In business class, I learned the importance of having a good marketing strategy and approach to customer retention. What I realized through working in consulting however, is that these strategies don’t happen overnight. Behind the scenes, collaboration fosters these types of successful business tactics, and it explains why collaboration is the key to success in business. Collaboration is a greatly overlooked aspect of successful companies and it plays a vital role in any business. It’s necessary to stress that leaders and entrepreneurs should embrace this if they would like to see their business thrive in the long run.
Collaboration makes processes more efficient
Small Business Trends sees collaboration as the solution to having more efficient companies. When I worked for a big company as a fresh graduate, I was part of a tight-knit team of like-minded individuals. We prided ourselves for working effectively. One day, our team found out that the project we’ve been working on for months was also being done by another team for the same amount of time. Imagine what could’ve been avoided if our company promoted inter-team collaboration in the workplace. We wouldn’t have had duplicated efforts and wasted resources on a simple task. While our team thought of ourselves as efficient, we realize the lack of coordination with other units made us unproductive in relation to the company’s end goal.
This experience early on in my career made me understand the importance of collaboration for efficiency. In collaborative workplaces, employees get more clarity in their roles. Each person knows what they’re supposed to do, and they know what their teammates are doing (or not doing). Collaboration helps team members focus on specific parts of the overall goal while understanding how their efforts complement and feed into somebody else’s work. A smoother workflow often results in reducing costs and increasing turnaround time.
Collaboration promotes empowerment
Collaborative leadership helps in promoting staff empowerment. Lifewire suggests that “by embracing a model of operational coordination across teams and departments, collaboration can basically drive motivation and engagement.” After that mishap of duplicating projects, our team made an effort to engage with other units. Through this we saw that through collaboration, employees became more empowered to develop solutions to problems instead of just waiting for direction from the top-down. Collaboration encourages suggestions from its staff, reversing the leadership to a bottom-up approach. This is an effective way to make team members feel valid and motivated.
Collaboration fosters innovation
Don’t be quick to assume that collaborative workplaces are only helpful in corporate settings. On the contrary, I’ve met colleagues from other industries who say that collaboration is their key to continuing success. Whether it is an ad agency or a legal firm, working with a group of people or a different company altogether, will help you produce the best results. Special Counsel explains how collaborations create the best innovative solutions. The more people working on a problem, the more chance that they will find the best solution possible to tackle the issue at hand.
Business.com reports that this type of collaboration is becoming common between large companies and startups. One of my former clients was an established company in the field of light bulb manufacturing. Through our consulting, we recommended them to partner with a small engineering startup that has been studying how to create more sustainable solutions for lighting. We helped them to realize that the benefits of working together far outweighed the risks, especially since the they’ve been meaning to invest in research and development for so long but didn’t know how to. In the end, the partnership ended up being a win-win for both groups. The company benefited from outsourcing innovative thinking to a more agile and inherently creative startup. On the other hand, the startup gained global visibility through the partnership. Each firm brought their own strengths to the table in order to create new ideas and opportunities for growth.
Collaboration leads to a happier workplace
Collaboration within a company helps people learn more about other teams and employees they wouldn’t usually interact with. Computer World suggests that collaboration leads to a more personal environment in the workplace. When collaboration leads to a company’s staff becoming more socially engaged, this leads to higher productivity and essentially, a happier workplace.
People nowadays are becoming increasingly caught up in their own day-to-day tasks. Often our own workflow makes us overlook starting a conversation with others unless we have to. But as we can see from the examples above, connecting with others is exactly what we need to make our work more innovative, efficient and empowered. Collaboration is the key to success in business, in whatever field of business you may be in.
Amelie is a business management specialist. She has been in the field of business consulting for nearly 10 years. She is currently a writer and business consultant for various small to medium-sized businesses. During her free time, she enjoys running and playing with her 7-month old puppy. She dreams of traveling the world with her Yorkshire Terrier Bart or meet her cooking inspiration, Martha Stewart.
