You’re a leader. 
Your role is to motivate and coordinate a group of individuals with diverse experiences and backgrounds to achieve common performance goals. You’re also responsible for creating a positive work environment and a space where the entire team can succeed. This requires more than just technical skills. As a leader, being able to support teamwork and collaboration within your team is essential to their success, and ultimately, your own!
First, let’s talk about what’s involved with teamwork. Teamwork involves the qualities and abilities of a person to work with others towards a common goal. These behaviours are what allows an individual to work and thrive within a group or team setting. They include active listening, sharing, cooperating, problem-solving, giving (and receiving) feedback, reliability, and respectfulness. Effective teamwork, especially from leadership, can boost team morale, build rapport, encourage trust, and foster engagement and productivity with your people.
Now, let’s look at collaboration. If you’re working with other people, especially within a team, collaboration skills are a must! Collaboration is the act of working with one or more people to produce something, whether that’s a tangible product, an idea, or completion of a shared task. At its core, collaboration is the act of working well with others to meet your goals. An important aspect of collaboration, and one that can be hard to perfect, is emotional intelligence. Being able to communicate effectively, navigate conflicts with respect, maintain self-awareness within a team setting, and sharing success with the whole group instead of the individual fall into this area of expertise. Collaboration also involves strong communication skills, effective resource management, working with positivity and respect for your teammates, and taking accountability when something needs to be changed. Leaders who prioritize collaboration in their workplace will see improved productivity within their teams, a space that fosters efficiency and positivity, effective communication to address conflicts, and overall, a healthy team environment.
Teamwork involves teammates tackling tasks individually, while chipping away at a common goal. It combines individual efforts from each person to achieve this goal, while collaboration unites individuals with complementary skills. Collaboration requires compromise, consistent input and communication, brainstorming ideas or creating something new. They’re very similar concepts, but leaders need both to make sure their teams are operating at their best, for both the organization and the people within it.
Enter collaborative teamwork, the intersection of two similar but distinct skill sets. This is where individuals with strong skill sets can use their roles and expertise, while also working with the entire team to achieve the common goal. There is both individuality and cohesion within this strategy. Individual tasks are assigned and completed with autonomy, while also combining expertise and encouraging collaborative problem-solving. It embraces the diversity each individual brings to the team, while also creating a cohesive product representing the team as a whole. Using collaborative teamwork increases productivity and efficiency, creates a strong social connection within the team through excellent communication, enables continued learning from both leadership and between teammates with different skill sets, and does all this while achieving team performance goals.
Leaders need to be prepared to use all the teamwork and collaboration skills at their disposal in order for their goals to be met efficiently and with high team morale. Leaders will need strong people skills to accomplish this:
- Written and verbal communication—In order to share ideas and messages, leaders have to be able to communicate well. During the process of collaboration, strategies, processes, ideas, and other topics are discussed in order to progress. A leader has to be able to communicate clearly and effectively for others to understand and follow.
- Listening—This is such a crucial aspect of communication and is absolutely necessary in collaborative teamwork. Effective leaders make an effort to hear and understand what is being shared with them.
- Trust—Believing in another person’s strengths and character is key to inspiring the synergy that collaboration brings. Believing that others have the skills and knowledge needed to complete tasks and deliver quality work empowers the team to do just that – deliver quality results. In turn, leaders must be trustworthy, so their team members feel safe to ask for help when they encounter a challenge.
- Open-Mindedness—Being less judgemental and more inquisitive, having a positive attitude and belief in the abilities of others allows the leader to see how diversity in knowledge, talent, skills, and abilities—not to mention, opinions—can help team members to thrive and create a supportive environment where people will want to do good work.
- Patience—Sometimes collaborations can take a while to come to fruition. In these cases, leaders may have to exercise patience and resist rushing to a conclusion when the best tactic is to compromise and be flexible to achieve the best results.
Other people leadership qualities will also come into play: project management, critical thinking, organization, and conflict resolution. So, yeah… leaders need a lot of personal and professional skills to foster collaborative teamwork, but the payoff in productivity and engagement is worth it.
Setting clear expectations for the team, empowering teammates to work collaboratively, and communicating through every step of the way are essential pieces to this puzzle. By developing their own collaborative teamwork skills, leaders will set a strong example, to their teams, of how they hold themselves to the same collaborative standard as they expect from the team.
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