Skillful Collaboration is what you’ve experienced in the best team you ever worked in—and
what you missed in the ones that were good, ok, mediocre, poor, bad, or downright terrible.
Like that experience in a cross-functional team developing a subsystem product for a high-end
car producer, and years later the Operations Director bumps into you and says: “Wow, if all
our products were this good, I’d have a much easier life.”
Or like the corporate Academy team who delivered the first global high-potential program for
engineers, and a few months later their leaders said: “Since these engineers came back,
they’re asking all the right questions, using our systems perfectly, and taking real ownership
of their projects. When is the next program? I need to send more of my people!”
Or like the time you dreamt it would be cool to combine engineering skills with artists’ ideas
to create beautifully crafted kinetic artworks—and more than 15 years later you’re still selling
pieces to world-class design stores and galleries.
Or like the time you set up a leadership development experience in nature that brought leaders
and teams from completely different fields together around a campfire. They arrived open to
learning and seeking wisdom from outside their everyday context—and left saying: “Our complex issues can
actually be normalized… what a relief!”
That’s what Skillful Collaboration is about.
It’s about coming together—within a team, across teams, or across disciplines—and deciding together what you’d love to create. It might be a product, a program, a piece of art, or an experience for others. Whatever it is, you agree together what you want to create—and ensure it delivers real value for your stakeholders.
And when you’ve decided that, the next step is clear: work together—collaborate skillfully.
But what does it take to collaborate skillfully? Here are some of the core human skills I’m
talking about: Listening. Talking. Feeling. Thinking. Understanding. Reflecting. Structuring.
Facilitating. Disagreeing. Adapting. Agreeing. Committing.
Some call these “soft skills.” I think they’re some of the hardest skills to learn and develop.
But the good news? Teams already have the perfect places to practice them:
- Conversations: where listening, understanding, and curiosity are tested.
- Decision-making: where disagreement, adaptation, and commitment come into play.
- Meetings: where structuring, facilitating, and balancing voices matter most.
- Peer coaching: where reflection, feedback, and genuine support help people grow.
I think these 4 places are the ‘meta-skills’ of teamwork. They’re not abstract ideals—they are
the everyday moments where collaboration is either strengthened or weakened. And with the
right attention, they can become the practice ground for Skillful Collaboration.
That’s what this initiative is about: enabling teams to practice, learn, and grow these skills.
So that more teams, in more places, can one day say: “That was one of the best teams I
ever worked in.”
