Need Teams To Collaborate Early And Often? This Convinces The Skeptics
by Lisa Bodell for ForbesWomen
A recent study from the Institute for Corporate Productivity found that companies which promote collaboration are five times as likely to be high-performing. If your company defaults to silence and silos instead of cross-functional collaboration, introduce them to a technique called Sharing Works in Progress.
It’s among the most popular videos in my LinkedIn Learning course on collaboration and it’s ideal for kicking off a discussion about the value of teamwork. Ultimately, this technique should help people feel less possessive of their ideas and get them in the habit of leaning on their colleagues for ideas development.
Start by alpha-ordering the room into teams and providing a flip chart and a bunch of sticky notes to each team. If you’re leading this exercise remotely, use Google Jamboard for a virtual version of the flip chart and sticky notes. For the next five minutes, ask each team to come up with as many ideas as possible to solve their unique challenge. To illustrate the type of challenge suited to this exercise, imagine that you’re a start-up mattress company and you’ve been tasked with partnering with a transportation company.
Don’t focus on the quality of the group’s ideas — just generate as many as you can. Then write or type each idea on a sticky note and place it on the flip chart. Now as a team, identify the most disruptive ideas, and then, choose only one. Write or type a one-sentence description of it on the top area of the flip chart and remove or delete all the other sticky notes.
To experience real-time collaboration, direct your team — and all the other teams — to migrate to whichever flip chart is to their right. In a remote setting, have Team A review Team B’s virtual flip chart, and Team B review Team C’s flip chart, and so forth.