Top Collaboration Skills for Workplace Success

Developing collaboration skills is a vital part of personal and professional development. Most of us can’t work in complete isolation, and that’s where collaboration skills come in. We’re here today to show you how developing collaboration skills doesn’t have to be difficult (especially with the use of a project management tool and the best time tracking software). Let’s jump in and get started!

What Are Collaboration Skills?

We’ve all heard the phrase “collaboration skills” but do we actually know what it means? Usually, collaboration skills are defined as a set (or several sets rather) of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills that are developed when you’re working with other people to achieve some purpose (usually to create or produce something). Collaboration skills can be hard to specified since a lot of the time they go beyond just co-working. However, frequently we understand collaboration skills as skills that ensure that you contribute to the common cause, manage to co-exist with other members effectively, and generally help to better the team performance.

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Why Collaboration Skills are Crucial for Business Growth

If you think of your company as a machine, training yourself and your employees and colleagues to be better collaborators is like making sure that the machine is well-oiled. Without effective communication and collaboration skills, mistakes can be made, projects can be delayed or driven over budget, and your company simply can’t operate as efficiently as it otherwise might do.

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.

Phil Jackson

Collaboration skills are also increasingly important in our diverse and global working environment. You’ll often find yourself working with people of different backgrounds, and if you don’t have the right skills and time management training, you can find that things are being lost in translation or that you’re inadvertently causing offense.

If you are looking for information on how to create an effective workplace collaboration environment as a team lead, project manager, or executive, you will find this article to be extremely helpful:

As for the rest of us looking to improve our collaboration skills as team members: keep on reading!

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Key Types of Collaboration Skills in the Workplace

Everyone has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. There are, however, some pretty universal ways for anyone to improve their collaboration skills in the following aspects:

• Verbal communication: it can be improved by developing the skill of speaking concisely, remembering and using people’s names, and taking into consideration factors such as your tone of voice and how loudly you’re talking.
• Written communication: you can develop it by paying close attention to the language you use, re-reading everything to check for errors or ambiguous meanings, and even using emoticons to clearly show humor/jokes/irony.
• Nonverbal communication: it can be improved by paying closer attention to body language to the use of mimics and gestures (in face-to-face communication) and diagrams, images, illustrations, even emoticons (in written communication).
• Active listening: can be improved by consciously paying more attention to other people when they speak to you. Most of us have a habit of approaching conversations with the goal of being heard, often thinking about what we’re going to say next. Instead, the goal is to listen more intently to others and to be willing to challenge your preconceptions.
• Emotional intelligence: this is one of the harder skills to perfect and involves being more understanding of both your own emotions and the emotions of others. You can practice it by starting to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Perhaps they’re having a tough time at home, a daunting deadline to meet, or they didn’t get much sleep. 

We see these key collaboration skills in effect whenever teams of two or more people work together on the same project. It’s not uncommon to see two people who are exceptional individual performers who just can’t seem to get results when they work together. When this happens, it’s a breakdown in their communication and collaboration skills.

Collaboration and communication have a strong link. If, like many of us, you’re facing or witnessing more and more challenges in remote team communication, do not miss this article:

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Examples of Collaboration Skills in Action

The ability to successfully collaborate encompasses a whole suite of skills, from interpersonal interactions to a dedication to keeping accurate timesheets and making reliable forecasts. The specific set of skills that you’ll need will vary from company to company, but just a few examples of collaboration skills in practice include:

1. 👉 A team leader places a project’s goals above personal satisfaction and/or recognition, stepping aside from their own ego to do what’s best for the company regardless of their own personal motivations.
2. 👉 A team member refuses to hold a grudge or a rivalry, even when someone else is trying to draw them into a conflict.
3. 👉 A project manager publically recognizes the contributions of their subordinates during a company-wide meeting or when working on an idea board.
4. 👉 A company director acknowledges their missteps and forgives others for making mistakes, encouraging them to learn from those mistakes.
5. 👉 Fifteen team members located in different countries and time zones work together remotely on the same project through a digital collaboration hub.

Managers, team leads, and CEOs among us don’t forget that all-important annual performance review! According to one study, 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important”, and yet only 18% of employees get evaluations of these skills at their performance reviews!

By simply going above and beyond in your annual reviews, you can make your company stand out from the competition and attract more team players to work with you in the first place.

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The Key Team Collaboration Skill: Becoming a Team Player

Ever heard the expression “take one for the team”? There’s a lot of truth to it because sometimes we as individuals have to make sacrifices for the overall good of the team that we belong to. If we want to get technical, we can take a look at game theory and think of business as not being a zero-sum game. In other words, in most situations, multiple people can win.

“Collaboration has no hierarchy. The sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth.”

Amit Ray

Sometimes, when you’re working as part of a team, you have to take on the jobs that nobody wants to do. In our society, we can’t all be movie stars and celebrities; some of us have to collect trash and work in supermarkets.

Taking one for the team doesn’t mean that you should be a pushover, though. It’s all about putting the overall good of the team ahead of any individual wants or desires, and you’ll find that when everyone is working as a team instead of as a collective of different people, the whole company does better as a result of it.

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In Conclusion

Knowing why collaboration skills are important and what those skills are is only half the battle. If you don’t act upon what you’ve learned and put those skills into practice, they’re useless to you, like knowing how to drive but not having a car.

The good news is that collaboration skills are like any other skills in that they can be practiced and honed over time. Your ability to collaborate is like a muscle that grows stronger over time, and you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to exercise it!

If you are managing a team of 5 or more and looking to boost efficiency, Everhour is the perfect tool to keep your team on track. With seamless time tracking, you can easily estimate task durations, set clear budgets, and generate detailed reports inside Asana, Trello, Jira, or any other pm tool.