Collaborate with an Openmind

One of the most talked about business themes is collaboration. It is also one of the most overused and incorrectly used words. The importance of effective collaboration has increased since COVID changed the face of work with the growth of working from home and new hybrid working models.

All too often organisations put the ‘best’ people into the room. Sounds sensible until you understand what makes a good collaborator…and it isn’t the usual alpha type characteristics that come hand in hand with great collaborators. Particularly when your ‘best’ people are measured by traditional metrics.

The key skills needed are far ‘softer’ skills in; communication, authenticity, compromise, tolerance, team player and reliability. This is where Openmind comes into its own!

Asking someone explicitly whether they are tolerant, are a team player, are reliable or can compromise will give you almost certainly a ‘yes of course I am’ answer. However, by unlocking someone’s non-conscious feelings, their implicit reactions, on these types of statements we can understand whether they actually have these key collaborative skills. This is key for the effectiveness of the team and very importantly their mental wellbeing. Nothing destroys an individual’s mental wellbeing faster than being railroaded in meetings, not listened to, put down or ignored.

So, when building a team, putting a project team together or building a multi skilled group to deliver a project start with the facts. Who has the collaborative skills to make this works. Rarely will it be the so called ‘best’ people or biggest hitters. Openmind enables this insight.

Lets talk about building your best delivering teams; group performance looks very different to individual performance.