Creating a Habit of Collaboration
At Life.Church collaboration is a part of our organizational culture. But last year we realized we valued the idea of collaboration over the practice of collaboration. We weren’t leveraging it to its fullest potential.
Several teams here build digital products — we get to work on awesome ideas that become digital tools that change people’s lives. However, with a laser-focus on our work, we weren’t always taking the time to connect with others in the same field, solve similar problems, and learn new tricks.
Sure, once and a while I would bump into a designer on another internal team in the hall and ask the usual “what are you working on” question. Every time I asked, I would walk away with a new perspective, idea, or spark of creativity. It was more inspiring than a polished Dribbble post. But it wasn’t happening often enough.
So, when we decided to launch Open Digerati, our entire digital team set aside a week to ask the question “How do we move to an open source mindset?” Teams formed around various functions and projects, and we came up with ideas. The benefits of this hyper-collaborative week quickly became apparent. New ideas were being sparked and learnings were shared at a higher rate. So, in addition to our ideas for launching Open Digerati, my team created a kind of side-project to ensure that this kind of free sharing of ideas moved from an idea we value to an idea we practice.
It was important to give ourselves permission to pause from the everyday hustle to meet with others with the sole purpose of collaborating. We needed to stop from go, go, go and listen to each other. Not only that, we wanted to give that permission to the rest of our 150-person digital team. Following Andy Stanley’s advice, we gave the idea a brand so people could easily recognize the function and reason behind the group.
We called them WorkGroups.
Since we established WorkGroups, I’ve been meeting with other interactive designers on a monthly basis. Sometimes we focus on a topic, but some of the most dynamic (and fun) times are when we just share unpolished designs and talk about what we are working on. One of our teams was working with the idea of a big picture rebrand project. They brought the project to the group and collectively we were able to contribute to push the team forward in their solution. What I’ve enjoyed most is the way ideas spark from one person to another. People who aren’t as bogged down in what you are working on can bring such a different perspective — you can’t help but generate new ideas!
It isn’t hard to get a collaborative WorkGroup started. It can literally be an email to three or four people in your building that says, “Hey, let’s do lunch and talk about what we’re working on.” It doesn’t even need to be a meeting. It could simply be a shared chat channel in something like Slack. It could be people from your floor, from your team, from different areas of expertise, or even from different companies. You could even expand your WorkGroup beyond your skillset/function into a particular topic like creativity, leadership, etc. If you’re a freelancer, I’d especially recommend starting a WorkGroup — working alone can be debilitating if you’re not getting great feedback.
Pick a focus (UI design, React coding, leadership growth, etc.) Then, define your desired outcome. How will the group make an impact on it’s members and your organization? Our purpose for our design group is to inspire, encourage, and sharpen one another to be masters of our craft.
If you know others in your organization or circle who want to strengthen a skill or focus, WorkGroups are a great way to make that happen.
Who are three people you can reach out to today who share your drive for constant improvement? That’s your core for your first WorkGroup.
