Your new company believes in integrated teams when it comes to problem solving. You soon find yourself on a large, multidisciplinary collaboration team faced with a challenge that will has no clear path to a solution. How do you begin to work with your teammates?
Rajesh Krishna, former chair of the CPTR section and executive director of clinical pharmacology at Merck Research Laboratories, offers this first step: “When somebody comes to me asking for advice on how to be a better collaborator, I start by asking how much he or she knows the other person or persons at a more personal level. In many instances, a personal connection has not been made.
“Getting to know the person or persons with whom you are collaborating is the natural and necessary first step. That relationship will have to be nurtured over time, and that will yield very real fruits of collaboration. While we expect organizational structures and anatomies to provide the necessary frameworks for collaboration, it is our personal networks and relationships that really provide us with rewards of collaboration. Break the ice!”
In a world of increasing collaboration, often across disciplines, communication and getting to know the other members of the team are paramount. Establishing roles and clearly defining the project are also key.
CHALLENGES
Collaboration may run into trouble “when your expectation for collaboration is different from what actually happens,” Krishna says. “There may be personal beliefs, attitudes, and perception gaps that could potentially affect whether collaboration could yield the intended endpoints. Implicitly, collaboration assumes some degree of compromise. There may be situations when somebody may not be willing to compromise, or compromise to a lower extent than you would be looking for, regardless of your efforts to be neutral or persuasive. When that happens, I recommend checking in your assumptions to see if they need revisiting.”
“Ultimately,” Krishna says, “you have to ask yourself what is it that you intend to achieve through collaboration. If the outcome of a collaborative effort is higher than what you imagined it would be, then that is a huge win. That is, ‘when the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts,’ as Aristotle said. Building a circle or network of relationships is an important first step in building the foundation for collaboration.”
Collaboration encompasses a lot of issues. In addition to personal interactions, scientists must consider research standards, verifying data, and authorship. See the articles listed below for guidance on successfully collaborating.
Resources
Science article “How to Collaborate”
Columbia University RCR Training, “Collaborative Science: Responsible Conduct of Research”
Forbes articles “8 Tips for Collaborative Leadership” and “Eight Dangers of Collaboration”