Building Collaboration with EI
M Azeem Saheer - PCC
Human Capital Specialist | Facilitator at Luminary Learning Solutions | ICF-PCC | EQ Leadership Coach |EQ Practitioner| Emotional Culture Catalyst | LEGO? Serious Play? |Hands On Thinking Coach | Speaker |Podcaster
“Coming together is beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success”- Henry ford.
It is well known that collaboration is the secret of success, as rather trying to achieve your organization goals alone collaborate to maximise the opportunity. Very good example would be UBER eats or PickME( Sri Lankan entity) where many restaurants getting in to technological platform to increase their visibility and the reach among the consumers.
Collaboration will not come easy in any organization; all the leaders works very hard to create that synergy required for the teams to collaborate. In that note emotional intelligence plays a vital role in creating a successful collaboration. Following four steps will help you to create collaborative environment.
Trust & respect
One of the key ingredient in collaboration is trust & respect, your collaboration is built upon these two elements. Honouring your commitment & being open and vulnerable the way you feel, will help you to win the trust & respect of your partners. In the movie Jumanji, the team need to collaborate to win the challenge where they have mutual respect and trust to keep the game moving. When we build trust & respect, feeling being confident will help us to strive towards the common goal.
Developing awareness of others
In the movie Jumanji, each of each member had their own strengths & weakness and each of them knew very well about. They were successful to use their own strengths to win the challenges. Similarly, when we get to know our teams & its members’ strengths & limitation it would be easy to utilize in such manner, this can be achieved when you are paying to their emotions, feelings and thoughts. Further acknowledging their efforts, hard work and thoughts contributed.??This will create an enroute to understand the passion & purpose of the individual & team.This will enable them to go that extra mile. for an example Burger King stopped selling whoppers by starting a campaign "a day without Whoppers" to join McDonalds campaign to raise funds through their BigMac sale to support Children with cancer. Purpose led to collaborate two fast food giants simply through awareness of others.
Provide support
We have seen in retails stores, where its employees are wearing their uniforms with a Tag “ I am here to help you” or “Can I help you”. This another element we can follow to create better collaboration.??Most of the team members get emotionally hijacked when they run out of solutions or ideas. Simple effort of asking can I help you will help them to reinvent new ideas. This is called as Positive influence, which enable a team or its members to take that extra effort break the limitation & drive towards organization goals. You can have a pool of experts or mentors where your teams can approach in such situation.
Take extra effort on decision making
When you’re working in a collaboration environment your decision cannot come on your own, as same in the movie Jumanji every decision they make comes after looking at everyone’s perspective. Get others perspective before a decision is made at the same time when you are communicating both decision and the reasoning, make sure you take extra time to thisAnother point to note is awareness of biases in decision making as emotions can contribute bias to thinking and decision making, which may trigger some of the teams or its members’ emotions in a negative way.?
It is not an easy task for leader to run an organization with a collaboration mode as he or she has to deal with plenty of emotions. Being emotionally intelligent can help him or her to lead well towards the goals. Emotional intelligent is skill which can be developed through intense practice.
Always remember you are not collaborating with just people, you are collaborating with different people whom are with different emotions.
M Azeem Saheer
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About the writer,
Mohamed Azeem Saheer?brings with him over a decade of hands on experience in management both in Sri Lanka and the region. Azeem’s experience in multiple industries offers him the unique ability to offer context and empathetic appreciation for the different programs he runs. Azeem is one of the one of first Genos Certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, First Riders & Elephant certified Emotional Culture Deck Practitioner and ICF certified coaches in the country. He combines a unique flavor to his programs via Lego Serious Play : bringing the ‘fun’ of our childhood favorite toy Lego and combining it with ‘serious’ topics : enabling an immersion into learning.
holistic mentor for purpose-driven leaders: decolonizing #leadershipdevelopment by growing genuine #psychologicalsafety + #trust together, so your team can enjoy harmony, expanding impact + aligned abundance
2 年how do I think collaboration can be improved? I think we need to throw out almost everything in 'business as usual' - as long as a company's #1 goal is financial profits, there will always be too much pull to compete for short term gains and you'll always be fighting an uphill battle. However, when well being becomes the primary currency, now you have something that will support long term collaboration! Thank you for sharing, Azeem Saheer ????????
Growth Leadership ?? | Shaping human behavior through Learning & Developmentq ??????| Inbound Tourism ??
2 年"Collaboration" is definitely a highly meritorious aspect of business in today's world.. However with my recent experiences operating in different international markets I guess the prevailing cultural norms play a massive role.. While collaboration is considered an easy act to pick and practice for some societies. Some societies take a faily long time to build that kind of trust and credibility - to collaborate. For businesses to build a culture that drives the value of collaboration, I think a solid program like what you deliver followed by carefully curated internal campaigns should be conducted in combination with HR & other departments. Over period of time, slowly that mindset shift will happen.