Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:38: Skills of collaboration
00:02:06: Six skills of collaboration
00:03:28: Action 1: self-assessment
00:04:07: Action 2: create a team profile
00:08:31: Action 3: so what?
00:11:23: Structure of collaboration
00:14:42: Principle 1: be intentional about your collaboration
00:15:45: Principle 2: reinvent the "why" and not the "wheel"
00:16:52: Principle 3: frequent feedback
00:19:13: Action 1: work with the "where" in mind
00:25:50: Action 2: know your needs
00:26:28: Improve work
00:29:28: Self- or team-improvement
00:32:09: Improve relationships
00:35:14: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen Tupper.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Each week we discuss a different topic to do with work and share practical ideas for action to help you and us navigate our Squiggly Careers that little bit better.

This week, we're talking about collaboration.  We're going to start off our conversation talking about the skills of collaboration and then we're going to move on to thinking a bit about the structure of collaboration, specifically thinking a bit about how our ability to work together is going to be impacted by that hybrid world of work that everybody is talking about right now.

So, we're going to start off thinking about the skills of collaboration and this was really inspired by a brilliant article I read by Francesca Gino; she is a professor over at Harvard Business School.  We'll link to that article, because it really is worth a read, in our PodSheet which you can download, and you can sign up for the PodMail where you get everything about the podcast all in one place now, so we hope that's proving useful for everybody. 

One of the things that she says at the very start of the article that really struck me is that, "Collaboration is often approached by organisations as a value to cultivate, rather than a skill to learn".  I think what struck me then is when we talk about something as, "Oh yeah, we should just collaborate better", it feels quite abstract and it's quite hard to know what to do with that, what does that look like, how do we know we've got any better?  Whereas when we think of it as a skill, we know that skills are things that you can learn, practice and improve and it just feels a bit more specific and useful. 

She's worked with lots of really interesting companies all across the world and observed those that collaborate particularly well.  She got to six skills that contribute to teams and organisations that have really high and positive useful collaboration.  So, what we thought we'd do is just summarise those six very quickly and then we're going to talk about how you could take those six and use them to think about how well you collaborate and also how well you collaborate as a team. 

These six skills, and I'm pretty sure there's probably a podcast for each of those six, but I feel like that would be a lot of extra listening; but if you listen to the podcast, I'm sure most of these will make sense to you intuitively.  So, the six skills are: listening, empathy, feedback, leading and following, and I'll just expand on that one a little bit because I think that's probably slightly less straightforward at a glance to understand.  What she means by this is your ability to lead when you need to be and being flexible enough to know when perhaps you're in more follower mode; so having that flexibility around the role that you're playing in a team. 

Number five is communicating with clarity, and number six is looking for win/win objectives and outcomes, so where if you're collaborating maybe cross-functionally or with different teams, you don't approach it as win/lose, you approach collaboration as we're going to share why something is important to you but also search for that common goal, common objective.  They're the six areas: listening, empathy, feedback, leading and following, communicating with clarity and win/win objectives and outcomes.  We've got three actions for you to think about in relation to those six areas; hopefully, quite a quick and straightforward way of getting a sense for how well do you collaborate today and where could you improve? 

So, I thought action 1 could be to start with your own self-assessment of how skilful do you think you are in each of those six areas by ranking them; essentially doing a forced ranking priority where one would be the highest and six is the lowest.  Take those six that I've just talked about, and if you're listening to this and you can scribble down at the same time, just write those down again but put them in the order where you've got at the top the thing that you think you're best at of those six skills and number six would be the one where you think, "Yeah, I know I struggle with that one" or "That's definitely an area of improvement for me".  There, that's about your self-awareness, your self-assessment.

Then I think action 2 could be to create a team profile based on those six traits.  I think this probably takes some psychological safety, because we are asking you to share with other people in your team your own self-assessment, but I think before doing that it would be really interesting to get other people to do that forced ranking exercise for you.  So essentially, you're getting feedback on those six traits, not in terms of people telling lots of anecdotes or more qualitative feedback, but actually in quite a quantitative way. 

If Helen was to rank those six things for me, one to six, what order she would put them in?  She would then share them with me and I could then compare and contrast to my own self-assessment.  So, I appreciate this might feel more realistic for some teams than others, I think you've got to have that confidence and that support for each other.  But to bring it to life, we thought we would have a go at doing this live and we haven't talked about this beforehand.

I'm going to ask Helen to say which of these she would put at number one for me and which she would put at number six, so we're not going to force you to listen to us going through each of them, one to six.  Then I'll share what I would do for myself, and you'll just have to trust that I'm telling the truth, and then obviously we'll switch around because I feel if Helen's going to assess me, obviously I'm going to assess her back!  So, Helen, if you were to look at those one to six, which one do you think would be my number one?

Helen Tupper: I would say empathy.

Sarah Ellis: And I put empathy as well.

Helen Tupper: Oh!

Sarah Ellis: Good news, consistent there between the two of us.  I'll be more interested in this one because I don't know if we'll have the same here, I'll be interested to see.  So, number six, what would you say of those six is the one where you're, "That's probably the one that Sarah needs to work on the most from a collaboration perspective"?

Helen Tupper: Flexing, leading and following.  What did you have?

Sarah Ellis: Do you know, I put that at five, so I wasn't quite sure.  This is where I started to really struggle; I never like doing things that are too binary, so I got into all sorts of different thoughts about making this overcomplicated, but I forced myself to keep with the system.  So, the one that I put at number six was actually feedback, because I think that in the spirit of collaboration, I am better at delivering feedback and I'm good at giving feedback to other people, but I don't think I do a good enough job of asking for it frequently enough and creating that space to get feedback for myself. 

So, again I've put an extra lens on it for myself, because that's just the way that my brain works.  But definitely leading and following I've got at number 5 as well.  If you're a new listener and you're thinking, "Oh, why were Sarah and Helen chuckling away at that?" I think it's because, as we've talked about before, I do really like to be in control; so, leading comes naturally to me and sometimes I have to work a bit harder to take a step back.

Helen Tupper: When you've got two co-founders who both like leading, it sometimes creates leading and following conflict which is always fun.

Sarah Ellis: It does, it does.

Helen Tupper: Go on then, which one would you have at number 1 for me?

Sarah Ellis: I had communicating with clarity.

Helen Tupper: That was the one I put at the top too!

Sarah Ellis: I can't believe I'm clapping at that; we are weirdly excited about getting these right!

Helen Tupper: Even better.

Sarah Ellis: Your number six, so I had also put leading and following.

Helen Tupper: That's so funny!

Sarah Ellis: What had you put?

Helen Tupper: Listening or empathy; I was either of those.  That's so funny!

Sarah Ellis: What's really funny is that neither of us are quite prepared to accept that leading and following, we both find it really hard, so we both put it at number six for each other, but not for ourselves.  We're, "Yes, we know we need to work on it, but I'm not prepared to accept that I really need to work on it".

Helen Tupper: I think there's a whole different insight in that.

Sarah Ellis: There is, there really is.  But I think that's why that's such a useful exercise.  First of all, it's great to know that we've talked before about intent versus impact and when we think about how Helen and I collaborate, the good thing is, the thing that we both thought we were best at, the intent in terms of where we hope we're having a positive impact, is consistent with how we're experiencing each other, so that's brilliant. 

If we were to keep going and keep talking about that number six, clearly there's loads more to explore in those "even better ifs", in those number six areas.  We could now have a really useful conversation, which we probably do need to have after today's podcast, about that leading and following and where that sometimes causes conflict.  So, that would be action 2.

Then action 3, which I think is the "so what" of that; so, you've done your self-assessment, you've had an assessment from those people you think you collaborate with frequently who know you well enough to be able to give you that feedback.  I then think you can ask yourself two questions: an action question and a sharing question. 

So, what one action are you going to take in the next month?  We're recording this at the start of September, so if it was September, what action are you going to take in September to improve your collaboration?  The second question is, what is one way that you can share what you know to help improve collaboration for everybody in that team that you're working with?  So, it's a bit about a personal action and then a together action; I liked those two things side by side because it felt like, as we talked about in our TED Talk, everyone now is a learner and everyone is a teacher, so I thought it brought that idea together.

For example, if that was me, just to take this to a conclusion and also to practice what we preach, I was thinking one of the things that I could do in terms of creating some space for the feedback that I thought I could do better, is I could pick a workshop or a meeting where I ask Helen to come along purely in the role of observer, although she might find that frustrating because she doesn't get to get involved, both because of what we just talked about, but with the pure purpose of afterwards, we're going to give Helen a bit of space to just reflect on what she heard and what she saw from me and then to give me feedback where I go into pure listening feedback mode; so very one way and very intentional.  Actually, we've never done that before in that way and I think I'd find that really helpful; so that was my one action. 

Then the other thing I thought I could do in terms of sharing what I was good at so that we can collaborate better as a team, is think about how can we create moments where we listen to how our clients are feeling at the moment?  So, sometimes when we're talking to the organisations that we work with, inevitably you jump straight into the actions you've got to do or the work that needs to happen.  I think one of the things that I always find really valuable is just to know how is it feeling in that organisation at that moment in time?  I think that's why sometimes, I'm good at having that sense of empathy and that understanding for what's happening. 

So, perhaps I could create two or three useful questions that we might use as part of client conversations that are specifically intended to create that empathetic understanding that we really want to have with the partners that we work with.  I could think about and start to notice what are the questions that I probably ask without even realising them, and then I could share those with Helen and say, "Well, perhaps just try asking one of these questions at the start of your conversations and see whether you find that useful".  It can be as simple as that.

So, that's some of the skillsets of collaboration and I think that's something that you could keep coming back to as a team and keep reflecting on and taking action on; I really like the togetherness of that.  Then we thought it would be useful to talk a bit about the structure of collaboration, especially given this hybrid world of work that everybody's talking about and no one quite knows yet what it's going to look like.  It does feel like it's going to add some additional complications, it's certainly creating new conversations about how we all work together.  

So, in the second part of the conversation, we're really going to focus on this hybrid world of work and what does collaboration mean in that context.

Helen Tupper: I think when COVID suddenly became everyone's reality, for a lot of people they suddenly just went remote.  If they weren't furloughed, they were suddenly working remotely in a way that they hadn't done before, and everyone was working on their own in their home.  Actually, collaboration meant, "Well, how do we quickly have our meetings virtually and how do we all share our documents?"  But actually, everybody was working in the same way; they were just doing it in their own place. 

I think the complexity that hybrid brings in is you've now got more variations of how people can work: some people might be going back to the office on some days so they're in the same place at the same time; some people might be working at home while other people are in the office.  So, you've got different people working in different places but perhaps at the same time; everyone's working to the same hours, just doing it in different places. 

Sarah Ellis: On that, I read a really good article from Lynda Gratton, which I think was on the cover of Harvard Business Review perhaps sometime earlier this year, but you can read it online for free.  She talked about one company which has actually created nine different almost personas of how you could be working.  You know when you start to think through the permutations?  They'd got to nine and I think they were thinking there might even be more than that.  So, that's what we've tried to get our head around is potentially people working in 9 or 10 or 11 different ways all at the same time.

Helen Tupper: This is the thing that makes collaboration really complex, because it's not just about tools.  I think we leapt to, how do we make technology help us to collaborate in this pandemic world that we're in?  Now, we are going to this hybrid world, and we've got nine or more different ways in which people are coming together, and that means times and places and spaces are all very, very different and technology is not enough to solve this. 

This is a really pressing problem for organisations, so Gartner have recently released some research that seven in ten HR leaders are much more concerned about collaboration now than they were before the COVID pandemic because of this variety, because of this complexity.  MURAL, who are actually one of the really good tools that we often talk about as this is a good way of how you can bring people together for ideas and innovation, did a survey with about 400 people and said, "What is the thing that you're finding hardest about collaborating virtually, what makes it more difficult?"  And they said it's the informal social aspect.  No one said, "We want a better tool".  "We want better ways of feeling like I'm working effectively with the people that I need to work with".  So, it is complex and it isn't just about technology. 

What we wanted to share to try and make this easier and actionable for you to do something different with, is three principles for how we can collaborate in this new world of work that we're all navigating and two really specific ideas for action.

So, the three principles: the first one is to be intentional about your collaboration.  Sarah and I were chatting just before we started about when you're in an office environment, you could just say to somebody, "Oh, could we just go into a room for five minutes and just talk this through?" and you'd go into a room, probably with some glass walls, probably with a white board, maybe some posters and you'd all just quickly write it down and it probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else that hadn't been in that room but it made sense to you, and you could go and quickly go and do something with that. 

But now, with back-to-back meetings and the Zoom fatigue, it's harder to get everybody quickly into a conversation for collaboration.  Again, in that report I mentioned from Gartner, they found that when teams are intentional about their collaboration, so what we need to talk about, when we're going to do it and how we are going to collaborate, they are three times more likely to achieve high innovation than the teams that are not intentional about it and maybe trying to force fit into a meeting that happened to be in the diary.

The second principle is to reinvent the "why" and not the "wheel".  So, we've always collaborated, there's nothing new in the need for us to collaborate; no one has all of the answers, and we are much better together when we share insights and information.  So, we might need to re-look at the when and the why we do it, but there are often lots of different tools that might already exist; you don't need to start from scratch with everything.  Actually, some level of consistency, so templates and tools and structures that you've used before, means there's a level of familiarity so that people can just focus on the new stuff and can get more creative with the new stuff, rather than trying to get their head around every single new tool or template that you're using. 

Again, on MURAL, they've got some really good templates that I think help to simplify some of these things; so a template for a weekly stand-up, for a lessons-learned session, for ways of assessing ideas, and important and difficult templates.  You don't need to create that stuff; it already exists.  Use what works for other people or what has worked for you before, but really focus on the why you're coming together as a team for collaborating.

The last principle is frequent feedback.  As we all try to work out what works best for us right now, and actually our "right now" keeps on changing, we need to expect that we should be experimenting with things, that we'll get some things right, that we'll get some things wrong and that ultimately, we'll keep needing to evolve things.  You'll only be able to do that if you get feedback from people.  So, what worked well in this meeting today, what would be even better if, for the next time we come together to discuss this. 

Regularly asking that and iterating how you're collaborating is much more likely to have something that's going to be fit for your future, rather than fix something that might be working right now, but it might change quite quickly.

Sarah Ellis: I can imagine it would be really useful for teams from now on to have a moment in time, at least every month, where you reflect back on the work that everybody's doing to achieve your team objectives and think about, "When are we at our best from a collaboration point of view?" so you're not just looking at, "Did the work get done or the tasks get crossed off the to-do list?" but in terms of collaboration.

So to Helen's point, I always think my shortcut for collaboration is "better together".  Because when we came together, and that doesn't necessarily mean physically, it improved the quality of our thinking, it improved the quality of ideas, it meant we sped something up, it meant we changed direction and that felt like a really good decision; I think that collaboration can result in lots and lots of different things. 

But when have we collaborated and it's worked really well?  Just be a bit forensic about what was happening there that just seemed to make that a good moment of collaboration.  And when have we tried to collaborate and, if anything, it felt like we could have made more progress by ourselves or actually maybe we then overcomplicated things?  I can definitely think of examples for us within Amazing if where sometimes I think we collaborate and then we maybe recognised that we didn't need to; we would have been better working by ourselves.  Or perhaps you've involved too many people; collaborating can be just two people, or it can be three people; when do you want everyone involved?  It's having that awareness and just that short moment of reflection. 

I would try to stick to examples like, "This meeting" or, "This moment, that's when our collaboration just seemed to be really firing on all cylinders" or, "Actually at that moment it really didn't work".  It's not about beating ourselves up or blaming anyone, it's about going, "Well, let's do more of that good stuff, because that's working" and then if it's not working, "Well, let's try letting go of that and maybe trying something different" or perhaps that's when people can just get on and do some work by themselves.

Helen Tupper: Maybe the questions there are, "When are we better together?" and, "When does collaboration feel like wasted work?" could get to some interesting insights from people.

Okay, so two specific ideas for action for you then.  The first one is work with the "where" in mind.  So, if you are going to intentionally collaborate, which as we said is one of the things that will help, it is very useful to be specific about where people are going to be.  Don't take that perchance; really think about this group of people that are getting together to collaborate, where are they likely to be; and then design that collaboration event, meeting, whatever you're going to call it, around the work.

So, for example, if it is going to be an in-person event, everyone is going to come together in person, think about whether the space that you are going to spend some time in, the physical space you're going to spend time in, is set up for optimising your collaboration.  If it's a really boring meeting room with a boardroom table and not much space to move around or stand up or get people talking, then that's probably not the best thing to do. 

Now, we appreciate you don't have all the choice over how your office might be designed, but actually there are lots of different spaces that you can hire if your office maybe doesn't feel like it's designed for collaboration yet, and there are lots of offices that are being redesigned actually for this purpose.  You can do lots of different things.  If you happen to work near a city centre, there are meeting spaces that you can hire by the hour, lots of different venues do that now. 

I have even before with teams hired an Airbnb just for the day and I've done some meetings in some very cool spaces.  They tend to have a bed in them which is a little bit odd, so just shut the door on that room.  Once we had this bed on this mezzanine, so no one really looked up because that always feels a bit weird if you're in an office space with your colleagues and there's a bed there!  But you can hire some really quirky spaces that just get people a bit excited about coming together, and then people can move around and get really creative when they're collaborating as well.

If people are going to be fully remote, so if that's the situation, and I think is probably one that people are quite familiar with now over the last 18 months of working the way we have been, this is where you want to really want to use those virtual collaboration tools.  So, Miro, MURAL, Teams Whiteboards, for example, documents where people can all contribute on them at the same times, you'll all have lots of them because you've been using them for a little bit. 

But what I would say is if you ever want to introduce a new tool, try to do that in advance.  Maybe give people a bit of pre-work so they can get familiar with the tool, rather than springing it on them in their remote session, because then people will be distracted by trying to get their heads around what all the different buttons do and how to get their thoughts into the system, rather than getting the brains working and connecting together.

The last thing on working with the "where" in mind is when it's hybrid.  Just for clarity, this means you've got some people who are working together in a physical space, at the same time as you've got some people joining remotely and you try and do some collaboration activity with everybody.  The risk here is that some people feel removed from the conversation, they feel left out basically.  What you want to do here is make sure you've got hybrid hosts. 

Ideally, that means somebody who is in that physical space, who is the host of the physical group, and then somebody who is in a virtual space, who is the host for the people that are joining remotely.  Those two people are making sure that everybody is heard and effectively joining the dots in the conversation.  It's a really important way to make sure that everybody feels included.  You have a recent example of this, right, Sarah?

Sarah Ellis: Yes, I was doing a session for Warwick Business School yesterday and I was at home, so this was a Sunday, a Sunday evening, quite an unusual time to do a session, but these were people who are doing learning outside of their day jobs, so that was the time that worked for them.  There were some people in the Shard in London; there were some people in Warwick in the Business School, actually physically in the university; I think there were also some people at home in various different locations all across the world; also people from loads of different companies, English wasn't necessarily everybody's first language and so probably every nuance that you could imagine. 

That was really interesting, because I was doing quite an interactive session where I wanted everybody to feel included and everybody's ideas to be heard; I'd very much designed it that way.  So, I think the thing that worked well is having these two hybrid hosts.  Because I was remote, I was the hybrid host almost remotely, I could see all of the chat, I could read some of that chat out so people in the room who couldn't see the chat could benefit from those insights.  Then I'd got somebody in the room in Warwick who was also playing that hosting role as well. 

I wasn't sure how well it would work, and I wasn't sure how well my brain would work, feeling like it was almost being split into multiple places at once.  But I think because we had those defined roles and actually people were very up for participating, it felt like people were very active and very engaged, and I'd been very clear at the start of the session how it was going to work, I was almost surprised this worked surprisingly well.  I think it was because it was very much set up for success; people were in a very clear environment, there was a clear, "This is how it's going to work". 

I do think it's harder when you can imagine you're in an office, and you've got some people at home, some people in an office, and perhaps five of you go into a meeting room for a meeting, and then you've got five of you at home; let's say you're a team of ten.  I think that dynamic is going to need really active facilitation, because otherwise you can't but help when you're in a room, of course you talk to the person across the other side of the table, of course you've got different kinds of eye contact.  How do you then also make sure you feel that you're engaging with people on the screen, people don't feel left out, and you don't feel like you're going to get into this world where, "Oh, well if I'm not physically there, I'm less important" or "I'm not heard as much"? 

So, I'd love to hear as well from anybody listening where perhaps your organisation already worked in that way, or perhaps you're already trying some really good things to make sure that everybody feels included when you're doing particularly things like hybrid meetings, hybrid teamworking.  Any other tools and tips that you've got that you want to share with us, get in touch, let us know and we'll do our best to make them available to everybody.

Helen Tupper: Our second and final idea for action is all about knowing your needs.  We've talked about how to design around the "where", the second is "why"; why are people coming together, and make sure you design the collaboration session that you're going to do or just that moment when people are going to come together around that need. 

We thought about this from three different perspectives, which is are you trying to get people to collaborate to improve work, to improve themselves or perhaps to improve the relationships perhaps in the team?  Based on those three needs, which we think are pretty comprehensive, what would you do differently in terms of how you might intentionally design that collaboration?

The first one then, improving work: this is really where you're sharing feedback or ideas with each other.  This is a really good one to go for what they call asynchronous collaboration; this means people working in their own time.  So, it's not let's all get into a meeting, let's all share ideas instantly and let's go away and make them happen; we're not doing that. 

This is we're going to set you a problem to think about or something that I'd like you to contribute your thoughts and feedback on, and you can go away and look at that and apply it in your own time.  This is the document that everybody is going to put those thoughts into and there's a deadline for it.  But people can do it when they want to at a time that works for them. 

The advantage of this is it gives people more time to think, you're not putting anyone on the spot; someone like Sarah, for example, who would come up with much higher quality responses if she had time to think.  What you really need to do is just make sure to make that an efficient process for everybody, make sure that everybody is contributing in that asynchronous way, but to a single place, so a single document where all the feedback goes, or a single MURAL board or a Trello board or whatever it is you're using, because as soon as it becomes everybody sending an email, it just becomes a bit unwieldy and inefficient.  

So, let people work in their own time, in their own way.  The things that connect everyone are the problem that they're trying to solve or the thing that needs feedback on, and the place in which they are contributing those insights.

Sarah Ellis: I guess what you then might get to a point of going, there's a point in the process where everybody's contributions, the collaborations through everybody's contributions, there might be a "so what" of there is a moment where you do then get together.  And whoever's leading that, whoever is taking accountability for making those improvements happen says, first of all you can summarise everyone's contributions; but then you can go, "This is what's going to happen: these are the two ideas that we are prioritising, and this is how we make sure those other ideas are not lost". 

I sometimes think when I've seen this done in the past, that first bit is done really well and then it's easy to forget, and I'm basically talking about myself not doing this bit, it's easy to forget to then let people know what happens next.  You might say thank you.  I'd always be quite good, I think, at saying, "Thank you, I really appreciate your ideas or your input", but I think then people spend time and energy on that, and you want to go back to people and say, "And this is where this is now going" and give people updates every couple of months, depending on how involved they are in it.

So, I think we can move in and out of different approaches and different styles, but I think that first stage of going, if it is about improving work or a process or a project, the space first to think by yourself, and then the "so what" actually do need to be almost, and we say this very rarely on the podcast, slightly more linear; you probably can't do those things in parallel at the same time.

Helen Tupper: Yes, otherwise the risk is people feel like wasted effort, this has gone into a black hole, a virtual black hole perhaps in the meeting room.

Sarah Ellis: Yes.

Helen Tupper: The second thing is the need for people to come together and collaborate about improving themselves and maybe this is individual or a team development.  This can happen virtually or together in person.  It's really more about how you take the idea and you make it work for people; I think that's what matters here. 

So, some ideas for people to collaborate around to improve self or team development: curious career conversations; if you are a regular listener, you will know that we talk about this all the time, but set up some discussions so people can learn more about each other's careers.  And people can do this, that could be one person meeting one other person from a different department, or maybe somebody who has a really interesting job, but nobody quite knows what it means, who hosts a 20-minute career Q&A session, they just talk about what a day in their life looks like and people get the chance to talk about it.  So, this could be collective or individual, but curious career conversations really start to open up more exploration into people's careers. 

Skill swaps are really nice as well; this is where everybody in a team might say, "This is one thing I want to learn about this year and one skill I've got to give" and you try to find a match.  Let's say I say, "One of the things I want to learn about this year is more visual thinking" and Sarah says, "One of the things I've got to give is my visual thinking skills"; that would be a great match for us and maybe there's something I could help Sarah with as well.  Just getting people to think about, what's one thing I want to learn, what's one thing I've got to give, and using that as a way of people connecting and collaborating.

The other thing you can do is strength circles.  This is more of a one-to-many approach; this is where I say, "One of the things that gives me energy that I want to be known for is building relationships".  What I could do is hold a strength circle in person or virtually where I could share what I've learned about how to do that effectively.  They are all just different ideas for making collaboration a bit different around this idea of self or team improvement.

Sarah Ellis: It's so interesting, isn't it?  The more I think about it, we have so much we can learn from each other.  We've talked before about sometimes I think you underestimate how much you can learn from the people that you work with; not because you don't think they're great, but because we almost don't create the time and space to learn from each other.  Often people will think, "This is my designated learning moment", perhaps because you're listening to a podcast like ours. 

There's lots of unknowns.  We sometimes don't know what people know, or we just don't have those opportunities which are purely created to collaborate but in a learning way, so that we're all getting better together as a team.  We often look outside in before inside out, and I think probably the most value that we can get from people in terms of learning is starting inside out.  I think it's one of those really undervalued and probably underappreciated things that we just all have to benefit from.

Helen Tupper: That links to the last one around improving relationships.  Working hybrid or fully remote or in person, that shouldn't affect the quality of the relationships; we might just need some new approaches for collaboration in that context.  So, have a think about, maybe if you're working virtually, what you might need to do is make more time in your meetings for debrief discussions, so it's not all about the task and getting things done, which I sometimes think back-to-back meetings can feel like, but that you've got a bit of space for people to share, "How are you feeling right now?  How are you feeling about your workload?  What might be areas of concern?"  Creating that time in meetings is really important. 

I have just joined a new learning thing that I'm doing for the next four or five months, and it was the first meeting of the community, the learning community that I'm part of, last week.  They had a really nice session to help everyone quickly build relationships with each other, because I'm in the same cohort for this whole period of time. 

What people had to do is go and find an object in whatever room they were in, so I was in my office, find an object that was just interesting to them for whatever reason and then use that object to talk about where they were right now.  You could take that question, "Where are you right now?" in any number of directions.  So, some people took it very literally, "I am in an office in Oxfordshire" and talked around that for five minutes.  Some people talked about it with where they were in their life right now, some people talked about it as where they were in time right now, so in 2021; you can take it wherever you want to. 

But it was just a way of people having the same question but coming at it from a way that felt meaningful to them.  Everyone was just given five minutes to talk about it and you just listened.  To Sarah's point earlier about closing the loop on things, everyone got to say one comment back to someone, which might have been, "Oh, you really touched me with what you shared there" or, "I can totally relate to your experience"; just a short comment back so it didn't all feel like one-way communication.  It's just a nice, simple way of building relationships.

Sarah Ellis: I think the reason improving relationships and giving that some time is so important is then with some of those things that we talked about at the very start in terms of skills, if you've got strong relationships, you then have the safety and the self-belief that I think you then need to all improve together.  I think if that's missing, it's very hard to do some of the things that we talked about today because it does take that honesty to say, "Well, that collaboration approach didn't really work for me because I felt left out" or "I felt that I wasn't really being heard".  To speak up in that way, you've got to create that environment where people can have those conversations, and that often comes from spending time collaborating where the objective and the outcome is about improving the quality of your relationships. 

It's back to high trust teams, isn't it?  They all end up being linked together, I think.  When you think about high trust teams and collaboration, those two things to me really go hand in hand.

Helen Tupper: What we'll do as well in the PodSheet is we will link to Sarah's conversation with Amy Edmondson on psychological safety, because it is a really nice link and follow-on to this discussion today, if you haven't listened to it already.

Sarah Ellis: We hope you found that really useful to listen to.  As a reminder, if you haven't already, please do sign up to PodMail.  What we've tried to do with PodMail is put everything in one place for you; we're trying to get better at that.  We create lots of what we hope are helpful things, but we do receive quite a lot of feedback that people can't find them.  So, we are on a mission to make our work easier to find and access and just make everyone's lives simpler; always a good thing. 

So, PodMail puts our PodSheet summaries, we have our videos of PodPlus that we do, our live workshops every Thursday are on there.  I'm sure we'll keep adding to it, but it's always very focused on the topic of the week, so that's all we talk about, and it also gives you links to where you can find other podcast episodes.

Helen Tupper: You can get that from the description on this podcast which will be on Apple.  So, just look at the description and you'll be able to find the links.  If you can't find that link for podmail, just email us, helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com

Sarah Ellis: We are working to make that even easier to sign up to.  That's the next thing on the list.

Helen Tupper: Just one more button somewhere.

Sarah Ellis: The dream of the one button; it's how can you create Apple Pay for PodMail, but it turns out we're not Apple so it's not quite that easy, but we'll get there.  Thank you all so much for listening and we'll be back with you again next week.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.