10
Essential Keys to a Successful (and Profitable) Collaboration
Building strong collaborations with
employees, vendors, and customers is critical to your long-term success.
In business, we collaborate with others all the time.
Whether its working with the members of our team, or closing an important deal
with a customer or vendor, or developing a new product or service with a
business partner, building effective collaboration
skills and strategies is key to success in business.
According to Felix Barber
and Michael Goold, business consultants and authors of the book, Collaboration Strategy, "The
greatest concern for most business owners and CEOs, what keeps them awake at
night, is often not their strategy--how to create a compelling customer offer
or how to outsmart the competition--it's how to get people to make that
strategy actually happen."
Getting people to make
something happen in business is a large part of what leadership and being a manager is all about. There are,
however, effective ways to accomplish this goal, and not-so-effective ways. In
their book, Barber and Goold present the following 10 keys for bringing about a
successful--and profitable—collaboration.
1. Creates value
Any successful collaboration creates value both for your
partners, and for you. Be sure that you know exactly what value you are
providing, and that you provide as much as you can within the available
resources.
2. Results in competitive
advantage for you
A successful
collaboration--whether with employees, vendors, customers, or other business
partners--will make your company stronger and more competitive in the
marketplace. This is a time when 1 + 1 = 3.
3. Takes account of your
abilities
When you collaborate with others, you have to know what
you bring to the table--the expertise, experience, and skills that your partner
may lack. At the same time, know your weaknesses. These will be the things you
look for in a good partner.
4. Your partners are able
(and self-motivated)
Just as you must be experienced and skilled, so too must
your partners be experienced and skilled. They should be excited to partner
with you for your mutual benefit.
5. Your partners have no
awkward conflicts of interest
Close collaborations require that conflicts of interest
with other individuals or companies don't intrude in the relationship and trust
that you are building with each other. Do thorough due diligence up front to
avoid the kind of conflicts of interest that can ruin an otherwise successful
collaboration.
6. Your partners do not
have and will not gain too much bargaining power
Ideally, the parties in a collaboration will have roughly
equal bargaining power, that is, no one party can force the other to accept
terms and conditions that are not favorable. It's difficult to build a stable,
long-term collaboration when one party has unequal bargaining power.
7. Set goals and constraints
to measure performance
Each party to the
collaboration needs to be able to set goals for the partnership, and then
measure their progress--and the progress of their partner--toward meeting them.
If there are going to be constraints in the collaboration, they need to be
defined in advance.
8. Align rewards with
performance
Successful collaborations incentivize performance in ways
that reward the parties for achieving specific goals and milestones. This is
true whether you are collaborating with employees, vendors, customers, or other
business partners.
9. Specify favorable terms
To ensure the success of
your collaboration, be prepared to offer favorable terms to the
other party--and expect (and require) the same in return.
10. Meet requirements from
partners' perspective as well as your own
The more of the above nine keys to collaboration you have
working for you, the better. However, in the best-case scenario, you'll meet
all nine--both from your perspective, as well as your partner's.
http://www.inc.com/peter-economy/10-essential-keys-to-a-successful-and-profitable-collaboration.html?cid=em01016week01a
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