Three keys for better team collaboration

Teams that collaborate well do three things:

1. They share a vision

2. They include everyone

3. They trust each other

Collaborative teams share a vision

When you collaborate, you work together on the same thing. That means you need to share a vision about what that thing is.

Now, shared vision isn’t a binary thing. It’s not whether you do or do not share a vision. It’s a matter of degrees. How much of your vision is shared among team members.

When you don’t share the same vision, team members work on the wrong things and do things the wrong way. Everyone’s rowing in different directions and your little boat goes nowhere. Teams that share more vision work on the right things and make coherent decisions. Everyone’s rowing the same way and your little boat moves in that direction.

So, how do you get to a shared vision? You share things.

When you share a sketch or a wireframe, you’re sharing your understading of the interface with your teammates. They can see it, ask questions, disagree, change it, and most of all, discuss. Talking together brings everyrone closer to a shared vision.

When you share personas, you share your understanding of your users. When you share jourmeys and flows, you share your understanding of how the user moves through your system.

Share stuff and talk about stuff to build shared vision.

Collaborative teams include everyone

Collaboration means working together, and that means everyone contributes to the work. Especially if you work across silos, you can’t build shared vision unless you include everyone.

Including someone is a sign of respect. To include everyone, you have to listen to everyone. You have to ask everyone’s feedback. You have to ask if anyone has any questions. Or issues. Or disagrees.

This also means you have to care about what your teammates care about. If you think the interaction design is super important, good for you. Worry about that. But you also have to care about what’s important to your project manager and your developer. Their thoughts about timeline or feasibility are just as important as your thought about the interaction design.

When you include everyone, you collect the team’s perspectives and fold them into the team’s shared vision. When you include everyone, you work as a team. You collaborate.

Collaborative teams trust everyone

To work together, you have to treat everyone on the team with respect. Note, I didn’t say you needed to respect everyone. Hopefully you do. You should. But if you have some chip on your shoulder or a grudge with someone on your team, keep it to yourself. That’s your problem. Don’t make it a team problem.

Respecting someone means you trust their decisions. You’ve included everyone. Requested feedback and criticism, elicited viewpoints and opinions, now you need to trust what everyone said. That doesn’t mean people won’t disagree. Of course they will. Collaboration unfolds as the team works through those conflicts to reach a decision everyone agrees on.

Collaboration builds better products

You don’t own the product’s experience. That ownership is shared by everyone who contributes to getting the product out the door. If you want to build really great products, you have to help your team work better together. Better collaboration isn’t a secret or a set of rituals. It’s easy behaviors you can put into practice starting today. Share things, include everyone, and trust everyone.