A recent survey conducted jointly by Mitch Ditkoff and Tim Moore of Idea Champions, Carolyn Allen of Innovation Solution Center and Dave Pollard of Meeting of Minds reveals that most people would rather have inexperienced people with a positive attitude than highly experienced people who lack enthusiasm, candor or commitment, on a collaborative work team.

Photo credit: Mac Brown

Two criteria, enthusiasm for the subject of the collaboration, and open-mindedness and curiosity, are rated as the most important criteria by virtually all segments of respondents.

More than half of all respondents rated these qualities as indispensable in a collaboration partner.

By contrast, five experience-related criteria (proven trustworthiness, collaboration experience, previous familiarity with other members of the team, reputation in the field of the collaboration, and business experience), rate at or near the bottom of the 39 criteria assessed by participants.

Candor, courage and timeliness of follow-through are also rated very important qualities in a collaborator, along with strong listening, feedback and self-management skills and diversity of ideas.

These findings, most of which are based on responses from experienced collaborators, seem to suggest that just about any group of appropriately motivated people can be effective collaborators, and that good collaboration is more art, and perhaps chemistry, than science.

The report also contains the full transcript of a wiki-based conversation among the authors which shed insight and advice on critical and often overlooked successful collaboration factors.

In order to make the results of this survey even more valuable to readers, the writers have in fact decided to provide some insight not only into who are the best collaborators, but how one can better conduct collaborative activities.

Rather than conducting another survey, they decided to tap their collective (and collaborative) experience as collaborators, and concluded that the best way to relate this was through a conversation among themselves.

A total of 108 people responded to the survey, which asked participants to rate 39 criteria for selection of collaboration teammates on a scale of 1 (not relevant) to 5 (indispensable).

The authors were also somewhat surprised by the final findings, since their collective past experience suggested that well-facilitated collaborations employing trained collaborators can have a powerful advantage over self-managed, untrained groups.

In reality, through the survey they have found out that trained, facilitated teams achieve more creative breakthroughs, faster, and are more likely to achieve extraordinary results, accomplishing things as a team that the individuals working individually could never have achieved.

In the report, which I strongly invite you to read in full, evidence suggests that we are normally, instinctively, cooperative, rather than competitive. It takes a lot of indoctrination to drive that out of us.

"It is less clear whether we are instinctively collaborative, rather than inclined to work alone."

Collaboration can be hard work, since it requires us to think outside our 'frames' and see things from others' perspectives.

In creative work, especially, collaboration can cause conflict that goes beyond creative friction to anger and intolerance.

Dave Pollard's own observations derived from 27 years of work in large organizations suggest that we collaborate effectively when we have to, when we know for a fact that collaboration will achieve better results than each of us working alone would accomplish.

To some extent that is the message that this survey gives us: Attitude is most important, and if we believe collaboration will succeed, it will, and if we don't, regardless of our group's skill, experience, and personality, it won't.

A new wiki by Mark Elliott called MetaCollab proposes to "create a continuously developing repository of knowledge surrounding collaboration". It is focused on the collaboration processes used in many different environments. Mitch, Carolyn, Tim and Dave Pollard have announced that they will be contributing to the wiki to continue the investigations we have begun in this report.

A recent study by Ken Thompson and Robin Good suggests that high-performance teams believe seven things:

1) That each member of the team is accountable,

2) trustworthy & competent,

3) willing to give & take,

4) honest and open,

5) willing to share credit & responsibility for the results,

6) optimistic about the outcome of the project, and

7) that their collective mission is important.

Read the full report:
The Ideal Collaborative Team AND A Conversation on the Collaborative Process