It’s easy to forget a time before collaboration was a business norm; many professionals probably have never experienced working any other way.
Older, more cutthroat, “every employee for themselves” work cultures have been dismantled and debunked as ineffective ways of driving innovation. And the proliferation and ubiquity of chat and video tools have acclerated the level of access, transparency, and context teams are able to share with each other to drive collaboration and productivity.
Yet as productivity goes up, innovation has gone down. Teams may understand the importance of collaboration, but at large we’re still grappling with how to tangibly improve collaboration in a way that goes beyond just driving feelings of connection and camaraderie, but contributes to actual business value. And teams are feeling the pressure of having to figure out collaboration under new hybrid and remote working conditions.
No one tells you in college that your career is essentially a lifelong exercise in group projects, yet there’s no curriculum for getting better at collaboration. For those looking for a structured way to improve how they collaborate, one key way is by identifying collaboration anti-patterns.
What is a collaboration anti-pattern?
An anti-pattern is a consistent response or action a team or individual makes that might seem useful on the surface, but is ultimately counterproductive. It’s distinct from a “bad habit” in that anti-patterns are usually well-intentioned but simply misguided attempts to solve a problem.
If the point of collaboration is to drive innovation and business results, a collaboration anti-pattern is a practice that keeps teams in ruts, prevents emergent thinking, and costs businesses money in the long run. The intent of identifying collaboration anti-patterns is to stop performing “collaboration theater” and create smoother, more predictable paths to innovation by finding better patterns to adopt.
If your team is feeling stuck in the mud collaboratively, there might be an anti-pattern at play.
The importance of improving collaboration by recognizing anti-patterns
While not necessarily intentional, we often undermine the importance of collaboration by only viewing it from the narrow lens of “brainstorming.” Collaboration isn’t just “ideation”—it’s embedded in the planning, research, execution, and evaluation that drives innovation. It doesn’t just happen at the virtual or physical whiteboard but at every stage of work
Another common occurrence is that collaboration is treated as an unfortunate byproduct of people having to work in teams rather than the purpose of teamwork in the first place—and efforts to improve collaboration aren’t approached systematically, intentionally, or with any kind of structure.
The truth is that improving collaboration is about creating an engine that drives consistent innovation, value, and financial growth for a business. And if you aren’t addressing blindspots and weaknesses in the way you work together, you may be getting passed up by companies willing to put in the work to improve collaboration.
3 collaboration anti-patterns you can fix today
If you’re feeling like collaboration is lacking on your team, approaching improvement by identifying and tackling anti-patterns can be a helpful framework. Naming anti-patterns makes them solvable and provides a clear first step for taking action.
With that in mind, here are three common anti-patterns to look out for:
Anti-pattern #1: Letting the clock drive the meeting
At face value, wrapping up brainstorming sessions in a timely fashion and aggressively driving toward a decision after each meeting feels like a good thing; you’re being efficient with your time and keeping the project moving along at a healthy clip, after all.
However, the tendency to try to wrap each meeting up nicely in a bow—regardless of where you are at in your discussion—can actually be a symptom of impatience in letting the group discussion process run its course. It is possible to be action-oriented to a fault if you aren’t allowing yourself time to simmer on the ideas.
By prematurely converging on a course of action before you’ve fully talked through the divergent ideas and competing visions of individual teammates, you miss out on the Groan Zone: the messy, uncomfortable area of collaborative discussion that unlocks emergent thinking and innovative breakthroughs.
Solution: Drive toward outcomes instead of arbitrary milestones
It’s easy to get in the habit of seeing the end of a given meeting—like a brainstorm or a project planning meeting—as a signifier that it’s time to move on to something else. If your drive to wrap up meetings in a bow means you’re consistently leaving The Groan Zone early, the project and business will ultimately suffer.
Even if the meeting ends, don't feel like you have to come to an immediate solution; schedule additional async or in-person time as needed to finish out your discussion and work through your ideas.
A brainwriting activity can ensure your team stays in and works through the Groan Zone, forcing them to generate a large number of ideas, and giving people the chance to build off others’ ideas so you don’t just run with the first good one you see. This will incentivize both depth and breadth of discussion before getting into any refinement or consolidation work.
