Collaboration can be taught and learned. Yet few organizations are actively teaching employees how to master this critical skill.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we speak with Deb Mashek, founder of Myco Consulting, LLC to learn how companies can move collaboration from a platitude on their office walls to a capability found throughout the organization.

"if you want to see a lot of collaboration, if you want to have a collaborative culture, first of all, you need to make collaboration possible. That sounds so obvious, but it means that you can't create weird infrastructures where people can't actually contact each other, which we saw when in 2020, a lot of us migrated very quickly from being fully in person to being fully remote, where there weren't a list of people's email addresses or phone numbers and so it wasn't clear even how to contact people. We didn't have a lot of us access to videoconferencing yet," said Deb. "So the modalities the infrastructure wasn't there to actually collaborate. And thankfully we a lot of us were able to onboard that fairly quickly."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• Why organizations aren't teaching collaboration.
• Whether collaborative efforts are ever a waste of time.
• How to hire for collaborative mindset.
• The broader collaborative ecosystem businesses should keep in mind.
• The five questions to establish if your organization is equipped to collaborate.

Plus, host Siobhan Fagan talks with Deb about how she came to specialize in collaboration, why helicopter parenting stunts collaborative skills growth and how to avoid running your business like a filthy dive bar. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].