Working Collaboratively and Managing Professional Effectiveness Across Organizations, Teams, Time, and Space
I am launching the Working Collaboratively blog because:
1. Key to 21st century personal, professional, and community effectiveness is the ability to work, live, learn, play (and often think) together better, often across organization and virtual boundaries. Face-to-face and virtual connection, cooperation and collaboration guidelines will be explored in the blog.
2. People, Management and Strategy are interconnected aspects of work and organization effectiveness, requiring strong relationships, collaboration and workplace savvy.
3. An engaged workforce and stakeholder group is critical to delivering the organization’s best product or service. Engagement with employees, contractors, customers, and stakeholders is more critical than ever, yet business relationship loyalties are often quite weak ties, especially in an increasingly virtual and global work in organizations that seldom offer lifelong employment anymore. True employee engagement is seldom achieved and sometimes not even valued in today’s mobile and temporary workforce, putting the system at risk for reasons the blog explains. This blog will share current research, expert knowledge, and client experience to build the strategic and financial case for deep engagement.
4. “Sticky organizations” build loyalty across time, space, and culture. People desire connection and want to contribute to groups and missions they care about, which are bigger than them. For many, work is also about the people. Most people deeply value mutually valuable, respectful relationships at work and in their communities, and to contribute to results they can be proud of. Many people believe expanding emotional bandwidth and building mutual accountability is too challenging in a virtual environment. The blog will show how virtual collaboration that maintains good relationships is not only helpful; it has become a critical success factor in most work teams and cross-organization collaborations that produce successful outcomes.