Successful collaboration involves taking action on all those marvelous ideas bouncing around inside your brains! Especially taking action on all those tremendous ideas generated when complex problem-solving: together.
Otherwise, team members’ contributions during collaboration are unconsciously limited by traditional habits like mindset, behavior, professional bias, and time constraints. As a result, your clients suffer. Why? Because your team’s deliverables become short-sighted due to lack of having 1280 degrees of collaborative input and insight.
Alternatively, why not become known as the team of choice to consistently generate robust, enduring, and innovative solutions? Consider the value of taking action on that one millimeter mindset shift, collectively.
How many times have you left a team meeting without placing the ideas inside your head decisively on the virtual or actual business table? Thinking up those ideas, individually and collectively, is one form of “thinking” action. However, thinking often leaves ideas spinning inside your heads. When your ideas get out of your heads and become more actionable, everyone you serve benefits.
Successful collaboration is an all-hands (and brains) on deck exercise. No more solo acts please. 🙂
How frequently are team members encouraged to (or prevented from) introducing ideas to the virtual / physical table? Often, teams poll or vote: once. More often, these actions are traditionally equated with “including everyone’s input.” Really?
- First, is this single action the only action taken on what is discussed during that meeting?
- Next, if so, consider the other potential actions the traditional “rush-to-poll or vote” ends up hindering.
When I work with individuals or teams and observe meetings characterized by polite discussion + a “final” vote or poll, I know there is a story behind what I am seeing and hearing. And that story usually is about team hesitancy to take their cross functional, collaborative conversation one millimeter further than what is currently professionally comfortable.
However, when your team sails together into these uncharted collaborative waters, you get to where the really great stuff is discovered. The resulting rich debate – including potential push-back – is the true source of more strategic and innovative client-focused solutions. Plus, these enhanced solutions become instrumental in not only acquiring customers (and employees) but retaining them, as well.
Instead of team dynamics “as usual”, I hit the Successful Collaboration Pause button.
I replace polling and voting with exercises from my Voice of the Customer or Wicked Problem Solving Playbook. Why? Because these tools engage people in injecting a more diverse and collaborative set of rich ideas into team dynamics. Plus, these facilitations tease out the ideas people hesitate to express, for one reason or another. Additionally, these conversations and tools make ideas less about thinking, reading and talking, and more about reflecting and taking action on what, literally and visibly, is placed on the table and whiteboard.
Before you enter one more team meeting and participate in one more poll or vote, think about the professional benefit of choosing to do the same things: differently. That realm of choice and action is where your own professional story and your team’s legendary successful collaboration story resides. Why not sail one millimeter closer towards legendary and successful collaboration, together?
Are you successful in taking action on all those marvelous ideas bouncing around inside your brain? Your colleagues and clients are waiting for you to take these next steps, together.
Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.
Babette Ten Haken | Change Catalyst | Purpose-Driven Professional Innovation | Cross-Functional Team Leadership | Trust-Based Client Retention | In Person & Virtual Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |
Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ Speaking & Consulting, catalyzes trust-based, purpose-driven, cross-functional leadership. She leverages Voice of the Customer, complex problem-solving and storytelling to catalyze collaboration between professional disciplines creating more innovative and robust business outcomes. Babette is a cross-functional, business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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