Competition and collaboration are sometimes thought of as opposites. I’ll share one thing people can do to help collaborations go better even when there’s competitors in the room.
Collaborations have always been popular, but it’s possible today they’re getting more common and that the stakes may be getting higher. So in today’s episode, I’m gonna give you one thing you can do to increase the quality of any collaboration that you are leading or a part of.
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 of the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is the place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and, most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.
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And like I said, we’re big fans of collaboration. When we co-design and co–develop projects, we know we get improved decision-making and quality and applicability of the project. We also get richer more robust end products. We all want to make something good. Now people are collaborating, perhaps more out of necessity. I just had a client this month say to me, “Everyone’s gonna have to do more with less and be working more together.”
So as we all carry on and find ways to continue doing the work we’re doing, collaborations are a powerful tool when done right. I’m gonna share some stories from my experience for the next collaboration you’re in or in charge of.
And again, like the rest of this series, I’m basing this on research from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, collaborations are the topic of much research because you can’t just put people in the same space, virtual or physical, and say “work together” and call it a collaboration. There are structured, disciplined ways to design and lead collaborations. This includes managing the challenges of collaboration, which you know is important.
And I want to give a shout out here to Samantha Cinnick, who came and did a mini series with me on communication in public health, and one of her episodes was on communication in a new collaboration, so I’m going to drop that in the show notes.
There are many ways collaborations can go wrong. When that happens, quality suffers, people’s willingness to participate might be affected. So here’s one thing people can do to help collaborations go better, make sure everyone still gets their job done, and finds the collaboration worthwhile.
One challenge of collaborations that I don’t think gets talked about enough, maybe because it’s seen as the opposite of collaboration, is competition. Competition and collaboration are sometimes thought of as contrary to each other, but I’m going to take a closer look at that.
Because no matter how good someone’s intentions are for joining a collaboration, we’re all still carrying our organization’s expectations and priorities and constraints along with us into the collaboration. We still have our regular job to do. We still have rivals and competitors who are trying to jump through the same hoops we are. And some of those organizations or people might be in the collaboration with us.
This is a reality maybe people are reluctant to talk about. And one of the reasons might be they’re afraid that they’d shatter the collaboration or damage whatever coalition they’re hoping to build. But I’ll argue that talking about competition, fronting the fact that it’s there, can have the opposite effect. It can strengthen your collaboration. But I get that talking about this can still feel risky. So I’m going to give you a place to start on talking about competition and collaboration, or a way to strengthen your approach if you’re already there.
Here’s one question you want to make sure you’re asking and getting good answers to: In what ways are these collaborators also competitors?
In what ways are these collaborators also competitors? I want you to take a moment with this question. Answer it. Get lots of answers to it. Answer it well. Talk to people. Get in there. Be practical.
You want to make sure you’re designing or having a collaboration that doesn’t ignore the potentially uncomfortable reality that there’s competition in the room, but acknowledge it. We all know it’s very competitive out there, even though our collaborations seek unity. We want a group working as one on a common project. So get good answers to that question.
There’s two reasons why you’ll wanna know what those answers are. One is because you wanna know what not to ask people to do or to talk about in the collaboration. Second, you want to be able to be super smart about what you are asking people to do or what you are talking about, so that the collaboration can be a win-win even among competitors.
Let me give you some examples. A colleague who was heading up a large project to increase broadband access in rural areas told me a great story about the start of this project that had all sorts of stakeholders. Many internet service providers, big household names and little mom-and-pop companies. And leadership at first said, “Let’s get them all other, put them in a room.” And my colleague had been leading collaborations for long enough to know that would be a disaster.
Yes, people would come, and yes, people would be polite. But there would be crickets around the table when it came time to talk. Because folks were all competitors, and would fear letting something slip about their operations or their plans or anything proprietary. Even though everyone in the room totally supported the project, and was very excited to be a part of it, it would have been an awkward and likely unproductive meeting because people would be guarding what they said, for understandable reasons. So thinking about competition can help you be careful about what you’re expecting people to talk about in a collaboration.
From my own experience as a consultant, I have a couple of stories too. A large organization asked for my assistance on a collaboration with many and varied stakeholders. And the leadership wanted everyone to work together. It was clear to me that there was significant competition among the participants that we needed to address.
One of the participants said to me, “Leadership wants groups working together for a unified thing. That’s wonderful. We should all aspire to that. We need to be cognizant of that. There are times when it’s appropriate, but sometimes it’s more difficult than others. We’re collaborators, but we want to win. We started this. We want our stakeholders to know we’re taking the lead.”
I felt it was important for the leadership and the organization to know this and adjust accordingly, So it could make sure the collaboration was relevant and worthwhile and connected to the real -world practicalities of the participants. And that’s what I helped them do.
But it can be hard to remember or kind of keep front of mind that there is competition because our collaborations are often complicated. We’re working on big problems. Often there’s a lot at stake. So we’re kind of thinking about other things. A federal government client had asked for my help with a collaboration. And again I was reminding the team, “there’s a lot of competition in the room.”
Now, people were there because they cared very deeply about the issues and the project. And they still have jobs, they still have goals and priorities. So I helped the client make sure the collaboration had value to the participants beyond the collaboration itself.
Again, I want to share with you that question: In what ways are these collaborators also competitors? You could also ask, “In what ways may they be in competition?” And we’re asking this not because collaborations can’t take the heat, but because they can. And in order to succeed, they have to.
If your organization would like help with collaboration, contact me. You can visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. You can message me on LinkedIn or you can email me info @h-cpartners dot com. That’s I -N -F -O at h-cpartners dot com. This has been “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel. Additional Music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com
