In the current recession with downsizing, restructuring, global competition and technological advances we find ourselves busier than ever. We respond to increasing and changing work demands by multi-tasking and working longer hours. Over time this impacts adversely on our well-being: as we become more stressed we become less productive; our performance deteriorates and we may even burn-out.
Team building has been a lucrative offering for training companies for decades. Any product manager knows that as a product moves through its lifecycle maximising profit depends on adjusting the marketing mix; so does this mean that ‘team coaching’, a term that is being increasingly used, is merely team building in new clothes?
Over the past two decades, Acorn has provided coaching support internationally to wide-ranging industries and organisations, from construction to media, pharmaceutical to nuclear. Each industry and each individual organisation faces its own set of unique challenges, and coaches offer higher value to clients when they are aware of the impact of these challenges.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines collaboration as ‘the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing’. In this feature we discuss what collaboration means in terms of output – rather than process – and offer ten things we consider useful to hold in mind when creating any collaboration.