There are different types of collaboration and they’re not all equal

Know what sort of collaboration is required and tune your team development efforts to it

Sloppy thinking about teamwork leads us to treat all collaboration as if it were the same. Like the office supplies sales team described in my earlier article, some groups don’t do much work together because they don’t need much collaboration to succeed. Others, like the automotive design group I previously discussed, work together most of the time because if they don’t they won’t achieve their goals. Still others fall somewhere in the middle. Some degree of teamwork is needed in all these cases. But would you manage the highly independent sales team the same way you’d manage the highly interdependent car design team? Of course not. Likewise, you wouldn’t apply the same team development approaches to drastically different kinds of work groups. Know what sort of collaboration is required and tune your team development efforts to it. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting effort and fostering cynicism among team members. And, once you’ve figured out what sorts of collaboration are appropriate, you’ll probably discover you need less collaboration than you thought.