5 Ways Collaboration Can Make Your Nonprofit Better

Originally written for www.cnmsocal.org.

When I was a student, there was nothing worse than when a teacher uttered those two horrible words, “team project.”

I was always the smart kid. I got straight As and was never nervous taking tests. In fact, I liked taking tests. But I wouldn’t say that I was a good student. What I learned was how to get an A. It was fun and came naturally to me to figure out the system, rather than learn the material.

Learning the system isn’t a bad thing, and it worked really well for me in elementary and middle school. But as I got older, I noticed that, even though I still knew how to get an A, I wasn’t always the one doing the best work.

When team projects came along, I often just offered to do all of the work instead of taking the time to talk through everyone’s lame ideas and wait for them to do their part, which was always put together at the last minute and messy. I’d come to class, knowing our team of me was going to blow everyone else out of the water, only to find that while mine was alright, there were teams that had done something really cool. I’d stew in my jealousy for a while, and promise myself that next time, mine was going to be the cool, original thing.

But it never was.

In 5 Reasons Why Collaboration is Essential in Today’s Business Environment, author Natalie Nixon explains why working in teams is a swift way to get to that cool, new idea and be a better business.

To gain self-awareness
First, collaborating with others helps you gain self-awareness. Think back to the last school project you did. I’m sure you remember how quickly everyone grabbed up their roles before anyone else could take them. “I’m writing up the report, but I will not give the presentation in front of class. I WILL NOT.” I remember distinctly putting together a team in my 11th grade Anatomy & Physiology class. I made sure to fill my group with classmates that were fully willing to dissect the cat. I promised to do anything else they needed, but I would not put a scalpel to that dead cat.

Similarly, when you work in a professional group setting, you have to speak up about your skills. As the author put it, “Collaborating challenges you to articulate and distill what you are great at, and what you do poorly. That honesty about your strengths and weaknesses can force you to ask for help when necessary and be brazen about how you can help others.”

To Scale
Do you remember the scene from Apollo 13 where a group of scientists frantically work to make a square peg fit into a round hole? A harried man dumps a box of space gear on a table and says to his team, “We gotta find a way to make this, fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that.”

Now imagine that guy had to come up with the solution himself. I imagine the outcome would have been much different.

The work that nonprofits do is similar to the square peg/round hole conundrum, and we aren’t going to reach our movie script ending without the help of others.

To learn the art of creative abrasion
Author Patrick Lencioni names “Fear of Conflict” as one of the five dysfunctions of a team. It is a dysfunction because when you work to create artificial harmony instead of solutions, you are just spinning your wheels. Nixon frames it in a different way, citing Jerry Hirsch of Nissan’s term creative abrasion. She says, “We typically associate friction with something negative, but friction in its purest form, is energy. So why not convert that energy that comes from working with people who are different from you, into something positive?”

Indeed.

To think long term
What seems like it’s a failure may not always be. In 1968, Spencer Silver was trying to make a super strong glue. He failed. What he ended up making was weak glue, which led to the invention of the Post-It note, which we all know as a huge success.

Nixon knows that not every project is going to work out. But that doesn’t mean that you should through the relationships out with the project. Building relationships is perhaps even more important than the end result of a project.

To learn
Every time you interact with someone, there is a chance to learn something. You may learn in your own organizational bubble, but working with others accelerates learning and innovation. This is the lesson I should have learned years ago when I was the bossy student that didn’t want to be bothered with other people’s ideas on how projects should go. Group situations are a chance to learn from others as long as you are open to it. Even if my classmates’ ideas were lame, there are things to learn from that. “Each time your firm collaborates with others you optimize the capacity of your associates to extend beyond their comfort zone, grow, and in turn, stretch the boundaries of the organization.”

Nixon’s article is from Inc magazine and is focused on for-profit businesses, but the messages are the same for nonprofits. The main difference is that while collaboration for for-profits means more money, successful collaboration in the nonprofit world can mean ending poverty or altering the course of climate change. And when the stakes are that high, collaboration is too important to fail because of clashing egos. Nonprofits should be actively looking for opportunities to collaborate and should go into those partnerships with their eyes on the mission and with their minds open to learning and innovating.

When I picture the word collaboration in my head, I always picture it as col(lab)oration, because working in teams is very much a human laboratory. Just like scientists search for answers in their labs, nonprofits need to get into social labs to solve the problems that plague our communities.