Mastering Collaboration

Chapter 1. Enlist Everyone

This chapter will show how being more inclusive makes teams stronger by widening their perspective and making them more invested in the team’s success. Managing groups of people who are very different can present some challenges and create conflict. You can take steps to help teams work through their differences, at least enough to make working together less painful, by enlisting everyone in a constructive way.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Everyone? That sounds…messy. In meaningful collaborations “everyone” cannot literally mean everyone, but as a general principle the more you include people who are affected by, and invested in, the topic at hand, the better your results will be. Enlisting everyone, done right, actually helps.

Casting a wide net and including more people actually helps you move faster. That sounds counterintuitive, but consider for a moment that everyone may already be “helping” you, just not in a way that is actually helpful. Group dynamics, especially in competitive corporate culture, lead people to see efforts that exclude them as potential threats or a drain on resources that feel tight. At first, the people that you haven’t engaged (for whatever reason) might stand off to the side, neither helping nor hurting your efforts. But it doesn’t take much for those who feel excluded to stake out a position on the opposite bank, and work against what you are trying to do.

We tend to assume that anyone not working with us is a neutral ...