What are the benefits of collaboration and teamwork in a business simulation?

This article is for learning and development managers and senior leaders deciding whether a business simulation will genuinely build collaboration and teamwork in their people.

Collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce something, or 'co-labouring'. In a business simulation, colleagues work together in teams to produce a set of results.

Teamwork is the process of working collaboratively with a group of people, here the other participants in the room, to achieve a goal. Once individuals have established collaborations with one another, it takes a team to carry out the task at hand. Collaboration and teamwork therefore go hand in hand.

Six benefits of collaboration and teamwork in a business simulation

1. Enables informal learning. Participants learn from each other when they work in teams. A simulation is a safe environment where teams can try things out, take risks, and learn by making mistakes. When teams compete, debrief sessions and conversations with colleagues let them learn from each other's successes and mistakes.
2. Shows individuals their style as a team member. Do they focus on the data available? Do they look at the bad points of decisions or the good points? Are they a reactive thinker? Seeing what sort of team player they are makes people conscious of their behaviour back in the workplace. It can also be a useful insight for senior leaders assessing how their people behave when teamed together.
3. Increases diversity of thinking. Participants work with different types of people. This is especially useful when colleagues from different departments are put together, because they gain insight into areas they do not come across every day. Put someone from marketing and someone from finance in the same team, and each learns something the other already knows.
4. Increases efficiency and productivity. Each participant has their own specialities, strengths, and weaknesses. Collaboration lets people focus on what they do best so the whole team benefits, and individuals start to take on specific roles such as finance director, IT director, or sales and marketing director.
5. Enhances communication and social skills. Team members agree decisions together and share what they know. They also present their results and strategy to the rest of the room, which develops how they communicate with colleagues, especially when a senior sponsor is watching.
6. Works towards a common goal. Individuals achieve more through a joint effort than by pursuing personal objectives alone. When each person makes a specific contribution and the outcomes are shared, the results are often greater than anyone could reach independently.

Collaboration and teamwork do come with challenges, such as team members not communicating well or disagreeing on decisions. In a facilitated simulation, the facilitator steers those conversations in the right direction and helps the team work through the friction.

How far can collaboration go? The six levels

Working together is not a single behaviour. It runs from simply staying in touch through to jointly inventing something neither side could build alone. Our 6C's model, the ladder of collaboration, sets out six ascending levels. Each one is more valuable than the last, and each asks a team to give up a little more to reach it.

In practice, most teams operate only at the lowest three levels: they connect, communicate, and at best co-ordinate. The higher levels, where teams pool resources, run shared functions, and invent together, are where the largest gains sit. They are also where the risks climb, because a team has to put more at stake, from reputation and knowledge through to control and independence. A business simulation is a safe place to practise that climb, because a team can feel the risk of sharing without the real-world consequences.

Practising collaboration with Consortium

Consortium is our simulation built specifically around this challenge. Teams run competing artisan businesses that have jointly won their first contract. None can deliver it alone, so if one fails, all fail. To succeed they have to climb the ladder, negotiating and collaborating with rival teams and with the customer at the centre. It is a direct, experiential way to feel where a group's collaboration currently tops out, and what it takes to go higher.

Choosing where to start

The right simulation depends on the collaboration problem you are trying to solve:

• Working across rival or competing groups: Consortium or Compete
• Making joint strategic, financial, and collaborative decisions: Dilemma
• Aligning departments around safety, guests, and profit: Cruise
• A need specific to your own business, industry, or terminology: a tailor-made simulation

If the aim is trust and performance inside one team, see our high-performing teams challenge. Need to build a high-performing team in a short period? Read our short guide, 'Instant Team: How to Create a High Performing Team in a Hurry', which sets out three simple ingredients and four steps.

To see how our immersive, facilitated simulations can develop collaboration skills across your organisation, explore our collaboration challenge or get in touch to talk it through with our team.