Collaboration skills are necessary to facilitation, group leadership, and public engagement at any level. We all work with people. As public sector consultants, we usually find ourselves bringing different groups of people with varying perspectives to work together on common goals. You need to know how to collaborate and how to cause collaboration. Together we are even better. There is a reason why it is our motto. Collaboration is the core of democracy and it’s how big things get done. Here’s some of the latest information we have found on collaboration skills. Thanks for letting us share it with you.
When you started working from home during the pandemic, our training classes and public meetings moved mostly online. We, our clients and Zoom figured out how to make virtual coaching and engagement work well enough to stay in business. But we also realized that, although it was convenient and did ...
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Helping people understand new information, as we suggested in the opening of this newsletter, requires getting them to first just consider what you’re trying to convey to them. At a time when all of us are bombarded with online and traditional media constantly competing for our attention, getting people’s attention ...
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I’m sure that you’re proficient with the overall do’s and don’ts of reaching, working with and engaging people in communities. But, fact is, that real success most often comes from the doing all of the little, seemingly innocuous things really right. Like, for instance, expressing authentic gratitude to the people ...
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When the premise of democracy, statesmanship and compromise is under attack, as it is now, the mere idea of collaborating seems quaint and old fashioned. But the fact is it’s probably the only thing that will save us. Getting people to the point of willingness to collaborate is challenging. The ...
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It was pointed out recently that we seem to be a nation united on values and divided by politics. (Values unite, issues divide.) Almost all of us want to feel safe, secure and provide better futures for our kids. How we do those things is where things begin to deteriorate. ...
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Getting the best out of people and nudging them into some level of cooperation is a learnable art and skillset. It’s sort’a required for the work that we do. Although we do deal with students and clients who sometimes just oversee the function of public participation but don’t actually work ...
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As a transplanted westerner for 40 odd years, I’ve come to love the skies, the vistas and the stubborn individualism that runs deep in the culture of so many of the wide open places west of the Mississippi. That stubbornness sometimes goes a little overboard like it did with the ...
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The pandemic halted face to face meetings, but we adapted and video conferencing became mainstream. Office buildings turned into ghost shells for nearly two years until employers began slowly enticing people out of their bathrobes and back to an agency/business desk, for at least parts of the week. We’re now ...
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Dealing with people and their oftentimes difficult, contrary opinions and positions makes up much of your day, I would venture to guess. Helping you understand and work with these people makes up almost all of our days. One of the universal truths to success lies in truly understanding the people ...
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Democracy – and a Democratic Republic like the U.S. – is an exercise in collaboration and it’s how we’ve gotten this far. I’ll argue that the best public participation is almost always a collaboration. But in recent times, the idea of compromise has been branded as a weak-kneed, liberal-minded copout. ...
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