Cultivate a Collaborative Mindset in the Workplace for a Competitive Advantage

The Information Age has plowed the way for the ‘Collaboration Age’ in business today.

The word collaborate comes from the Latin word ‘collaborare,’ which means to labor together. In today’s business world, the word ‘collaboration’ is spoken and heard a lot. In fact, this word—collaboration—is a term often referred to in the workplace, and it represents a relatively new and important strategy used by businesses to gain a competitive advantage. 

As our society has moved from an industrial age to an information age, we have seen relatively new business terminologies take root. When business professionals talk about collaboration, they are basically referring to a synchronization of processes that, when combined with organizational abilities to distribute and delegate responsibilities, cultivate more positive outcomes. 

As a business process, workplace collaboration serves as a platform for developing internal partnerships so your organization can realize a competitive edge in the marketplace. Here are a few examples of the types of advantages that collaboration can put into motion:   

1. Collaboration enhances the ability to support the right people with the right data to obtain the right decision, or to make the best decisions. And it's all about making the right decisions. And I'd like to emphasize the significance of this goal, because obviously organizations make many decisions; but also making decisions doesn’t automatically mean those decisions are always the most thought-through.
2. Collaboration allows for a team of professionals to give their input, which in turn helps instill greater credibility within a new system or process.
3. Collaboration seeks to find the balance between business professionals who are trying to achieve goals with those individuals who are making decisions.
4. Collaboration helps organizations fine-tune their processes for engaging and empowering people and how they maximize their resources. 

Bottom line advantages: Collaborative events, such as the above, help increase coordinated actions and the flow of information within an organization; which, in turn, will help move everyone toward making better long-range decisions and choices. These outcomes can have tremendous impact on those teams of people who collaborated. For example, an effectively led, collaborating team can assess the strengths and the weaknesses of a process or idea before decisions are made on ‘x, y and z,’ and so on. 

The advantages of the collaboration process are not attained in an impulsive or random manner.

I’ve heard of organizations in which a business manager says something similar to, “OK, let’s get together and collaborate,” without realizing how this exchange really happens. Instead, a well-informed business manager will begin a collaborative process only after thinking it through, which includes thinking it all the way through to setting final expectations—before coming to or making any decisions. 

While collaboration is vitally important in this information age, which is also linked to the digital era of ‘do it fast and do it now,’ employers should not expect collaboration to happen overnight or spontaneously. Business managers should be trained in knowing how to properly and thoroughly think through and lead a collaborative effort. 

So I encourage business leaders to acquire and follow the necessary steps for developing a collaborative process. If they don’t, and I’m speaking from a strategic-planning, business perspective, they can end up taking the process in a direction that is detrimental; for instance, if they are striving to introduce new products or initiatives into the marketplace. 

In contrast, effective collaboration that is based on building rapport and uniting people in working toward common goals will better provide businesses with distinct competitive advantages.

The Information Age has plowed the way for the ‘Collaboration Age’ in business today.