This May, Hayes Davidson hosted a Brick & Wonder roundtable on collaboration. We invited 20 of our friends, partners and colleagues to share their experiences of the joys and challenges of collaborative working.
The discussion was the first London event for Brick and Wonder, a networking organisation with a difference that encourages a more personal and collaborative relationship between its members.
These were our top 10 takeaways:
Be clear about your ‘why’. Having a clear, strong understanding of why you are collaborating and what you want to achieve can be a powerful north star to help you overcome any inevitable challenges. Follow your shared goal.
Get out of your comfort zone. Collaborative endeavour can be unpredictable, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Collaborations can be exposing. They involve risk, trust, vulnerability and friendship. Meet in person, be honest about your strengths and weaknesses. Feel the fear and do it anyway!
Set boundaries. Setting out who does what early in the process can bring clarity to collaboration and how individual skills and expertise can best add to successful outcomes, without duplication. Identify a leader or conductor to help coordinate everybody’s input.
Bring in new voices. Collaboration can be a great way of supporting diversity and bringing new voices and ideas to the table. Encourage contributions from everybody with a mixture of individual and group thinking.
Competition is good! Often a feature of collaborations with our peers,a slightly competitive edge can be a good thing, inspiring everybody to raise their game in the interests of achieving the best outcomes.
Let the idea of ownership go. In a fruitful collaboration, you may not be able to pinpoint where a particular idea came from and that can be a magical space to explore. As somebody once said, ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve if you don’t mind who gets the credit’. Let the ego go, let the creativity flow!
Be patient. Developing relationships based on shared values and trust takes time. Deciding you’d like to work together is the first step, but it might take a while before the right project or opportunity emerges. Meanwhile, develop a more detailed understanding of each other’s skills and approaches, so that you are ready when the time comes.
Be open to learning. Collaborating with different disciplines and industries requires an open mind. You’ll encounter different processes, theories, expertise and communication styles. Prepare to have your assumptions challenged and be open to new ways of working.
Collaborations come in all shapes and sizes. Some might be very strategic and deliberately targeted. Others may be more spontaneous and informal, working with surprisingly different disciplines to transform your individual and collective reach.
Be a matchmaker. We all have friends from different spheres of life that we know would get on. Identifying and orchestrating great collaborations is an act of professional generosity and can be very fulfilling, even if you are not directly involved. Build networks with the kind of people you know would do the same for you.
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