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Collaborative People Skills: Manage Your Energy

One of the important collaborative people skills is managing and blending our energy with others. Collaboration happens not only on structured teams but also on ad hoc teams where people don’t know each other as well. In these moments, others might see our unchecked energy as annoying nervousness or a desire to dominate.

Collaborative People Skills: Share Energy vs Nerves. Image by Sean MacIntee

Sean MacIntee via Flickr Creative Commons License.

Collaborative People Skills: Share Your Energy Not Your Nerves

To avoid having your energy seen as uncontrolled nerves or dominance:

• Know your own personality type and adapt to others. Every type, drivers, analystics, expressives, and amiables can run over the others with extreme behaviors.




• Understand the collaborative goals and work toward them. If you step out too far ahead and act independently, others may label you as non-collaborative and seeking dominance. Collaborative people skills are the tools to showing initiative while collaborating.




• Clarify what you don’t understand before you act. Rushing ahead, taking action, and then asking why and how, make you seem nervous, erratic, and a royal pain to work with. Your collaborators don’t want to chase a runaway train i.e. you.




• Communicate don’t dump. Lack of communication will earn you the label of maverick lone wolf. Certainly not a collaborator. Likewise, too much talking and not enough listening will seem like nervous dumping. Collaborative people skills hinge on great communication skills: listening, paraphrasing, questioning, and speaking. TIP: Ask yourself, am I inviting other’s ideas or simply telling them mine?




• Be self-aware. If you have very high energy, tell collaborators at the start. Give them permission to tell you if your energy runneth over. Adapt at that point, learn from it, and moderate going forward.

The common element to these collaborative people skills steps is respect for differences. It all flows from the belief that collaborating takes you further than going it alone. To live that belief, manage and blend your energy with others.

Related Post:
The 12 People Skills You Need to Succeed Without Authority
Collaborative People Skills: Are You Someone Others Want to Work With?
21 Reasons People Don’t Automatically Get Along

©2016 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission and guidelines. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

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Tags: collaboration, communication, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, listening, people skills, Soft Skills, Teamwork