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Growing a business requires you to collaborate, both internally and externally.  So you should be facilitating employees in a way that allows them to work together to problem-solve and act with a shared purpose.  And this applies even more so to remote or interstate teams.

Starting and growing a business requires more than employees with extensive functional skills.  You need to be on the same page.  You need to collaborate.

When this occurs, employees come to leverage the strengths of one another as they work to achieve shared objectives vital to the company’s growth.

As collaboration occurs, teams leverage individual differences to produce exceptional outcomes. This knowledge sharing creates a learning enterprise in which employees more readily identify solutions to problems. As a consequence, the company may become more operationally and financially successful.

5 reasons you need to stop and collaborate, rather than have your staff compete against each other:

1. Makes the Best Use of Available Skills

You always want the best person to do the job.  But what if the best person was actually two people to work together, using a cross combination of their skills  Collaboration allows that cross pollination to happen.  With collaboration, tasks are completed more efficiently, leaving more time for staff to concentrate on activities that contribute to company growth.

2. Facilitates Problem Solving

No one single person knows all the answers.  And there is nothing more powerful than exploring new viewpoints and different angles  to attack a problem. Collaboration allows a company to throw the most skilled resources at a problem, which may mean a solution is identified more quickly and more cost-effectively than might be possible otherwise.

In addition, diverse and complimentary talent may enhance individual work processes and thinking as each employee becomes a part of a greater whole, which can positively affect a company’s culture. It’s the change in culture that contributes to new thinking, which may lead to new products and new ways to use existing products, each of which contributes to company growth.

3. Leverages Individual Differences

Asking employees with very different skills to collaborate to accomplish an objective leverages individual knowledge, strengths and capabilities and maximises organisational potential. A team is only as good as it’s weakest link – so by sharing knowledge – in effect you are up skilling the weakest link.

Deploying a variety of unique strengths and skills advances a team’s understanding of a problem, which can lead to faster problem scoping and solution formulation, and more effective solutions.

4. Builds Company Knowledge

A group brings different perspectives to a problem at hand.  As individuals share their perspectives, each team member considers problems from multiple viewpoints and the person begins to think like the group.

Likewise, as each individual demonstrates a particular skill, other team members may learn these skills, which will be helpful when attempting to accomplish new goals.

5. Creates a Learning Enterprise

Collaboration provides an opportunity to move beyond learning management systems and content to learning in context, which can be empowering to an entire team.

When two people work together, it’s inevitable that they share knowledge, which contributes to a culture that supports ongoing learning. At the other end of the scale, collaboration creates a safety net that protects a company from a lack of appropriate knowledge.

“Having staff is not about them competing against each other for the solution to an idea. It is about sharing the brainpower to make the solution easier.”

Collaboration is an effective means of problem solving because it allows a business to take advantage of individual employee differences, evaluate employee efforts in the decision process and create a learning hub. When problems are solved more readily, not only are staff happier, but the business has a platform to smash through problems when they arise.