You can find ideas for effective collaboration in the workplace in unusual settings. Whenever a group needs to instantly form and accomplish something, you have an opportunity for new learnings. I discovered a new, valuable practice while attending a Catholic evangelization convocation last week.
Amid hearing multiple ideas for reaching out to and successfully engaging people, I was struck by a collaboration practice shared by Dr. Mike Scherschligt, CEO of Holy Family School of Faith. I always learn something new about speaking whenever seeing Dr. Scherschligt talk. On Friday morning, he led a room filled with hundreds of attendees in praying the rosary aloud. This group prayer involved hundreds of people needing to say the same words at the same pace more than fifty times. To help synchronize everyone, Scherschligt said to make sure that as we prayed aloud, we were quiet enough to be able to hear the voices of the two people next to us as they prayed. Making sure we could hear them would keep the entire group speaking at the same pace.
Guess what? It worked fantastically! Hundreds of people were in perfect sync throughout twenty minutes of group prayer.
This accomplishment made me consider comparable situations when attempting to create effective collaboration in the workplace. How many times do we struggle to get everyone working together on an outcome at the same rate?
Translating this practice, think about how to orient people to hear others around them no matter the process. Hearing may be hearing. In other situations, hearing could involve visual observations, data monitoring, or paying attention to some other indicator that provides a guide for synchronous performance.
I can’t wait to try this practice out in additional settings and see how it works to boost collaboration. – Mike Brown
