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Some Of My Recent Thinking

A collection of thoughts, reflections, ideas and resources on topics to help you with your leadership in engineering. These will be updated regularly, if you'd like a digest in your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter.

Unite and Conquer: The Power of Collaboration

Writer's picture: Sally TwisletonSally Twisleton

Updated: May 13, 2024




Two people discussing hardware
Stop, collaborate and listen

I’ve decided to call myself a collaborative coach, facilitator and consultant – why collaborative? Well a few of reasons, the first being that throughout my engineering leadership I consistently got feedback that bringing people together and fostering collaboration was one of my key skills – so why not make the most of that skill!?


Secondly my belief around coaching is that it is a partnership of equals between coach and client where we work together to meet the clients objectives. Through our collaboration the client will do some brilliant thinking and find the answers they needed.  


The third reason is more important for wider industry which is that collaboration is one of the key skills needed as the world gets faster and more complex. We need to be faster at making decisions, able to solve complicated multifaceted problems and find new ways to innovate. Many of our old ways of thinking and working won’t be as effective for the future – think about the frustrations of siloed working in your organisation or the multitude of meetings you attend which have no clear outcome. Only by developing great collaboration and working more effectively together to harness input from a diverse, cross functional team will we be able to handle some of these questions well.


HBR have a nice article about how important collaboration is in uncertain times which gives some strategies and also discusses abundant mindset which I talked about in a previous post.

McKinsey have also done lots of research into this topic thinking about driving efficiency through effective collaboration, they share a helpful framework for thinking about three critical collaborative interactions: Decision making, creative solutions, information sharing. If we’re so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? | McKinsey

So, if you are interested in collaborating with me on some of your challenges – for individual thinking or team collaboration and effectiveness, please get in touch!


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