Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016 - (Page 43)

GET INTO THE ACT ACCELERATING COLLABORATIVE TEAMWORK BY BOB WIELE I n the 21st century, collaboration trumps strategy. It's collaborate or evaporate. The forces of complexity, diversity and speed now shape our workplaces: the complexity of challenges, the diversity of workforces and the speed of change. Accelerating collaboration is the foundation for success in dealing with these forces. In knowledge-based enterprises, fostering collaboration is job one for leaders, managers, and learning and development professionals. REAL COLLABORATION IS HARD Organizations rely on all kinds of teams to produce results, and collaboration is the secret sauce that makes or breaks every team. Leadership teams craft strategy. Project teams drive innovation, implementation and execution. Collaboration isn't easy and doesn't happen naturally. It needs nurturing and support to flourish. Real collaboration emerges when all team members feel comfortable contributing their best work and bringing forward their disruptive ideas and contrarian opinions - all in the spirit of progress. Like all skills, real collaboration is learned and developed over time, through persistent effort, practice, feedback, experience, discovery, adversity and success. FIVES KEYS TO COLLABORATIVE TEAM SUCCESS No team moves quickly from forming to performing. You have to be slow in the beginning to be fast later. Here are five ways to move toward successful collaboration. 1. USE COGNITIVE DIVERSITY AS THE NEW DRIVER. Talent comes in all varieties. Sameness in thinking produces only minor variations in the status quo. If they are managed well, differences in thinking produce innovative solutions and breakthroughs. Leaders must look beyond personality types to assemble teams of people with a deliberate mix of cognitive skills, like creative thinkers, analytical thinkers and critical thinkers. 2. DEVELOP A COMMON LANGUAGE AND ENSURE EQUAL PARTICIPATION. Down with dominators; up with collaborators. Alex Pentland's research indicated that the more team members participate equally and the shorter, more focused their contributions are, the higher the team's productivity is. As teams learn to work together, they develop a common language for collaboration. 3. DESIGN DISCIPLINED PROCESSES. Make sure team members set clear outcomes in advance of each meeting. Develop routines and timed phases for each planning and problem solving process to avoid wasting time, talent and money. T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MA GAZ INE - SUMMER201 6 I WWW.TRAI NINGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE 43 http://www.trainingindustry.com/ezine.aspx

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016

Perspectives
Table of Contents
Three Strategies to Ensure Your Training Has Tensile Strength
Experience, Exposure and Education
Beyond the Classroom Paradigm
Applying the Buddy System
Purpose-Driven Professional & Organization Success
Making It Personal: The Four Pillars of High-Impact Mentoring
Blowing Your Millennial Mindset
Hidden Forces: Unconscious Bias in Learning
Memory: The Critical Bottleneck to Learning
Gender Barriers & Solutions to Leadership
Cognititive Collaboration: Utilizing Diverse Thinking & Behavioral Preferences
Get Into the Act: Accelerating Collaborative Teamwork
Dispelling the Five Myths of Microlearning
Quicken Loans: Culture Driven
Developing Global Leaders: On-the-Job Leadership Development
From Where I Sit
Why Do We Wait to Train Our Managers?
Is Knowledge Overrated?
Is Your Business Acument Showing?
Avnet Expands Services with ExitCertified Acquisition
Company News
What's Online
Training Talk

Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016