Quotes About Collaboration

Securing advantage in this new world means that intelligence agencies must find new ways to work with private sector companies to combat online threats and harness commercial technological advances. They must engage the universe of open-source data to capture the power of its insights. And they must serve a broader array of intelligence customers outside of government to defend the nation.

High standards in a context where there is uncertainty or interdependence (or both) combined with a lack of psychological safety comprise a recipe for suboptimal performance.

People sit in a circle, with the intention of de-emphasizing hierarchies and instead encouraging what's called "a leader in every chair."34 To create the mindfulness and focus conducive to an environment where everyone collaborates and contributes, meetings begin with a minute of silence.

For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.

Often in meetings, I will ask people when we're discussing an idea, "What did the dissenter say?" The first time you do that, somebody might say, "Well, everybody's on board." Then I'll say, "Well, you guys aren't listening very well, because there's always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.

In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

Leadership at its core is about harnessing others' efforts to achieve something no one can achieve alone.

Proficient teaming often requires integrating perspectives from a range of disciplines, communicating despite the different mental models that accompany different areas of expertise, and being able to manage the inevitable conflicts that arise when people work together.

We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.48

Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.

Sullenberger later wrote about [air traffic controller] Harten, "his words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn't going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

They concluded, "psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found."10 Other behaviors were also important, such as setting clear goals and reinforcing mutual accountability, but unless team members felt psychologically safe, the other behaviors were insufficient.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety. Take, for instance, the hospital where Christina works.

Jazz at Lincoln Center, says of his work with other jazz musicians: "There are always tensions that come up. Part of working is dealing with tensions. If there's no tension, then you're not serious about what you're doing.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.

Teaming is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds – expertise, status, and distance, to name the most important.

A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.

But for jobs where learning or collaboration is required for success, fear is not an effective motivator. Brain science has amply demonstrated that fear inhibits learning and cooperation.

Treat people superbly and compensate them fairly.

Emphasizing interdependence lets people know that they're responsible for understanding how their tasks interact with other people's tasks. Interdependence encourages frequent conversations to figure out the impact their work is having on others and to convey in turn the impact others' work has on them. Interdependent work requires communication. In other words, when leaders frame the work they are emphasizing the need for taking interpersonal risks like sharing ideas and concerns.

The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.

Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers advice for how to choose people for an effective feedback group. They must, he says, "make you think smarter and put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time."6 Stanton's point about having people around who make us "think smarter" gets to the heart of why psychological safety is essential to innovation and progress. We can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds.

For over a century, we've focused too much on relentless execution and depended too much on fear to get things done. That era is over.