Warm up Your Collaborative Muscles

If you think of collaborative skills as muscles, then it follows that they need a little warming up before a get together of your project team or partners.

Unless of course, you’re like the only professional athlete in my family who used to hide behind a tree as the rest of the team did warm up laps around the oval.

He was young, fit and invincible and just wanted to play the game. A bit like people who are new to collaboration.

‘We’re all people, let’s just get into it!’ they say. Then wonder why things might get stalled or go a little pear-shaped.

Last week I did a warm up with a group who were about to get started on some new collaborative projects.

Here’s a short guide to what we did. If you find it useful, let me know and please share.

1. Identify what ‘muscles’ (collaborative skills) need warming up.
Get an understanding of the culture of the group. What sort of collaborative challenges have they encountered? How have these challenges created barriers to progress on collaborations in the past? In this case, it was a range of communication and interpersonal skills. Shutting up, speaking up, inviting participation, choosing the right three letter word and re-framing default negative responses to ones that would keep ideas flowing.

2. Use the talent in the room.
Who might have stories to share? What examples are there from the group to illustrate the benefits of warming up, using and stretching the collaborative muscles under discussion? In our warm up, the room erupted into knowing laughter when one woman said that “yes but is just another way of say NO!”.

3. Work with what you’ve got.
What can you warm up in the time available? What’s possible in the space you have? You can do sprint warm ups if you don’t have an oval. Start small and build up. Conflict, for instance, may be one of the biggest challenges for effective collaboration, but if you’ve only got a short time available, leave warming up muscles to lean into conflict for another training session.

4. Avoid injuries in the warm up.
Keep it light and fun. Give people lots of time to practice. Above all, make it safe for people to have a go. We started gently, built up to the toughest exercise, then wound down. There was variety. We warmed up standing up, moving around the room, in pairs and in small groups. Exercises appealed to different learning styles. And nobody was asked to ‘report back’, show off their strengths or reveal their weaknesses.

5. Revise so they can do it on their own.
A quick visual review to remind us ways to warm up muscles to listen, to speak, to generate ‘our’ ideas and re-framing default responses to keep ideas flowing.

When you’re ready, here are four ways that I can help you get into collaborative shape.

Collaborative Warm Up – a 2-hour workshop for large groups of up to 150 to test, build and stretch collaborative muscle so that they can collaborate better.

Collaborative Coaching – 1:1 and group coaching over three months to strengthen collaborative skills.

Peers Solve Problems – a short workshop for 4 to 10 people. Practise and improve vital collaborative skills such as prioritising, decision-making, listening, speaking up, engaging quieter people, being heard, strategic questioning, re-framing, communicating and synthesising. You have the answers – this process empowers you to uncover them yourselves.

Collaborability Workout – 6-month program that includes a combination of workshops, tailored content and mentoring for organisations.

Reply to this blog with WARM UP in the comments if you’d like to chat!