To succeed in business today your business or organisation must create amazing results.
In a world where people with opposing views on nearly every topic imaginable must come together and produce these results, it's not as easy as it sounds. The workplace is no different.
Your employees and teams may be quite capable of handling their specific areas of focus, but unless you get them to work together, your products, services, and profits will suffer.
Dr. Thea Singer Spitzer, combing her longstanding expertise with innovative thinking, research, and focused interviews with Silicon Valley leaders, has created a practical framework for the next era of collaboration in her new book, ‘The Power of Collaboration’.
Spitzer examines how so many of the companies in Silicon Valley have succeeded in building complex, successful businesses. These companies and leaders have succeeded because they didn't just apply existing business models - they created a new one.
Many of the Silicon Valley employees who are committed to collaboration are distinguished by six fundamental characteristics:
1. A drive to succeed.
2. The desire to contribute to something meaningful.
3. Persistence.
4. Acceptance of differences.
5. Desire for genuine communication.
6. Connection to company-wide goals.
The patterns that run across the companies reveal important factors that create a collaborative and often successful organisation.
Those common factors include:
1. A company culture that encourages and reinforces collaboration.
2. Leaders who model the value of collaboration through their actions with peers and with employees at all levels.
3. Employee incentives that encourage appropriate collaboration.
Further, one of the most powerful and least understood aspects of successful businesses is how employees' feelings of connection, community, and unity provide a competitive advantage.
Employees in a business or organisation with a high degree of connection are more engaged, more productive in their jobs, and less likely to leave for a competitor.
They are also more trusting, cooperative and willing to work in collaboration; they are more willing to share information with their colleagues and therefore help them make well-informed decisions.
The key to success with your business, your people and your customers, is to create the environment of collaboration and to be the model for collaboration in all your daily actions.
Reference: Thea Singer Spitzer: 2017. The Power of Collaboration: Powerful Insights from Silicon Valley to Successfully Grow Groups, Strengthen Alliances, and Boost Team Potential
