Collaboration Characters

Patti Gilchrist, PMP, is a Senior Technical Manager with more than 20 years of IT experience. Visit her website at www.freepmstudy.com

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

Collaboration, or working as a cohesive team toward a shared goal, has many benefits. Thus, organizations seek to realize productivity gains from a collaborative leadership approach. Many times a differing and fresh perspective is essential to solve a complex challenge. But in reality, do organizations gain significant rewards from a collaborative approach?

There are many examples of successful collaboration. Steve Jobs has cited the Beatles’ collaborative approach to music as a model for management:

“My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies.They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos and it was magic.“

Another notable example of collaboration is the songwriting process of another legendary rock band, the Rolling Stones. The majority of the Stones’ songs are a collaborative effort between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, with Keith contributing the imaginative spark and focusing more on the creative riffs and Mick delivering the discipline …

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