Aboard the learning boat: Expose yourself

It seems funny to ask someone about how good they are at collaboration; especially when they have just asked for funding to do more of it. Based on my recent experience, I’m willing to wager that a very large proportion of NPO bids for Catalyst funding last month featured the word ‘collaboration’ in prominent sections.

Of course it isn’t just the Catalyst fund – collaboration has become a key funding buzzword along with ‘innovation’ and the related ‘partnership working.’ And when you ask people in the arts about their personal plans it crops up again. Whether it’s a creative collaboration, a desire to gain a greater sense of togetherness across different departments, or brokering new links to an external body, collaboration is a recurring theme.

So it is perhaps strange that we are not more used to being asked questions about whether we are any good at it, and how we might get better.

As my enquiry, as part of the Learning Boat project, is precisely: ‘how to be a better collaborator,’ I have been asking all kinds of people about collaboration and how they make it work. What is particularly surprising in many ways is the double standards that occur, in comparison to other important skills – one person was surprised to reflect on their skills as a collaborator, whilst at the same time they booked onto an expensive leadership course.

I’ve come to express it like this: we need to realise that becoming a better collaborator is a lot less like visiting a plastic surgeon, and a lot more like visiting a hairdresser.

Everyone can now see how important collaboration is to their working lives, so it can feel quite exposing to think about ways we could do it better. If you question how good someone is at collaborating what they hear is you questioning them on how good they are at their job.

It is like we’ve identified a fault in them; an ugliness that needs fixing. It is like we’ve suggested they need plastic surgery.

In fact, collaboration is much more like hairdressing. When a hairdresser suggests a cut we don’t think they see our hair as in some way defective. We are pretty comfortable with the idea that we need some help to get it into shape. We are accepting of the fact that a bad hair day doesn’t mean we are congenitally unable to style our hair ever again; we pretty much accept that this is an ongoing thing with hair. And similarly you might need to go back and get your collaborative skills into shape every now and again.

The good news is that once we get past the barrier around the question itself, we can get our teeth stuck into some really interesting ideas to do with what makes a good collaborator. Asking people in very different sectors, it is clear that there is more than one type of good collaboration. At the same time, there are patterns that emerge.

At the moment, it seems to me, there are three types of good collaborator:

• The Maker – the craftsman, who brings real expertise in a particular area. The Maker is a good collaborator because they bring a craft. They might be coders or book-keepers, facilitators or organisers, but they collaborate by contributing a discrete element. The confidence a good Maker has in their abilities rubs off on a project; other people feed off their energy and conviction.
• The Jugaad – the creative improviser. The Jugaad is a good collaborator because they make it work. Jugaad is an Indian word and a big idea – it is about inventiveness, ingenuity, cleverness. The Jugaad thrives on constraints, but not on rules. Jugaads are good collaborators because they can find a work-around to any barrier the project comes up against.
• The Nurturer – the grower. The Nurturer grows ideas and people. They bind people together, but also protect ideas from anything that might hurt them before they have had a chance. It is sometimes hard for outsiders to see what difference a nurturer makes, but once a team loses this person you really see the impact they had.

These three traits keep coming up. And what is really interesting is that asking any of these three types of people to behave like the other – asking a Jugaad to be a nurturer, or expecting the Maker to abandon their precision and just find a solution – will be a disaster. To get the most out of them you need to work with the skills and personalities people have.

So the lesson, on an individual level, is to recognise that the first step to making yourself into a better collaborator is to find out what kind of collaborator you actually are. Asking that can be a little unsettling if, like most people, you haven’t challenged your skills as a collaborator before. However the process could be one kind of catalyst you know you have in the bag.