Mixed feelings about collaboration?

As I talked about in the last blog, there’s an incredible range of outcomes associated with collaborations that sizzle versus fizzle. Given that range, it’s no surprise that a lot of people hold mixed feelings about collaboration.

What about you? What three words or phrases best describe your thoughts and feelings about workplace collaboration?

I ask this same question of participants in my collaboration workshops, on social media to generate interesting discussion, of strangers who ask what I do for a living, and of participants in my research.

Many people share a mix of positive and negative words and phrases. Alongside positive descriptors such as “opportunity,” “success,” “essential,” and “potential,” people share negative descriptors like “scary,” “risky,” “apprehension,” and “painful.”

Self-report data from varied samples echo this mixed sentiment.

In Spring 2021, I teamed up with College Pulse, an online survey and analytics company, to ask a representative sample of 500 current college students their opinions on team-based class projects. The data, originally published by Hechinger Report, showed that nearly half (49 percent) of the students characterized their feelings about team-based class projects as either “somewhat negative” or “very negative”; only 2 percent felt “very positive.”

Among the 1,100 participants in my Workplace Collaboration Survey, 72% reported having been in at least one collaboration that was “absolutely horrendous.” Thankfully, 85% report having been in at least one that was “absolutely incredible.” This means, of course, that most people (63%, in fact) have experienced both the highs and the lows of workplace collaboration.

Participants in the Workplace Collaboration Survey also had mixed feelings about the people with whom they collaborate. When asked to rate their collaborative relationship on a visual analog scale that corresponded with values from 0 to 100, where 0 equaled “collaborHATE” and 100 equaled “collaborGREAT,” respondents used the full range of the scale.

In other words, a whole lot of people out there have mixed feelings about collaboration. They know it is ripe with potential and that it can be incredibly rewarding. And they know it can also be an incredible burden, ripe with headache and heartache.

If you likewise have mixed feelings about collaboration, welcome to the club. You’re not broken–you’re experienced. The good news? Collaboration isn’t a personality trait or a roll of the dice. It’s a set of skills, structures, and cultural norms that can be strengthened. If you’d like support turning collaborHATE into collaborGREAT–whether through a keynote, workshop, or consulting engagement–I’d be glad to help. Don’t stay stuck in ambivalence. It is possible to do together better.