“The importance of collaboration in the workplace” written by Simpplr Marketing is an insightful read that recently came up on my LinkedIn stream. The article inspired the writing of this message and triggered my curious interest in learning about approaches for “collaboration”, “cooperation”, and “partnership” especially in the research community. Naturally, I queried Google and found a generous number of readings about the importance of all three practices.
Beginning with the basics, the Cambridge Dictionary defines the three words as follows:
Collaboration: the act of working together with other people or organizations to create or achieve something.
Cooperation: the process of working with another company, organization, or country in order to achieve something.
Partnership: an agreement between organizations, people, etc. to work together.
It has become a reoccurring pattern that, more than ever before, today’s work environments are challenged with the most complex problems, the biggest competition, and the highest expectations to return prominent results across departments, organizations, and even at the individual levels; in the shortest time. It has been settled that such undertakings can only be achieved by bringing talented people together and affording them the resources and conditions to deliver the best outcomes.
There is a notable rise in practices such as team building, culture and behavior alignment, brainstorming meetings, information sharing, ideation exchanges and workshops, and open creation of connection forums such as the RC3 weekly TGIT events. Such engagements have contributed effectively to the success of many organizations in achieving their goals. Fortunately, the channels of communication have never been more, and wider, than in recent times with all the technological enablers as well as the many open-learning and knowledge-sharing options.
There are essential protocols for improving the opportunities for collaborations, cooperation, and partnerships for individuals, among teams, and across organizations such as: setting a clear vision, direction and goals, building diversely skilled teams, understanding the strengths and constraints of the participants, adjusting with the flexibility to accommodate changes, balancing the workloads and giving a chance to everyone to contribute fairly while incentivizing and rewarding thoughtfulness in teamwork, and always moving forward.