Today’s Leaders Can Make Team Collaboration Inevitable
No matter how talented the soloist, you can’t play a symphony with just one instrument. Can you imagine The Four Tops, minus three members? Or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as an oboe solo? How about if Glenn Miller’s orchestra playing ‘In The Mood’ with a single saxophone?

As a CEO, or Executive with Leadership responsibility, you understand the magic that can happen when talented people get into a room together to collaborate. But, creating this elusive dynamic on demand in an organization that spans the globe with thousands of employees - there should be a Grammy for that!

Billions of dollars are spent every year just on the technology that attempts to bring people within organizations ‘into a room’ together so that collaboration and innovation can happen. But, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every organization has different challenges.

You have most likely already noticed what conditions allow first collaboration, and then innovation, to occur in your area of responsibility. Have you also noticed the conditions that prevent it? In my experience, a leader may have the most success by focusing on creating the environment that ‘allows’ collaboration to happen naturally.

Surely one of the worlds foremost experts in the technology of collaboration, Cisco has found that non-technological solutions can be just as important in creating the conditions that foster team collaboration. Take a look at this surprisingly simple collaboration solution involving musical chairs, as it were.

How can you turn your creative music from solos into full choruses?

(Share your ideas and best practices by commenting below!)