Female Collaboration: A Superpower in an Age of Remote Work
Motivation is harder in a full-time work-from-home environment, even for the relentless strivers among us. Our interactions tend to be scheduled. We don’t still have the serendipitous hallway meeting. There are no full visual and audio cues while sitting alongside one another.
So how do we help motivate each other remotely? In particular, how can we motivate ourselves not just to meet our day-to-day tactical needs, but step-up to higher-order contributions to help ourselves and our businesses grow?
My recommendation is to focus on Collaboration.
Many of us want to have fewer meetings, not more — but strongly collaborative meetings boost our energy and productivity. So shouldn’t we narrow our focus to a smaller number of meetings, but make them strongly collaborative?
Stanford psychologist Greg Walton’s work has confirmed that “people are powerfully motivated by other people.” Feeling that you are not alone is highly motivating, especially when we’re all working remotely. We need to achieve togetherness psychologically even when we can’t do it physically.
Among women leaders in particular, the ability to foster collaboration is an undervalued strength. I’ve personally worked with many women who are adept at finding a way for disparate personalities and skill sets to work together. They are the antithesis of Yeats’ “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” — we find ways to incorporate various voices so the team doesn’t list towards chaos. Collaboration abilities should be a beachhead for women as we continue to grow in senior leadership positions.
Flashier skills, such as strategic, visionary, risk taker, are regularly called out as keys to great leadership. But collaboration is often unsung — why?
Collaboration is typically identified as a “soft” skill, or personal quality. It’s not necessarily job-related knowledge or expertise. Collaboration comes from a supporting player or enabler, not the mover. — And there is some truth in these assumptions.
But it’s time for Collaboration to take its place as a key contributor to success.
Collaboration and the ability to instill it in others — especially influencing without direct authority — is rarer and more powerful than you might think.
Being skillful at collaboration makes progress look easy, but in fact, it’s not at all easy to promote it. Let’s work to make the art of collaboration more visible, with concrete markers such as:
○ Spell out goal-setting from the outset along with accountability
○ Emphasize the range of voices in a discussion. Are more than one person’s ideas part of the outcome or is a single vision the driver? Will thematic grouping of disparate ideas add richness and/or clarity?
○ Give credit for ideas. Acknowledging special assists invites others to speak up and participate.
○ Plan to socialize outcomes so that the value of the collaboration is visible, from formal notice to ‘elevator pitches’ for the team.
I’m a firm believer that Collaboration leads to Motivation and Engagement — both sorely needed always, but especially during more remote periods of working.
Least you think collaboration is a panacea, we should acknowledge that there are perils to collaborating. Downsides to guard against include:
○ Perceptions of indecisiveness
○ Potential slowing of decision making
○ Giving up one’s personal imprint and — potentially — recognition
One of my richest professional collaborations has been with Jessica Hogue. We’ve worked together in multiple incarnations. Today we work for different companies, but we continue to collaborate, particularly around SHEconomics, our shorthand for the special skills women bring to enrich the business community and how we can amplify them.
Most recently Jessica and I’ve been drilling down into how our collaborations have been successful and how to scale our model. We certainly don’t have all the answers, but by long association and deep trust, we have built a strong, deeply satisfying collaboration. In fact, this article is a tangible example: We challenged each other to write something to commemorate IWD 2021 and Women’s History Month.
We’d love to hear about your own collaborations — what they’ve meant to your careers, your lives and the lives of your collaborators. As a thought starter: How do your female collaborations differ from other types of working groups or coalitions?
Let’s evangelize the importance of Collaboration, especially for women, and work on tools to further build our female leaders’ collaborative muscle. Let’s Collaborate!
