Don’t only focus on your personal successes, I often tell young people who contact me for job guidance. Be a team player.

During a decade of study and teaching at Harvard’s law and business schools, I made a significant but sometimes missed discovery: People who learned how to work across teams had a significant competitive advantage over those who did not.

The benefits of collaborative abilities

Collaborators with intelligence are in great demand while hiring. They produce products of a better caliber, advance more quickly, attract the attention of top management, and satisfy more clients.

But the thing that really surprised me was how uncommon collaboration abilities are, especially among guys.

These individuals shouldn’t just have diverse expertise areas. Additionally, they ought to reflect a range of ages, professions, and life experiences.

1. Lead with inclusivity.
Take action to bring various individuals together, whether or not you are the project leader.

I constantly think, “That individual thinks differently than I do. They are knowledgeable in something I am not, and I can learn much from them.

2. Express gratitude and thanks.
Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, observed in a ground-breaking study that workers, particularly males, frequently take their professional networks for granted.

They overestimated their independence and “portability” in job interviews because they were unaware of the amount of help they got from their coworkers.

This “me-first” attitude is frequently a deal-breaker and a turnoff for recruiting managers. Even former Google VP Claire Hughes Johnson says she looks for self-awareness and teamwork abilities “before anything else.”

3. Seek assistance.
If you are responsible for providing a sales report each week but do it all by yourself, it may indicate that you believe your viewpoint to be the most important.

But your data points will probably be stronger if you seek advice from specialists in several fields.

Don’t forget to provide the contributors’ names and areas of specialization. Your report will have greater credibility as a result.

4. Use the crowd.
People should have a method to learn without being required to join every team. According to my study, the motivation for voluntary commitment is frequently a desire to learn.

Communities facilitated by messaging platforms like Slack and others are excellent for promoting online forms of collaboration, information exchange, and knowledge dissemination.

Share data streams, please.
Scorecards and dashboards are effective tools for several reasons, including:

• They let you gauge your success in relation to your stated objectives.
• Peer pressure develops when results are made public because it makes it possible to compare leaders’ results to those produced by their peers.
• They increase transparency in the inclusion process by making important information accessible.
• Think about which information should be provided, when, and how. Making data accessible and helpful to certain audiences is the goal, not hiding it. Err on the side of oversharing is a wise maxim.

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