How to Effectively Collaborate in the Workplace
The modern day workplace has to be the greatest social experiment of all time. People from diverse backgrounds working together to achieve a shared vision of moving the business forward. Except it’s not that cut and dry. Beyond the organizational agenda lies human interests and needs that can either be supported by an organizations culture or undermined by defensiveness and distrust. Every individual comes to the workplace with a set of beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behavioral patterns. Harnessing this rich diversity to foster innovation requires essential relational skills that are often lacking in our technical training.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how things can go wrong when we lack the soft-skills to collaborate:
Organizations are made up of people.
People drive outcomes.
Outcomes can be sabotaged by bad attitudes and poor relationships.
Poor relationships can lead to the inability to collaborate and in turn create environments of fear and distrust.
Distrust leads to toxicity in the workplace and creates a culture that crushes the human spirit and creativity.
Crushing the human spirit sabotages an organizations progress forward because people become emotionally checked out.
The inability to move forward because of human discord and presentism cost money, time and other valuable resources.
Losing valuable resources stifles innovation and pisses the people off at the top causing budget cuts and layoffs.
Budget cuts and layoffs incite fear furthering a culture of competition instead of collaboration.
Rinse. Repeat. Fail.
I have seen this pattern repeated in organizations over and over and over again. Rather than address the cultural and relational issues at the root of the problem, many focus on tactical reorganization of systems and processes failing to realize it’s the human element that drives outcomes. And as it turns out, crushing the human spirit is bad for business — higher turn over rate, increased healthcare costs, more absenteeism and presentism, and a mindset of basic compliance rather than an emotional commitment to the mission.
So how do we break this cycle and tap the discretionary passion and emotional commitment in the workplace?
The answer is simple: Train people in the art and science of being a decent, conscious, and curious human being.
Let me explain.
Great places to work aren’t created by accident. Establishing and maintaining a healthy culture requires a continual commitment to assessing the interests and needs of the stakeholders and creating an environment that fosters psychological safety (we’ll touch on this more later). Considering organizations are powered by human energy, it’s reasonable to assume that conscious people would create conscious cultures. The challenge most of us face is that we’re living more by default than by design. Said another way, we’re functioning unconsciously on autopilot constantly reacting to our environment from a place of habit and fear rather than by conscious choice. Couple this with a scarcity/short-term/win-for-me mindset and we have a the prefect cocktail for conflict.
Humans are creatures of habit. We learn how to respond to each other by watching the behavior of others growing up and unconsciously develop a model of the world that we assume to be true. But considering there are over 7 billion of us, no two people have the exact same model of reality. This is a simple fact. And since our brain is designed to keep us safe, it’s always scanning the environment for signals of potential threat. Are you friend or are foe? Are you here to help me or hurt me? This is the most primitive survival function encoded in our DNA. It helps us stay alive and avoid getting eaten by a tiger. Expect in our day and age, the tiger is a boss, team member or that snarky client who constantly belittles us. Depending upon our working model of the world, threats to our core beliefs and assumptions of how “things are supposed to work” can illicit the same automatic defensiveness of fight or flight that our ancestors experienced ages ago. When we are in fight or flight, our blood rushes away from our prefrontal cortex (the seat of our executive functions like reason, logic, and contemplation) and into our primitive reptilian brain, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This triggers a physiological response to protect, defend or shut down. When we are emotionally hijacked because Steve pissed us off in the meeting, we literally decrease our intellectual capacity to do great work. Over time, this pattern damages relationships, productivity and our overall health. This is not the place to do our best collaborative work because triggered people make terrible decisions.
Too often I hear, “Training people in social skills shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of businesses.” And to a certain extent, I agree. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and training people is costly. However, given that our educational system failed to recognize the importance of soft-skills training and the fact that we now have a greater understanding of the science of high performance and interpersonal neurobiology, it’s within the interests of an organization to help its talent realize their full potential — tactically, emotionally and socially. Developing the capacity for emotional and social intelligence is a win-win for all parties involved. I encourage businesses to spend the effort on the front end because cleaning up the mess on the backend is often more costly — both financially and emotionally.
So what is necessary to ensure a collaborative work culture?
Let’s break down collaboration.
Organizations have become highly interdependent systems that require the ability to effectively collaborate. The challenge then becomes — how do we create a collaborative culture when most people are functioning on default mode?
While collaboration is something that occurs between two or more people, it ultimately begins within the individual. Your ability to effectively navigate the complexity of relationship dynamics while regulating your own emotional responses can be the determining factor to whether or not your work makes you come alive or deadens your soul.
When we boil down what makes a collaboration successful we discover a few key factors.
1. Collaboration is about internal chemistry
It’s about what’s going on inside of us from a neurobiological perspective when we interact with one another. When we feel safe, relaxed and comfortable our nervous system is bathed in a “feel good” chemical cocktail loaded with dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. These chemicals are associated with connecting, bonding and opening up. It’s in this state of being that we have access to higher levels of thinking and an increased capacity to collaborate, share and engage.
On the other hand, when we’re feeling unsafe, uncertain and fearful, we trigger a chemical response of stress hormones that signal our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) causing us to protect, defend and shut down. This is the state associated with being emotionally hijacked. When we’re feeling defensive, we’re less likely to be curious and open to input from others. This makes creative problem solving nearly impossible. We all have this biological impulse from time to time. How we choose to handle our emotions when triggered will influence the quality of our relationships and our ability to effectively collaborate.
2. Psychologically safe environments matter
Psychological safety is about how we treat one another as we work together. It turns out this is a pretty important component of high performing teams. When people feel safe to ask questions, raise concerns and own their mistakes without fear of backlash it instills a sense of trust that is necessary for effective collaboration. As mentioned earlier, we are always scanning our environment for signals of safety or threat. When threatened we produce a chemical response that influences our ability to effectively collaborate. Creating environments that trigger a sense of safety will greatly increase innovative thinking, work satisfaction and trust because the environment supports the “feel good” chemical response amongst team members. Cultivating a psychologically safe environment requires us to be clear about what our intentions are. Since we are social animals with a social brain we are constantly exchanging information with one another on an unconscious level. If someone’s words are incongruent with their body language we may not fully trust their intention. By clearly stating and signaling intent, trust can be established.
Several years ago, Google conducted a research study known as Project Aristotle. The intent was to identify the key elements of high performing teams. Their results concluded that psychological safety is one of the most important aspects to whether a team performed well. They didn’t conclude that there is a step-by-step recipe for success. Rather it’s the ability of each team to negotiate the relationship dynamics of the team members, their unique personalities, expectations and interests. Teams that felt safe to take risks and own their mistakes were more innovative and collaborative.
Recently, I was facilitating a collaborative skills training for 26 high-performing scientists from around the world who were having issues working together. It became very clear early on that it wasn’t a psychologically safe environment. Many of them had reported shutting down because they were tired of constant confrontation when they shared their ideas. Rather than harnessing the power of the brilliant minds at the table, everyone grew defensive and either attacked one another (fight) or shut down (flight/freeze). Working within a highly interdependent system with a lot at stake, it was imperative they learned new strategies for communicating with one another; not a one-and-done, quick fix strategy, but a mindset shift towards building high-trust, long-term relationships. By acknowledging their own flavor of defensiveness, how fear plays a role in triggering this response and how they can be more deliberate in creating an environment for others to feel safe, the team began to problem solve from a place of curiosity and self-accountability that led to some amazing results in a very short amount of time.
Let’s face it, humans are messy little creatures. We constantly bump into one another, misunderstand and misinterpret. Part of what I want to bring into your awareness is that most of our relational interactions are left to our autopilot response system. We do things out of habit. We do things the way we’ve always done them. But collaboration requires awareness of self and others, self-accountability, openness, and a genuine intention to be collaborative. Without these human elements, we will continue to point fingers at one another and limit our creativity, aliveness and joy.
If you’re fed up with the way things have been, then it’s up to you to do what is in your power to make a change.
The first step is acknowledging how defensiveness shows up for you and taking steps to bring your full brain back online.
Here are some simple suggestions for how to do this:
Take a few deep breaths with a longer exhale. This triggers the “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system by way of the vagus nerve reducing your emotionally hijacked response.
Take a “time out”. Go for a walk. Agree to resume conversation when you’re more present and able to be more curious about the interests of all stakeholders.
Write in a journal. A simple format for unhooking your hot buttons is as follows: (1) State the facts and the feelings of the situation, (2) write down the story you are telling yourself about what the other person might think of you, and (3) explore the underlying fear that led to your defensive response.
Remember, all defensiveness stems from fear. Conflict arises when we don’t want to feel the fear so we project it outward, blaming the other person for our discomfort rather than being curious about what is going on within ourselves.
The second step requires you to acknowledge how your presence either produces a sense safety or threat for others. How can you be more intentional in the way you communicate with others so they understand on a biological level you can be trusted and want to collaborate?
Try on the mindset below and see how it impacts your working relationships.
I care about my success and yours. Explore ways you can communicate this intention to others.
I’m willing to be accountable for my defenses in order to maintain a high-trust working relationship.
I own that I’m not perfect. I will make mistakes and so will you. How can we support each other in an open and honest way that helps to find creative solutions rather than play the blame game?
I commit to speaking directly when I have a concern, checking my assumptions along the way.
I am genuinely curious about your perspective and recognize we might have different models of the world — and that is OK.
I’m mindful about the energy and mindset I bring to the table because I recognize that my presence impacts the group as a whole — emotions are contagious!
Each one of us has the capacity to lift one another up, improve our own relational skill sets and harness the sense aliveness within the workplace we so desire. The downside of not doing so is costly to your health, happiness and the bottom line. May you choose to become a deliberate, conscious human being for the sake of all humanity. Cheers!
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