Creating a Collaborative Culture

The modern day workplace has to be the greatest social experiment of all time. People from diverse backgrounds working together to achieve a shared vision of moving the business forward. Except it’s not that cut and dry. Beyond the organizational agenda lies human interests and needs that can either be supported by an organizations culture or undermined by defensiveness and distrust. Every individual comes to the workplace with a set of beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behavioral patterns. Harnessing this rich diversity to foster innovation requires essential relational skills that are often lacking in our technical training.

Here’s a simple breakdown of how things can go wrong when we lack the soft-skills to collaborate:

• Organizations are made up of people.
• People drive outcomes.
• Outcomes can be sabotaged by bad attitudes and poor relationships.
• Poor relationships can lead to the inability to collaborate and in turn create environments of fear and distrust.
• Distrust leads to toxicity in the workplace and creates a culture that crushes the human spirit and creativity.
• Crushing the human spirit sabotages an organizations progress forward because people become emotionally checked out.
• The inability to move…