Being collaborative is a good thing...until it isn’t

Collaborative people and organisations are friendly, open, helpful and collegiate. It’s a good environment to work in knowing we can easily get support from colleagues.

But an overly collaborative culture has downsides:

1) Too much chatting, not enough doing
2) Diaries overloaded with meetings 

We all want to be helpful. But a Harvard Business Review article I recently came across ('Collaboration without Burnout' July 2018) has a different perspective.

Where we wrap our identity too tightly around being helpful we can run ourselves into the ground trying to be all things to all people. People won’t hate us if we say no occasionally.

Being helpful compounds. If you help someone a couple of times you get known for being helpful. Which is nice but means they keep coming back for more! Suddenly your time becomes too focused on other people’s agendas and your day extends as you work longer and harder to manage it all.

Have a read of the article for more insights into how the researchers saw this play out in corporates.

But before you do, here’s some quick tips from me on how to manage this:

1) Set boundaries with your time and schedule work. 

If your diary has time blocked out for your commitments, you’ll see when there is and isn’t time to get involved in extra work. Tell people you’ll be happy to help them during a gap next week. We often assume urgency when it can wait. 

2) Delegate. 

We want you in your zone of genius most of the time (all would be the dream!). So sense check whether this activity truly needs your input and get your wider team involved if it fits their role better

3) Go through your calendar.

Challenge yourself about the recurring meetings in there. Is there a project where your SME knowledge was crucial a month ago but doesn’t really need you right now? Get them to invite you back when you’re critical, not just useful.

Collaboration on the right things is great, so this isn’t a call to turn into an island, just sense check you’re protecting your energy and pointing it at the things that deliver most value for you, other people and the organisation. 

Hope this is food for thought- interested to hear your success stories.