ELSUA ~ The Soft Skills of Collaboration and The Social Enterprise

So what are those common traits that powerful collaborators …? Let’s see:

• Be a good listener: Indeed, most of the potential conflicts that can happen in a multicultural collaborative environment are happening because knowledge workers just simply don’t listen well enough. Sometimes it’s much better to listen, focus and pay attention to what’s been said than to utter words to just get your voice heard.
• Be innovative: …
• Be creative: … 
• Be curious: …
• Be confident: …
• Be polite: … There is nothing out there that beats a heartfelt Thanks! for helping out those in need, for finding the right experts, for achieving together a common goal, etc. etc. Being polite can take you very far, whether when asking for help or even when giving it out. Try it!
• Be helpful: … Always being willing to help others, even if you yourself are busy, too!, can help you build social trust amazingly fast …
• Be authentic: … Just be you. It’s enough.
• Be passionate: … Don’t neglect your passion; don’t let it go unnoticed; don’t feel bad, or embarrassed, for showing it, even if others make fun of it. …

And, finally, the last one of those traits that surely adds further up to those soft skills that help knowledge workers becoming much more efficient and effective at what they do and how they collaborate with others, and also one of my favourites: be yourself. Allow others to trust you for who you are and for what you are good at.

Great posting by my IBM buddy Luis Suarez. How do you need to behave to become the „Collaboratinator“ or „Socializer“. Hej, Luis you raise the bar quite high … Nevertheless I really like a lot of the attributes, in particular be yourself.

Looking forward to see Luis Oct 18 at BASF, where we stop by with our IBM Social Business JamCamp bus and at the JamCamp itself on Oct 19 and 20 in Frankfurt. And to prepare ourselves we need to do the Wine Tasting 2.0 on Oct 17 at the Wachtenburg Winzer together!