How to collaborate with love as a guiding principle?
“What’s the one thing you want to improve the most when it comes to your team culture?” – I often ask senior leaders as we scope out the support they need.
“Collaboration,” they respond almost instantly.
I love this response - it opens up the possibility to dive in and learn more about the conditions under which a team collaborates. When I start to uncover what’s underneath the need for better collaboration, we often land on these questions:
How can we improve the relationships within our team?
How can we create psychological safety so that we can talk about what’s most important?
How can we promote cross-team communication?
How can we become more aware of each other – our needs and expectations?
How can we make work to flow in a stable and predictable way?
Powerful questions, don’t you think?
Like any goal, successful collaboration is an outcome. It’s an outcome of the way we answer these questions, an outcome of things like connection, communication, relationships, clarity, space, technology, and more.
“Collaboration is an outcome of things like connection, communication, relationships, clarity, space, technology, and more.”
Collaboration rooted in Fear
Is it possible that the word ‘collaboration’ is another word taken by the hustle culture to get us moving with more intensity towards outcomes, seemingly together, but working through the lens of our separateness?
As I unpacked this for myself, I remembered a challenging collaboration I was part of several years ago. I was working with another leader towards a common goal and running several projects together. We shared a vision and values in our charter, but we didn’t spend enough time reflecting on the behaviours that would make our collaboration work.
Upon reflection, I found we missed some things - perhaps you can relate to these?
Lack of structured communication created messy hand-off points. When we discussed our progress, I felt I’d wasted time trying to add value where it wasn’t needed. Other times, I was worried that I wasn’t up to speed with what we were working on.
Lack of transparency around our personal needs and circumstances created scheduling, logistics and burnout issues. It was impacting my relationships outside of work and my family.
Poor meeting hygiene led to prolonged conversations, lack of focus and slow progress. I was never sure when was the right time to talk about which project.
We didn’t have a process for prioritization and used unaligned methods of working which led to unclear expectations and frictions.
It was difficult to adapt and navigate the unexpected, which happened all the time.
Overtime I noticed that I wasn’t able to be present in a way that felt authentic in that collaboration.
“We can either collaborate through the lens of our connectedness or our separateness.”
We achieved some things, but it wasn’t fun. It was exhausting and often demoralizing. This collaboration was rooted in Fear. From my perspective, things weren’t working well. But I didn’t have the capacity to tap into what my mind, heart, and body were telling me. I didn’t spend time making sense of it or sharing my experience. Collectively, we didn’t take the time to intentionally design the conditions under which we collaborated. The processes enabling our collaboration were random. It felt as if the work was happening to us, rather than being designed by us.
When we don’t feel safe and don’t trust our internal guide that gives us data to show us when we are not in alignment, we remain numb to our authentic experience. If we aren’t listening to our own selves – we can't communicate with others either. We remain silent. I didn’t have access to the right tools at the time, and my internal dialogue only led to more fear. It becomes easy for the wrong attitude to creep in. But, the good news is that collaboration rooted in fear isn’t the only option…
Collaboration rooted in Love
I will never forget the first leader I told this: “The way to improve collaboration is to deploy Love as a guiding principle.”
“Really?!” - nearly came out of their mouth, but instead they opened their eyes. They got curious. It’s hard to portray to someone who hasn’t intentionally worked in a loving way what this feels and looks like.
When you drop into that space, full of trust, believing in both your own value and the value of the others involved. When you feel you are understood and accepted, despite your differences. When you share when you feel confused and ask for help. When you can say “I am sorry I messed up.” and ask for help to make things better. When you are motivated to continuously seek clarity and uncover what’s beneath the surface to make work flow better. All of these things are again outcomes.
I recently started a new collaboration. In the first co-working time, my partner observed me writing my thoughts and ideas, and named – “I notice that I am holding back in sharing my thoughts. There is fear here.” That was a powerful and brave declaration. It takes courage and intention to make thinking visible and take the time to examine it. This collaboration was already rooted in Love as a guiding principle. We were self-aware enough to sense our experience, and brave enough to trust it, make sense of it, and share it with each other. We were starting to identify behaviours which honoured both our self, and the other. It felt like strong connection was being born.
Looking at my most loving collaborations, similar behaviours were present. We would ask questions, write together, draw together, move together – to unveil things, to make things visible. Only once they become visible – we can collectively examine them and make sense of them for our collaboration.
It’s not that when you ground on Love, you magically figure out all the conditions for a successful collaboration. It is still a process. It takes intention and care to design the right ways to communicate, to learn, to delegate, to share, to schedule and to prioritize.
What love does is just open the door. It creates an attitude of approaching difficult conversations with care and concern for one another. It allows us to go into conversations with both confidence in our own worthiness, and humbleness to open and listen to the other views. Co-creating the answers in a way that is honouring those involved.
It Starts With Me
It starts with me – my inner ability to sense my own needs and limitations, seeking what’s underneath them. Only when I am present and aware of my inner world, I can find the meaning in it, and make intentional choices. Then, I can use different tools to show and share my authentic experience.
So many of us live in the shadow of our own doubt asking, “Am I good enough to be here?” From that place, we (me and you) by definition are separate. For real collaboration to exist, I need to just nest in that inner space where I know that the most vulnerable, fearful, needy parts of me are part of our common humanity. And when I share them, and you witness me do that – we both heal a little bit more. When we bring our true experience into the collective space with love, we give each other permission to make sense of it together. Then, we can contemplate to find the essence in the present moment and create a collective truth that emerges from that space and our collective experience. I don’t know if things happen for a reason, but I know that we are born with the capacity to heal, for a reason. A loving collaboration, like any other relationship – is our greatest potential to recover from our wounds, and tap into the infinite possibility that is simply there because we are together.
