Collaboration is Key to Fulfillment in Relationships
Do your relationships feel collaborative or combative? If you’re not sure, ask yourself if you feel mostly fulfilled or frequently frustrated after interacting with a particular person. Your answer to that question says a lot about whether or not that particular relationship is a collaborative one that has the potential to thrive long-term.
This doesn’t mean you never experience conflicts in the relationship. However, if you feel resistance or even dread toward any of your working, friendship, or family relationships, it's probably because it’s not a very collaborative relationship - and that’s why working or engaging with them isn't a fun or fulfilling experience.
In this blog, you’ll learn how to collaborate more effectively in your relationships so that you get the outcomes and fulfilling experiences you want. Also, if an individual doesn’t have the capacity to be in a collaborative relationship with you or on a team you’re leading, it’s important that you place yourself in the position to figure that out sooner than later.
What is Collaboration?
Collaboration is all about working together. Author and Relationship expert, Dr. Gay Hendricks, describes collaboration as, “a working practice where individuals work together for a common purpose”. While in the past, the idea of “healthy competition” may have been considered the norm, studies show that individual and team productivity, camaraderie, and results are much better in more collaborative environments and the individuals in those environments are happier and healthier from a mental and emotional health perspective. Nowadays, business is much more about embracing collaboration - which is working together toward a result that is bigger than its constituent parts. Within the context of personal relationships, I often refer to this as Co-Creation which is one of the primary and most fulfilling purposes of relationships.
Why Collaboration Matters
Collaboration is a requirement of the most fulfilling and engaging relationships and is imperative to long-term success in both business and personal relationships. In high-stakes and in crisis situations, individuals ability to collaborate with one another in a manner that leverages their strengths, expertise, leadership abilities, and unique perspectives to solve complex problems can have long-term implications in the ecosystem of a workplace team or family unit.
When the ability to collaborate breaks down, stressful situations and crisis create anxiety and lead to communication breakdowns. Trust starts to erode as individuals mindset starts to shift from believing “We’re in this together!”, to “I’m better off alone!”. The desire to bring things under control creates a myopic perspective in each person. They may begin to hoard resources as their focus turns into self-preservation and individuals become increasingly rigid or combative in their interactions with one another as respect diminishes as well. These relationships and teams eventually fail, leaving family members, friend groups, and organizations in shambles.
“When collaboration is great, whether it’s business or personal, it’s almost the best thing you can do with the lights on! However, when collaboration goes badly… the results are disastrous.”
Oftentimes, when people show up resistant, rigid, combative, and generally uncollaborative in any personal or business context, it is very easy to project blame onto them - they are wrong, their attitude sucks, their perspective in unrealistic, they don’t know what they’re talking about - but resist the urge to blame! If you are in a position of leadership or if the relationship you are struggling with is your romantic partner, child, business partner, or someone else that you have a vested interest in having a working relationship with - it’s time to engage in relationship building or repair and that means it’s time to look within yourself - and take more personal responsibility.
Check Yourself
Ok, this one is tough, but it needs to be addressed if you’re going to have a real opportunity at not only improving your relationships with others but at improving your own life! So what does it mean to check yourself? Well, it means before blaming, which is projecting your frustrations and limitations onto others, you pause to look within and self-examine how you are contributing to your own undesirable experience and ask what you can learn about yourself from it. Consider examining:
Your Expectations: Have you stopped to consider what expectations you are placing on the people you’re in relationship with? Are they clear? Are they reasonable? Most importantly, have you clearly communicated your expectations to them? Disappointments in relationships are most often a result of uncommunicated expectations.
Your Need to be Right: When initially asked, most people don’t believe they have a need to be right. Yet, they are being met with resistance, rigidity, and combativeness in relationships that are frustrating and uncollaborative. So how do you know if you have a need to be right?
you consistently correct others on even trivial or irrelevant issues
you need to have the last word
you believe there is strictly a right way and a wrong way to do things - and that you know the right way or are the only one who can/will do it right
you re-do other peoples work or chores because they didn’t do it to your preference or standards
you find yourself spending significant amounts of time wondering why another person is the way they are or wishing they’d be different to your benefit, if only…
If you see yourself in any of the aforementioned, consider who you would be and how you would show up in your relationships if you didn’t believe that you needed to be right, that your way was the only way, or that others should change to align themselves with your desires. My guess is that you’d be a person who’d experience much more personal freedom, more fun and fulfillment in your relationships, and a lot less frustration and disappointment in others.
How do I Create Collaborative Relationships?
Intentionality
Collaborative relationships are not created by accident. In the initial stages of a relationship, it’s important to set an appropriate tone so that it is clear to the parties:
who is taking on certain roles or responsibilities?
what are some shared desired outcomes? Where do we diverge in what we think is the best way to go about co-creating shared desired outcomes? Can our differences be reconciled?
what are some ground rules or agreements we can make that will help us manage conflict and keep the lines of communication open?
Common Vision
If you’re in a leadership role within the context of a relationship or team, creating more collaboration requires you to share your vision for the organization, team, or relationship. In addition to sharing your vision - you must share EXACTLY how you see the other person or people fitting into the vision invite them into the opportunity to utilize their strengths to support the vision to achieve a shared outcome.
In relationships where you are operating in co-leadership such as friendships and in some contexts within intimate partnerships, this is a fantastic opportunity to do some future-visioning and co-create a shared vision for the direction of the relationship.
Rapport and Trust
Taking the time to establish more rapport and trust in your relationships will pay off over and over again as you become increasingly collaborative and start to experience synergy and flow. It takes work and commitment but is worth it as the experience is priceless.
Meet One-on-One: Meet in a neutral setting. Spend quality time having conversations unrelated to work or what “needs to get done”. The goal is simply to get to know one another on a deeper level (build emotional depth and intimacy).
Over-Communicate: Don’t assume that because you said it once that it was sufficiently clear, or assume that a person should remember, or that you should never have to reiterate or repeat yourself. See it as a courtesy and speak more often, leave notes, send emails, put it on their calendar. ASK them how they want to receive information.
Keep Your Promises: Say what you’re going to do, and do what you said you would. Period. If your words don’t match your actions, it’s only a matter of time before you lose credibility, respect, trust, rapport, and eventually, the relationship.
Capitalize on Strengths: Openly discuss and prioritize your strengths as individuals and how you can each leverage your strengths in pursuit of a shared vision and common desired outcomes. Be honest about where you do not have strengths to leverage or prefer not to contribute to the team or relationship and negotiate as needed.
Recognize & Celebrate: Recognize one another for your accomplishments and celebrate them in a way that’s meaningful for each individual. ASK people how they prefer to be recognized and celebrated and what would be meaningful for them
If you’re looking for a place to find like-minded individuals where you can build collaborative relationships and get support for your relationship and business pain-points, become a member of the Edgy Entrepreneur Community on Facebook and join us for Unf*ck Your Mindset Friday at 12:30pm EST on April 8th where we’ll discuss this topic in more detail, answer your questions, and help you unpack this further so that you can experience the fulfillment of healthy and collaborative relationships and teams.
Stay Edgy-
Coach Oriana Guevára, MHR, MBA
Co-Founder, The Edgy Entrepreneur
© Edgy Entrepreneur, LLC. • 51 E. Jefferson St. #3292, Orlando, FL 32802 • www.edgyentrepreneurs.com
