Collaboration skills check

The 12 collaboration skills

Most leaders can name three collaboration skills: communicate, share, and be a team player. There are 12. Five are foundations that most people recognise, and seven are advanced skills, where collaboration gets genuinely hard and where the balance with competition matters most.

The five foundations

1. Team collaboration: collaborating well both when you lead a team and when you are only a member of it
2. Coordination: communicating well with others who share an interest in a goal or project
3. Resource sharing: sharing common resources, such as people or facilities, equitably and considerately
4. Cooperation: working together, but separately, on a shared challenge
5. Co-invention: working in a fully integrated way with another party, investing together and sharing both the risk and the reward

The advanced seven

1. Avoiding sub-optimisation: prioritising the whole over your own part or team
2. Collaborative competition: collaborating temporarily with a competitor for mutual gain
3. Alliancing: building a partnership beyond your usual boundaries and co-travellers
4. Eco-competition: winning without needing anybody else to lose
5. Edgy collaboration: collaborating generously without looking naïve, and making sure your contribution is seen
6. Negotiating: give and take for mutual advantage, because collaboration with no trade-offs is usually one-sided
7. Virtual collaboration: doing all of the above down a phone line or over a video call, which for most teams is now the norm

Using the check in a session

Score yourself against all 12 first, then ask a colleague to score you too. The disagreements are where the useful conversations start, and a shared record gives you a baseline to develop against over time.

Run it with a whole team and the pattern across the group usually says more than any individual result. Teams tend to score well on the foundations and poorly on the advanced seven, which is exactly where the value sits.

For the reasoning behind each skill, read our collaboration skills checklist for leaders. To build the capability rather than only measure it, see our collaboration challenge.