Do We Teach Collaboration? Nope.

Given collaboration is both difficult and essential, surely we make it a priority to teach people how to do it well, right?

Nope.

Let’s first look at college. When I teamed up with College Pulse to survey 500 current college students in the US, we asked how many major group projects the students had been assigned in that one semester. 35% of the respondents had been assigned three or more such projects.

How much training, if any, had their college had provided for ways to make these team-based projects more effective, enjoyable, or productive. Desperately little.

65% of respondents said they had received no training. Another 22% said they had received “A few minutes” of training.

Gulp. This means that a whopping 87% of college students lack training in a skill that, according to a study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, is highly valued by 93% of employers. These findings resonate with a 2017 survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management in which 80% of HR professionals reported that job applicants fell short on soft skills. Teamwork and collaboration specifically were cited by 30% of these HR professionals as the reason they were having difficulty recruiting talent.

What about beyond college? MBA programs, for example, are notorious for requiring a lot of group-based assignments from students. Perhaps collaboration skills are taught in business school?

Nope.

One business school professor I interviewed for Collabor(h)ate observed, “We throw them into groups and tell them to work together, but we don’t actually give them any tools for how to do that.”

With no training, some people figure out a very light version of working together. The strategy: divide and conquer. The case study has five sections? We’ll each take charge of one, get the info we need for our part and then present. Not surprisingly, the result is often a disjointed mess that lacks the sort of integration and coherence an audience would actually find useful.

As the business school professor noted, “Even if everybody in the group is well motivated and really wants to contribute to the project, I don’t think they have any idea how to work together beyond divide and conquer. And you have limited time, so they probably figured that’s going to save the most time anyway. But the truth is very little of it is actually collaboration. Most of it is just a semi-coordinated team doing modular functions.” He adds, “I actually don't tell them how to do it either. I just say, you know, you're adults. Just do it.”

OK, so what about in the workplace? Perhaps we wait until people enter the workforce before investing in their development as collaborators?

Nope.

31% of those in my Workplace Collaboration Survey said they had received exactly no professional development in how to build healthy and productive collaborative relationships at work. Another 6% said they had received “A few minutes.” 14% said “About an hour.” 23% said “A couple hours” and 26% said “More than a couple hours.” In other words, only roughly a quarter of people report receiving anything approximating substantial training in this critical workplace skill.

Collaboration is critically important, it’s hard to do well, and yet there seems to be a general belief that this is a skill one can just pick up by osmosis via on-the-job training amid a bunch of other professionals who likewise haven’t had any formal training. Like trying to construct an IKEA dresser without the instructions, everyone is feeling their way through the muck. It’s no wonder so many collaborative projects encounter snags, fall flat, or result in good talent heading for the door.

We can do better, but where shall we start?

If you’d like support turning collaborHATE into collaborGREAT–whether through a keynote, workshop, or consulting engagement–I’d be glad to help. It is possible to do together better.