How Teaming Supercharges Collaboration
Career Climbers / September 26th, 2024
NASA does it. We show how your organization can embrace teaming, too.
In the complex, uncertain and fast-changing world we live in, success and even survival require intensive collaboration among individuals, organizations and countries. The outcomes of such collaboration can be breathtaking – consider the growth of Netflix and Amazon, the rebirth of Microsoft and General Motors, the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Yet, most people and organizations fail to collaborate, preferring competition to cooperation. In business, up to 70 percent of strategic alliances fail, and more than half of joint ventures do not survive their 10th anniversary.
Why collaboration stumbles
There are good reasons that collaborations often falter: physical distance, time zone differences and unequal access to information, to name a few. However, the biggest obstacles are psychological.
For millennia, people have grown, learned, played and worked in small groups. In modern times, as villages gave way to cities and farms to factories, hierarchy has become the way to organize and manage human and other resources. However, it fosters an individualistic, uncollaborative Mindset characterized by distrust of strangers, unwillingness to share information and a strong preference for working independently or with familiar others. It also leads to a focus on personal gains, avoidance of initiative and risk, and shifting of responsibility.
These behaviors make effective collaboration problematic, even when individuals appreciate the need to work together. To read the full article, click here!
