A continuum of design engagements

Nuances on working together, towards "partnership"

For many years now, I’ve had a working theory borne out of diverse project situations with virtual and local teams, around the notion of collaboration. 🙌🏽

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While collaboration is championed as vital for team and company success, I see it as one point along a continuum of team-based social interactions, each with their own qualities per different contexts or purposes. And I would kindly suggest there’s something more significant than collaboration — partnership — whereby a mutually recognized relationship of interdependent success & failure is deeply embedded in the values, attitudes, conversations, and actions of the partners.

Everyone is in it together, committed to the end, hell or high water, so to speak. 😇

If you think about it, there’s a range of cross-functional relationships that emerge over time. The key factors that guide those relationships include: shared goals, levels of trust, types of engagement, contextual factors such as remote or on-site, critical path dependencies, and even tangible incentives. Such factors can affect whether your team is enjoying basic coordination, cooperation towards a purpose, collaboration on outcomes, or partnership for lasting value. Let’s take a closer look…

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• Coordination: This implies a time-based choreography of activities & resources, to ensure dependencies are satisfied and the critical path of meeting a deadline is secured. It’s really the fundamentals of project management, serving as the minimal bar of team capability to work together. ✅

• Cooperation: This represents another level of team engagement, with some minimally viable trust and respect to achieve accountable, accurate delivery of artifacts for known, stated goals. This involves information sharing & access, leveraging files/content across sources, and fostering feedback and inputs from other people in a respectful, beneficial manner. 🤝

• Collaboration: Ah, the golden sweet spot per mass business literature. 😁 This is where everyone is working together (whether remotely async or in-person live), sharing, discussing, interacting, fully present and committed to project goals for mutual success, solving a problem together. There may arise a shared bond of co-creation and supporting each other with positive team dynamics, with healthy conflict and positive argument, whereby team learning and growth occur, with enthusiasm. 🌟

• Partnership: This is the advanced level, truly involving a long-term, strategic, values-driven, mutually dependent understanding of collective success and risk-taking. Decision-making is fully transparent and informed with full recognition of every teammate’s value. Co-creation, co-planning, co-interpretation of results for strategizing the next round— this is what it means to be partners, with total investment of time + energy for mutually assured sustainable success.💥

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There is one more thing — camaraderie may be that special connective thread necessary for a robust, enduring quality of hospitable engagement.🪡 It’s not about becoming “friends” per se, but generating/harnessing a certain positive chemistry and collective energy, via the presence of others, in a virtuous cycle of building professional, beneficial rapport, with constructive inputs/supportive outputs along the way. I mean, who doesn’t want that? 🤨 Hopefully, this working theory offers a structure and language to think through such an important opportunity for a team wot work together over time, accordingly. 🙏🏽