Collaborative Behaviours - Why Are They Important?

I recently spoke to you about the five key mistakes that businesses make when they're looking to work in a collaborative way. And I wanted to move on today to briefly talk to you about behaviours, because I think they are a key element that are often overlooked. 

I think we can all agree that we spend time looking at legal agreements, technical specifications, all those key things that absolutely are important and absolutely need to be right. But what we don't do is think about how we need to work together, what expectations we need to set for each other so that we can be clear about those, what our perceptions are of each other. And what we don't do is think about how we need to communicate with each other in order to build that trust that is essential in a collaborative way.

Over the last 20 plus years that PML has been working with different businesses, we've identified a number of key behaviours that we need to learn and put into place, and we've used these a number of times to build successful relationships. Critically, we need to have a clear understanding about our expectations of each other at the very outset of that and be very honest and very open with each other. And honesty, Openness are absolutely critical. It sounds very obvious, but it's not always easy to work in that way. If we can develop that openness and transparency and honesty, then we feel comfortable about being clear about what our expectations are of our collaborative partner, what we think that we want them to do and we need to be clear with them about that.

If we're clear with them about that, then there is honesty and ability to have very open and frank conversations. Because again, there's that fear of conflict we talked about before.  If you've got transparency and honesty, then you should have no problem with being very clear about a particular point or something that you want to challenge, but doing it in the right way, doing it in a productive way so that you deal with the debate, you get it done and you move on and focus on the bigger objective.

You have to have the ability to be a bit provokable, but only to bring back your partner to adopt the right set behaviours, and absolutely critically, you need to able to focus on the win-win because if there isn't a win in this situation for both parties, then why are you actually trying to form a collaborative relationship?

So what I would urge you to do that is take a step back. Think about how you could work in a collaborative way with an organisation. Think about your expectations, think about what your perceptions of that organisation might be. And perhaps then think about the importance of those good behaviours. We've got a great scorecard that you can use to test how good you are at collaborating.

And we've got a great strategy session that if you're interested, just drop us a message and we will be in contact..

Thank you.