A 5-Level Collaboration Strategy Approach

We've written about the importance of signaling collaboration strategy preferences when you and team members are working remotely. Even with video conferencing, you lose many of the verbal and physical cues available when you are sitting across a table planning who is going to do what and when on a project.

Talking with someone who is struggling with identifying the best ways to signal the appropriate collaboration strategy approash, we hit on a variation on the Sergio Zyman decision levels. We talk about Zyman’s decision delegation approach frequently to help leaders and teams figure work better.

Rather than addressing who will provide input and who will make decisions (as the Zyman model does), this collaboration strategy revolves around who will start developing ideas and how the collaboration will unfold within the team.

A 5-Level Collaboration Strategy Approach

Here are five possibilities:

• L - The Leader will figure it out
• LT - The Leader will start developing ideas, then will collaborate with the entire Team to figure it out
• C - The leader and team will Collaborate from scratch to figure it out
• TL - The Team (or a team member) will start developing ideas and then bring them to the Leader to collaborate and ultimately figure it out
• T - The Team (or team member) will figure it out and bring the finished product back to the team leader

This collaboration strategy idea is still in the Brainzooming R&D lab. The situations and acronyms for this collaboration strategy approach may change.

Do you have thoughts, reactions, or alternatives? Please share them on our Facebook page. If we have big insights from trying it ourselves, we'll pass those along, too. – Mike Brown