “teamwork”? Teamwork means different things to different people in different circumstances. Because the word has so many meanings, and because collaboration is more important than ever, we have to be more precise about what we mean by teamwork. This is especially true if we want to foster it in our workplaces.

Team LeadershipCarlos Valdes-DapenaJune 30, 2017Team collaboration, real team, teamworkComment