Collaboration is a necessary part of a successful business. Lots of great ideas have been shared this month by the SheTeam contributors and I found myself considering many of the ideas and putting them to work in my own business. Now a way to pull it all together.

1. Take an objective look at people you are working with. Is it working? If it is, keep on keeping on. If it isn’t. End the relationship and find someone more suitable
2. Look at areas of your business where collaboration could bring you (and someone else) to a higher level of business performance.
3. When you identify those areas, start to get ‘curious’ about who could fit the bill. What are you looking for? What qualities do they need to have?
4. What rules and boundaries do you need to have in place to protect the interests of all involved?
5. What are the individual and shared goals of the collaboration.

It’s okay to be selfish in a collaboration as long as you encourage others to be selfish as well. When everything is out on the table, collaborators can all benefit from the multiplying effect of their efforts. Don’t forget to examine your collaborations on a monthly basis. Whatever you do, from teaming up with another business to contributing to a blog like this one, if it stops serving you…stop doing it.

Chris.

www.GhostCEO.com

Clarity is the first step of powerful collaboration. Here is a five-step process I came across earlier this week that makes a lot of sense (By Rachel Kellogg):

1. Get your team on the same page.Everyone in your department needs to be able to agree on at least one competitive advantage. Ask the group to tell you what they think the competitive advantage of the company is to find out how many different perspectives you have to work with. Then you can narrow it down and communicate the best ones to the group.

2. Examine all of your deliverables.You can start by thinking about every process that happens in each department of the company. What are your company’s deliverables besides the product? How you deliver the product is often more important than the product itself. What does the company do to get results? How outstanding is your response time – or anything else that you don’t charge for?

3. Make competitive advantage positioning statements.These statements are measurable, objective, not stated by the competition and not clichéd. It’s best when you can be specific with statements like, “Ninety-five percent of our calls are answered in less than a minute.” Saying you offer great customer service or have a great reputation is expected – and are things your competitors would also claim.

4. Conduct market research.Ask existing customers what is most important in their buying decisions. Why did they pick you? Would they recommend you to their friends, and why? Fewer than 10 percent of middle-market companies conduct research, so 90 percent are just guessing what their customers want.

5. Integrate and communicate your competitive advantage. Consider putting policies and procedures in place to make sure what you’ve determined to be important continues to be a priority. If you’re going to say your advantage is that your response time is better than the rest, you’ll want to make sure it really is. And don’t forget to spread the news to everyone, not just your managers. Your sales team and customer service reps need to be able to tell clients why they should do business with you and not the other guy – or gal.

Best,

C/

www.ghostceo.com

Last week’s post on the Benefits of Collaboration got me thinking more about values fit and how that alone can make a significant difference in the success of a partnership.

In case you missed my earlier comments, let me explain. Partners’ values — the intangible outcomes they hold as important — don’t have to match up identically for a joint project to work. They do need to be compatible, not in opposition to each other. And if they are not mutually exclusive and not identical, they do need to be mutually respected.

A misalignment of values means that even if you and your partner have compatible skills, personalities, and communications style, the collaboration still may be a bust because you’re at cross purposes. You have your heart set on different intangible benefits, even if your tangible benefits are the same, i.e. financial success.

Mutually respected values means that even if you don’t hold the same priority to your partner’s values, you still respect and will honour those values equally to yours.

Now here’s where things get interesting and where 1+1=3 really takes off. By not prioritizing what matters to me more than what matters to you, but making them equally important, we push for a better outcome.

Say one partner values functionality over design, and the other values design over function. One is the technician, the other an artist. If the value for function wins out, you have a chair, but it’s aesthetically uninspiring. If the value for design wins out, you have a really cool looking chair that is uncomfortable to sit on.

However, when those two values come together, you get a chair that is cleverly designed and beautiful, as well as comfortable and stable.

Another example we can all relate to, technology tools were primarily functional from the day they were invented. Then along came Apple and turned things upside down. Their products are highly functional, no one can dispute that. But at last, someone over there decided functional could also be beautiful. They compromise neither form nor function, and the result speaks for itself. They have raised the bar and continue to do so.

Don’t compromise what really matters, work together to create a more amazing outcome than you might have.

Liz Gaige
Market Navigators Consulting