CREATING A COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENT WORKSHOP
“THE PERSONAL TRAINER”
Over the last few years there has been a movement to build an organizational culture that is grounded in collaboration. This Workshop lets participants discover new ways to manage their personal behaviors to enable a collaborative work environment.
First, let’s define some key words and concepts:
Collaboration -Working together to do a task and to achieve shared goals, by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.
Consensus Decision Making – A group decision process that seeks the consent of all participants. 1st, it is agreement – 2nd, it is group solidarity of belief or sentiment, for both the decision and the process.
As you can tell by these definitions, the goal of a collaborative culture is to have people working and acting together with a common belief as opposed to working in a competition for a selfish benefit.
My entire Blog is full of articles that describe behavior/activities that are focused on helping to build collaborative working cultures. Throughout my entire career I have believed that being in an environment that focuses on people working together was far superior to environments that used competition as the driving factor.
While I have always believed in the cooperative concept, the world seemed to be obsessed with the concept of driving competition. It was not till about 2 weeks ago that I finally understood why this happened. The Baby Boomers have been in a competitive battle their entire lifetimes – we were this large group of individuals that changed everything before us, and we had to compete against ourselves for everything. The way you could tell if you were winning was by comparing yourself or your organization to the competition. Well, it did drive the way the world grew, but as you look to the Millennium generation and the impact of the new online social systems, everything they do is about sharing. Their lives are not anything like the Boomers. “We Competed, They Share”
The building of a collaborative working culture really involves looking at everything a leader does with the definitions above in mind.
“THE PERSONAL TRAINER”
1. THE LEADER BEHAVIORAL SKILLS THAT BUILDS A COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENT
KNOW YOURSELF AND UNDERSTAND OTHERS
The Behavior Style profile produced by “The Effectiveness Institute”* – The self-assessment you will complete is a self –scoring assessment that measures and summarizes the strengths and challenges of the four primary Behavioral Styles; CONTROLER-STABILIZER-ANALYZER and PERSUADER. This self-assessment is a simple way to validates one’s pattern of behavior in order to facilitate making appropriate choices when interacting with others.
*This element of the “Personal Trainer” Workshop requires individuals to complete an on-line profile, prior to this seminar.
2. UNDERSTANDING HOW TO BUILD TRUST AND SHARED VALUES
Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
How trust affects the trajectory and outcome of our lives- both personally and professionally – and what we can do to change it.
Values:
Most employee problems are related to a difference in values. In the business environment your values are reflected in three distinct kinds of decisions: How you spend money, how you use your time, and how you treat other people.
- What is the level of mutual trust with your team? Do all of your team members share the same values?
[Score your team’s mutual trust level and shared values 1-10 with 10 being high]
Articles for reading:
Cliff Notes for the Speed of Trust by Steven Covey
The 8 Interpersonal Behavioral Skills that Build Trust
Thoughts about Values
Cross training, A way to Common Values
3. DEALING WITH CONFLICT
Conflict Management is the process of limiting the negative aspects of a conflict while increasing the positive aspects of conflict. The aim of conflict management is to enhance learning and group outcomes including effectiveness or performance in organizational settings.
- How comfortable are you at managing conflict in a way that improves performance?
[Score your level of confidence in handling internal conflict 1-10 with 10 being high]
Articles for reading:
4. MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
Organizational change is actually a process in which an organization optimizes performance as it works toward its ideal state. Organizational changes occur as a reaction to an ever-changing environment, a response to a current crisis situation, or as triggered by a leader.
- How comfortable are you with organizational change? Do you have a clear understanding as to what you need to do to manage organizational change?
[Score your level of confidence in handling Organizational Change 1-10 with 10 being high]
Articles for reading:
The Concept of Organizational Change – the 3 types of Management
5. HOW TO BE CREATIVE
Creativity is the phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created. The ideas and concepts so conceived can then manifest themselves in a number of ways, but most often they become something you can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste.
Organizational Creativity includes 3 fundamental concepts:
APTITUDE- The capacity to modify, change, or innovate
SYSTEM- Creativity is not just individual in nature; Social systems, Organizational Cultures, and any Enterprise – all require the capacity to change
EVOLUTION- Change is a necessity, but not sufficient condition in order to define Creativity
- How comfortable are you at finding ways to be creative? Do you have a system for fostering your team’s creativity?
[Score your level of confidence in inspiring you teams creativity 1-10 with 10 being high]
Articles for reading:
6. BUILDING A SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
“There is something deeply important about an experience of being in the presence of someone without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing to make a demand on you. And this creates a space where someone can feel sufficiently safe as though there is a shield, or someone guarding you against dangers such that you can forget your self and be open to trust of and connection to others”. – [The Paris Review with Adam Phillip]
It All Starts With A Conversation
CONVERSATION – is a form of interactive spontaneous communication between 2 or more people who are following the rules of etiquette. It’s a polite give and take of subject thought by talking with each other for company.
- How well do you engage individuals and small groups in Conversation that allows for equal exchange of information?
- How comfortable are you engaging, considering the time pressures of your workday?
[Score your level of comfort with just being socially engaged 1-10, with 10 being very good]
Articles for Reading:
Building a social environment [coming soon!]
7. PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL GROWTH THROUGH NETWORKING
There are a multitude of things that you can learn about yourself by being an active networker. In today’s social media world, we lose sight of the power of a conversation between two people exchanging ideas and knowledge about a common topic of interest. Networking, when done right, can have an explosive impact on your career and life. The lesson is understanding that networking keeps no score. Networking is about the relentless effort to connect people interested in learning to other people interested in learning.
- How well do you Network? Is networking a part of your self improvement strategy?
[Score your level of Networking as a consistent personal growth strategy 1-10 with 10 being very high]
Articles for reading:
Personal Growth through Networking [Coming Soon!]
8. HOW TO MEASURE PERFORMANCE IN A COLLABORATIVE CULTURE
What you measure is what you get. The importance of having a well known and understood matrix of timely and frequent reports that all team members take ownership of, is critical to the success of any organization and team. In a perfect world, these elements would be a combination of business indicators [sales growth-expense margins –etc] as well as scores that define the important human engagement levels. [Do employees have passion and accountability to the culture and the business?]
- Do you have a consistent “Dash Board Report” that gives a tangible score to measure you team’s progress?
- Does this “Dash Board Report” have a high level of transparency and trust that the employees can have an impact on its results?
[Score your level of consistency at positively using this Dash Board report to manage your team 1-10 with 10 being very high]
Articles to be Read:
How to Measure Performance in a Collaborative Work Environment [Coming Soon!]
9. OTHER TOPICS TO EXPLORE
What Successful Management Looks Like
Thoughts about Leadership and Values
The Architecture of Managing People
Thoughts about Successful Communications
All Great Decisions are Made on the Last Day
What Success Looks Like
When you have completed this seminar, you will walk away with 3-5 activities that will build your team’s collaboration capacity.