Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

True collaboration begins inside the individual and works its way out into the organization. By developing five essential skills, you will not only increase your own personal effectiveness, you will positively influence your team or organization.

There is no better way to improve relationships than to jump in and practice these skills every day. Learning the five skills is a lifelong task, but it is possible to make small improvements each day. Your power is in choosing not to be overwhelmed and instead asking, “How can I take a few little steps on this journey today?”

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Increasing Your Collaborative Influence by Jim Tamm and Ron Luyet

From the Research & Articles Section of the Radical Collaboration Web Site

Highlights from the article:

Even a small increase in proficiency in the following skills can lead to a measurable improvement in individual and team performance.

• Collaborative Intention (CI): Maintaining a non-defensive presence and making a conscious personal commitment to seeking mutual gains in your relationships. People with CI consciously seek solutions rather than blame. They’re interested in other points of view and welcome feedback. The key to CI is remaining intentional about building mutual success.
    

• Truthfulness: Committing to both speak and listen to the truth, and the ability to create an atmosphere where it feels safe enough to raise difficult issues. The level of trust in any relationship is determined to a great extent by the amount of truth that is being told. Telling the truth about yourself requires a combination of awareness, honesty, and openness.
    

• Self-Accountability: Taking responsibility for the full range of choices we make, either through action or inaction, and taking responsibility for both the intended and unintended or unforeseen consequences of those choices.  People’s beliefs about the amount of choice in their lives can either paralyze them or mobilize them. The most effective thing people can do to feel more empowered is to change their belief system about how much choice they really have. A sense of influence over our own lives makes undesirable events less demoralizing. Self-accountability is being aware of all the choices we make, and taking responsibility for the results of those choices.
    

• Self-Awareness and Awareness of Others: Committing to know yourself deeply and showing a willingness to deal with difficult interpersonal issues. Whether you want to improve a single relationship or change the culture of an entire organization, the first step is to increase people’s self-awareness. The ability to make effective choices and live an authentic life depends to a great extent on a capacity to be self-reflective. If people do not understand their own feelings, fears, values, intentions, and patterns of behavior, their lives can be like corks bobbing on the ocean. Increasing self-awareness is the greatest asset people have for living fulfilling lives that provide a sense of direction and influence over what happens to them.
    

• Solving Problems and Negotiating: Skillfully negotiating your way through the conflict that is inevitable in any long-term relationship. If your relationship doesn’t bump up against some conflict every once in a while, you’re either in a very boring relationship, are in complete denial, or are overly medicated. Even the most collaborative, self-aware, accountable, non-defensive, truth-telling people will have a difficult time maintaining successful relationships if they aren’t skilled at negotiating. Resolving conflict requires both courage and skill.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.radicalcollaboration.com/researchandarticles.html

   
Improving Your Relationships

Paying attention to the five essential skills for collaboration can pay big dividends for both individuals and companies. Just a little improvement in these skills can result in measurable improvements to the bottom line as communications improve, trust goes up, and relationships become more effective.

Here are fifteen actions you can consider taking today to improve your relationships and collaborative influence:

1. Tell your truth. Don’t be afraid to let yourself and others know what’s important to you..

2. Realize that you choose. Eagerly accept responsibility for what is happening in your life. Accept that you are responsible for your own happiness and wholeness.

3. Seek deeper self-awareness. Reflect, read, discuss, meditate or involve yourself in any activity that aids your awareness of your old paradigms and deeper levels of being.

4. Respond emotionally. Allow yourself to “feel.” Own your feelings rather than letting your feelings own you, or numbing out. Realize that all emotions are acceptable, but not all actions are acceptable.

5. Give up blame and postpone judgment. We’re all trying our best to get by. Seek to understand what is happening and how you contributed to that. Attempt to listen and clarify one another’s viewpoints and interests before defending yourself or making others wrong.

6. Seek not to consciously hurt others. Assuming an adversarial stance causes others pain and takes a severe toll on the quality of our own life. Maintaining collaborative intention and respecting others adds to our lives.

7. Take time to envision yourself as you want to be. Motivate yourself by thinking about your future, rather than letting yourself be shoved through life by your past. Start being who you want to be … today.

8. Consciously change your limiting beliefs. Don’t wait for experience to change them for you.

9. Assert yourself. Be aware of your boundaries and stand up for yourself. If you don’t, who will?

10. Be as sincere and as vulnerable as possible. Explore being “present” rather than being “right.”

11. Be in touch with your body and its wisdom. Seek alignment and connection with your head, heart, and “gut”. They have much to tell you if you listen.

12. Seek a higher meaning or purpose in your life. Explore ways to collaborate with others by doing something you are passionate about, in the service of others.

13. Treat your personal growth with respect, excitement and patience, rather than judgment. Personal growth is a lifelong job.  It requires commitment and compassion. Focus each day on becoming your best cheerleader rather than your worst critic.

14. Give to give. Give yourself away daily to purpose, people, places and things you love. Stop waiting for others to love first, accept you, or make it safe for you.

15. Laugh a little. Some things are much too important to be taken seriously.

Source: Improving Your Relationships by Jim Tamm and Ron Luyet

 
Next Month

“It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader; the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out,” say the authors of a recent Harvard Business Review article. The good news is that no one is omniscient and flawless.  The bad news is that trying to live up to some ideal can lead to burnout. Next month we’ll confront the myth and look at how to move beyond it.

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