Organizations use teams to create wealth, market share,
customer service, competitive advantage, and organizational success. Effective teams accomplish their assigned end
goals by engaging in collaboration as a joint learning activity. Enhanced effectiveness is why collaborative
tools are so critical to the project manager, and 7 out of 10 IT professionals
see collaboration
as essential to their organization.
For an information worker operating within a modern team
environment, finding information is relatively easy. Any team member can “google”
to find just about anything. High-performance teams, however, know how to work
together to brainstorm and collaborate on discovering the right questions. That
concept frames the future of collaboration and the project manager’s role. The
most effective project managers use
artificial intelligence (AI) to apply computational approaches to the collaborative
social experience. In laymen’s terms that means using AI to discover the right
questions. Research has shown this approach as a
more robust method of helping
humans solve increasingly complex business problems.
As AI and collaboration technologies enhance and spread intelligence
equally to any worker, machine learning technologies provide just-in-time custom learning based on team needs and the organizational
goals. Collaboration technology should, therefore, also help ease the challenge
of connecting physically remote teams to each other. This critical function allows more interaction, more collective learning, more collaboration, and
more team success. By embracing this new remote collaboration paradigm, project
managers can:
- Identify and engage critical talent independent of their location. This capability improves the manager’s ability to bring complementary skills into a collaborative environment with the broader team;
- Encourage and build healthy relationships with remote team members. Strong relationships are the heart of effective collaboration and leadership;
- Present and communicate a guiding vision to the team. Providing clarity of purpose enhances collaboration;
- Work with local and remote team members to jointly prepare a clear mission objective and define group rules of engagement;
- Connect the project with higher level organizational objectives;
- Create an atmosphere of safety, trust, and respect that, in turn, encourages multiple perspectives, diverse viewpoints, and creativity;
- Make everyone’s ideas and suggestions visible and tangible by building prototypes, or drawing diagrams;
- Provide an easy-to-use infrastructure that enables learning, communication, and collaboration;
- Remove barriers to high performance by nurturing individual brilliance;
- Coach for improved teamwork, emotional intelligence, and navigating difficult conversations;
- Jointly celebrate joint accomplishments; and
- Capture best practices and things that should be avoided.
(List derived from “12
Ways to Enhance Creativity and Collaboration in Teams.”)
This post is brought to you by Cisco and IDG. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Cisco.
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