Collaboration - Working with Others

Collaboration is the act of working together with one or more people in order to achieve something. This is what a lot of people do in their jobs. People get information from various sources, apply their special skills to process and discuss their results with others (colleagues, bosses or clients) until a problem is solved. But effective collaboration is hard. You often get only B-level teams even with A-level people. Here is why.

People: You have to deal with people that may or may not be on par with you. If you or they are juggling many things (multi-tasking) or are in different offices or time zones, it might be hard to get enough shared time to make progress. You may have to put up with a lot of wait times and delays or settle for something sub-optimal.

Information: You are bombarded with a ton of information yet it is often diffiult to find exactly what you want. Processing what's relevant while discarding what's not can take up most of your time. And when you can't find what you need, tracking down the right answers takes even more time and often involves waiting on others.