What’s your collaboration style?

What’s the connection between a collaboration strategy and a diet plan? Both seem to be surrounded by plenty of advice and opinion. Both are healthy aspirations – for business and life.

But if either doesn’t recognize and support the way we behave as individuals or even what motivates us, then they can both be difficult to adopt and sustain.

If the definition of collaboration is people coming together to share and work on common goals and interests, then it’s a behavior that transcends professional and personal life. When we collaborate, we often achieve more than we can on our own – and that’s what motivates us to do it.

The combination of social media and the proliferation of apps and mobile devices in our personal lives means we’re all collaborating more often with more people. And because collaboration is an innate human behavior, it’s not confined to the post-Baby Boomer, tech-savvy Generation X or Y.

How can we be great when we collaborate?

Collaboration itself doesn’t have a generic purpose or method.

Getting things done more efficiently, more accurately, or more quickly by involving others is not the same as inviting diverse opinions and managing the spontaneity and potential chaos of a brainstorming session.

Sometimes, collaboration is asynchronous with one party transmitting more than receiving. Sometimes it’s synchronous with an equal flow from all parties.

With the ability to record and distribute co-working sessions, presentations, brainstorms, or project management meetings, collaboration can be a real-time event or time shifted to suit other participants or essential contributors. It may be two people working thousands of miles apart on the same document or two hundred people joining a webinar, presented and controlled by a small panel of people.

In the business environment, advanced collaboration solutions have come a long way since the days when video conferencing systems were confined to company board rooms and gathered more dust than users. We now have collaboration solutions that are capable of recognizing and supporting different behavior, work styles, and preferences – enabling us individually and collectively to be great when we collaborate.

When you use technology to collaborate in your personal or professional life, what are your preferences? What’s essential to the way you work and how do your choices say something about you?

Also, learn how AT&T Office@Hand fits into your current network infrastructure and adapts easily, helping you reduce costs and management overhead.