Why team collaboration is necessary

- Even if you're not officially part of a team, you typically do need to collaborate with others to be successful. This course is actually a great example. Yes, I have expertise and experience that will form the basis of the content, but I can't produce a professional quality video without collaborating with others. Let's explore reasons why collaboration is so important. Collaboration allows you to leverage other people's expertise. No matter how brilliant you think you are, there are other people who have deeper experience, or different skills. As an instructor, I'm reliant on producers, AV experts, or designers, to provide you the best finished product. I just don't have those skills. Collaboration also provides cross-training opportunities. As I work with other subject matter experts, some of that expertise invariably rubs off on me, and that's tremendously valuable. So, if the AV guy couldn't make it one day, now I may be able to step in, and handle my own audiovisual needs. I will never learn those skills, though, if I'm not collaborating. Collaboration also supports better problem-solving. As individuals, we tend to approach problems only from our point of view, and that can be really dangerous. I heard a story one time about a brand of hot sauce that was trying to come up with innovative ideas about how to increase revenue. Most of the ideas involve complicated marketing strategies, designed to get users to use hot sauce, on a wider range of foods, but there was an intern who showed up to one of the meetings and he said to the group, "Well hey guys, you know, every time I'm using the product, you know, I have to shake the bottle so hard. Why don't we just make the hole bigger?" Then everybody looked around and thought, why didn't we think of that? Also, collaboration just makes work more fun. When teams work together to produce something amazing, it's a bonding experience, that builds strong connections within the team, and improves morale overall. You can probably right now identify people that you're close to as a result of having worked with them on a project years ago. And finally, the number one reason to collaborate, is that it typically produces a better product. One of my favorite team building activities, is one where participants are given a disaster scenario. Then they're asked to rank their materials in order of importance, to represent their survival strategy. They then complete the same activity, but this time in teams. Most of the time, teams perform better than individuals, and with this particular activity, they can actually measure their level of synergy. And this synergy is what highly collaborative teams experience in the workplace every day. As the African proverb says, "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together."