No man is an island, and no business can succeed without teamwork. Having more hands involved in your company provides greater opportunities for growth, and branching out to like-minded businesses for different projects can boost both companies’ capabilities — mutually increasing your reach. Forbes recommends businesses prioritize collaboration, as this form of teamwork can help forge new ideas, distribute risk management, and provide customers with an enhanced experience. While it’s essential to choose the right collaborators, businesses should also take the steps to encourage a positive mindset for working together. If you’re looking to improve collaboration between organizations, here are some ways businesses can work to succeed:
Ensuring aligned values and expectations
Before starting a collaboration, it’s important to ensure that brand values, mission, and goals align with each other. Setting expectations is also essential for making sure both companies are working for their fair share of benefits. As reported by Mission.org on Red Bull and GoPro’s co-marketing, their shared vision led to an outstanding initiative. Both were interconnected through storytelling, with the energy drink fueling different athletes and adventures and the action captured by the cameras and tools. Furthermore, this was set to be a co-marketing collaboration, rather than a co-branding option, which is a logical approach considering their products. Setting a strong foundation in direction and views is key to a successful collaboration.
Investing in soft skills
Without any soft skills, it’s almost impossible to get collaborative ideas off the ground. An article on soft skills from LHH highlights how this is an enduring workplace trend, being important — if not the most important — set of tools in your arsenal. Soft skills like active listening and empathy are great behaviors to adapt in the workplace, allowing you to remain focused on others’ perspectives and learn more about the challenges they face. This is especially important when working with people outside your company, as certain individuals may not necessarily present good ideas out of fear of judgment. By showing that you’re interested in what they are presenting, you can learn new things and find inspirations for projects.
Working for mutual success through goal-setting
When businesses collaborate, they are both working for shared success. As mentioned earlier, setting expectations is a key part of collaboration. Having set goals is also essential in setting a good direction for both businesses’ approaches. Our post “With Elton John, Britney Spears Releases First New Song Since 2016” reports how Britney Spears released her first song in six years by working with big-time music legend, Elton John. This collaboration not only boosted Spears’ influence again, but also allowed John to bring some of his own classic songs back into mainstream music. Being able to tie key goals into projects can ensure that collaboration is a win-win situation.
Communicating clearly during planning and execution
Even with aligned goals and targets, a project will still fail without proper communication. With the advent of work-from-home setups, online communication has become imperative as part of teamwork. Businesses should maximize work communication tools like Slack, organizing important details, files, and other information into different channels while making it easy to acknowledge public details and contact individual members. The added benefit of these communication outlets is that you can also have channels about subjects beyond work, allowing team members to unite and share positive experiences or funny jokes to lighten the mood. Through effective communication, businesses can work together towards success.
