GENUINE COLLABORATIONS: What Makes them Genuine?

By Bridget Woodbury

The word ‘collaboration’ gives me a little bit of pause. I have so often heard it used to defer action and gloss over misaligned values.

“This is a collaboration between two departments, so you’ll need to come to a consensus before you move forward.”

“We’re collaborating with another organization on this, so don’t expect change to be quick.”

“You’ll need to reach a compromise here; be collaborative.”

Collaboration can be a barrier disguised as a bridge. 

Malicious or not, it can make progress impossible. When our Managing Director Jeff M. Poulin and I were discussing the quarterly topics for our 2023 Campaign, I was adamant that we spend time talking about genuine collaboration. I wanted to hear how folks are entering spaces with the intent to learn from each other and work together, rather than placating employees that are historically unheard.

How do we foster these relationships and encourage these conversations? Here are some suggestions I have:

  • Be flexible about process and product: In the course of collaborating, you will inevitably learn something new and you have to be flexible enough to act on that. At Creative Generation, we sometimes will go so far as to leave the last phase of our work totally undefined so that we can respond to what we learn in the previous phases. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a goal or objective for the project — just that we are open to different ways of getting there.

  • Don’t make promises you can’t keep: If you can’t afford folks real power, don’t tell them you will. If there are limits to how much time or money you can invest, be honest about that. You build trust by being honest about who makes decisions and how they make them. When we go through the Adaptive Impact Planning process, we conduct interviews on behalf of our collaborators, in an effort to better understand their audiences and communities. In those sessions, we are very specific about how we will use their feedback. We let them know, for example, that we will share their feedback anonymously. We also tell them that we are simply able to make recommendations, but it is incumbent upon the organization to make changes.

  • Stay true to your values: In hard moments, it’s easy to make concessions to keep the peace, but that’s not genuine collaboration. Making easy choices in the moment may grease the wheels on a particular project, but compromising on your organization’s values impacts who wants to work with you. An essential part of this is admitting when you’re wrong and apologizing as publicly as you made the mistake.

What does genuine collaboration look like in your projects, programs, and organizations? Does it remain the same, or get more specific, when working intergenerationally? 

I have a hunch that the above ideas may be universal across all genuine collaborations - and I look forward to learning from others and continuing to refine these ideas throughout the series.