Conscious Collaboration: Essential Business Skills & Beliefs | #PeopleSkills

When leaders and employees in business choose conscious collaboration, they succeed. When they focus on individuals doing their jobs, their success is less. So what does it take for leaders, managers, and employees to consciously choose to collaborate?



Conscious collaboration: Image is sign with those two words in it.

Conscious Collaboration Requires These Essential Business Skills & Beliefs. Image by Ron Mader via Flickr Creative Commons License.

Image by Ron Mader via Flickr Creative Commons License.


Conscious Collaboration: Essential for Business Success

When leaders/managers regularly collaborate with employees, employees learn how to collaborate with each other. Sounds simple, right? It can be. Yet, there are many things that get in the way.

What Gets in the Way of Collaboration?

  • Fears that collaborating undermines your authority. It doesn’t.

  • The need to be in charge. This applies to everyone, not just leaders and managers.

  • Thinking you know more than others. Yet, each person has talents to contribute. This breeds business success.

  • Focusing purely on the end result and metrics. These folks see collaboration as a detour. It isn’t.

  • Too much short term thinking. When you see the short term goals and tangible steps, you are more likely to say, I’ll just do it. It’s feels good to get things done. Yet if you step back and see the bigger picture, you will more likely collaborate to get there.

  • Wondering who owns the result. If you collaborate and the project fails, does everyone share the failure? This is a big obstacle to collaboration.


Examples of Conscious Collaboration

  • Leaders engaging employees. Great leaders ask engaging questions and listen to the employees ideas, concerns, solutions.

  • Managers who use collaborative coaching style with employees. Picture a call center where the manager reviews calls and then creates a list of things the agent did well and what the agent needs to do differently next time. Agents start to feel like rats in a maze as they are constantly critiqued. BUT, if the manager asks the agent what they think they did well and what they would change next time, the agent feels like they own their own improvement.

  • A frontline customer service professional who is OK with questions and welcomes customer effort. They create great customer experience as they interact with the customer. Those who smile but resist collaboration bring customer experience down.


Essentials Skills & Beliefs for Conscious Collaboration



  1. Understanding different personality types. To collaborate, you must understand the differences, respect the differences, and find the fit. For example, don’t assume that someone who initiates collaboration and talks a lot is weak and nervous. They aren’t. They are most likely expressive personality type.

  2. Self-awareness, self-moderation, and self-esteem. The first gives you insight into how you come across to others. Then the second gives you the ability to control your extremes. The third allows you to hear criticism of your ideas without feeling rejected.

  3. Desire to learn and grow with and from others. Lifelong learners are often great collaborators.

  4. Listening. Listening for ideas that trigger new ideas in you. This is far better than trying to prove your idea is the best one. Listen also for how the collaboration is going. Every person can help keep the collaboration healthy and alive.

  5. Asking great open-ended questions. How, what, what if, when, where, are critical question starters if you want to collaborate well.

  6. Beliefs

  7. Everyone matters. Collaborating taps everyone’s insights and lets them know they matter.

  8. Win/win is better than either/or thinking. Great collaborators don’t see other’s great ideas as a threat to their identity or success.

  9. Tapping and honoring everyone’s talents, leads morale. Although collaboration itself has creative friction and tough moments, it still feeds good morale.

  10. Leaders must help managers collaborate with employees. Managers sometimes resist collaborating with employees because the managers are focused so much on short term metrics and goals. Yet, leaders can show managers how to get out of the weeds and see the bigger picture.

  11. Natural collaborators are not weak. They are just as strong as natural competitors. They just get to the finish line in a different way. For more collaboration in your organization, you must embrace this belief.


Call to Action

Take time to think about your beliefs about collaboration. Think of situations where you can see now that you resisted it in the past. Develop the skills noted above to be great at collaboration. It will distinguish you and your organization and create great success.



Here’s your chance to collaborate right now! Add to the above list of essential beliefs and skills.




From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
20 Common People Skills Mistakes That Drive People Apart
Ego Actions That Stifle Collaboration

©2022 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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