Welcome back, we are going to continue by talking about the format for your collaboration, you need to choose what format you're going to use to have your collaborative event. So you can choose your format based on a couple different things. Number one, based on the goal of what you decided your collaborative event is going to be about. Number two, you're going to base the format on the needs of your team. So there might be some geographical things happening, there might be just some facts of your company that are really going to impact what type of collaboration you can have. And number three, you're going to be set on the personalities of the team that you're working with.

Just to help everybody be as comfortable as possible, and to you know, be able to get the most out of them. You'll notice that I'm not talking about actual tech or software in this lecture, and that Because your company probably already made that decision for you. Most places that I know of have already chosen, whether they're going to use Go To Meeting, or Dropbox or Google Docs, or you know, whatever it is fill in the blank, they've pretty much made that decision for you. And your hands are going to be tied with that. If they haven't made that choice for you, and you're looking for new things. Just number one, I am not your go to with the tech and the software stuff.

And if I say any type of company, it's going to be out of date pretty much before it's even out of my mouth. So I am not talking about tech or software for those very specific reasons. But feel free to Google it and come back and put it on the comments on this lecture. help other students out that'd be awesome. So rather than Explaining format, I thought maybe it'd be easier to give some examples of different formats that you could use for collaboration. So one of the first examples you could use is to say, okay, Hey, everybody, we have x question that we're trying to answer, give me, you know, your five best ideas, you can email me or you can send them to this shared folder.

Make sure to do it by 5pm on Tuesday. So that's a really quick and easy way to do collaboration. One of the pros of that is that it is so quick, but a con would definitely be that you as the manager, have to synthesize a lot of information to bring it all together into that coherent story. So there's pros and cons with all of these and you know, that's life. So you just have to decide what's going to be best for you guys. You can also work on a shared document together.

You can You could do that while you're on a webinar, you could do it in real time, or you could not do it in real time, depending on maybe the location of your team, maybe you have a couple people in different countries who are on some pretty vastly different time zones. So maybe it's important to do it asynchronously. You could also do it while you're on a call. You could do a webinar. And instead of having your screen as the managers be the only screen that's shared, you could bounce that screen around to everyone else, so that they can have a chance to share their ideas, designs, you know, whatever project they've been assigned to, they could share it that way. Because again, this is not a lecture from you.

This is this is collaboration. You want everyone's voice to be heard. You could also literally just do a phone call and have someone take notes. Just because you're working remotely does not mean that it has to be super high tech. You can use some pretty low tech ways to make this happen. So that's types of formatting.

Again, you want to base it on your goals. Are you brainstorming? Or are you coming up with finished product? The type, or the format that you're going to use is probably going to look different based on those different things. An idea for brainstorming that I did want to share that I will certainly give credit to. His name is Hal Gregerson.

He's an executive director at the MIT Leadership Center. But his idea about brainstorming was not brainstorming for answers, but brainstorming for questions. And the thought behind that is that it's twofold. One, it's hard to answer a question and know that you got it right. And there's a lot of pressure. You don't want to answer it wrong, especially in front of a group of people.

But you can't really ask a wrong question. So it really frees them. People have to have the confidence to come to the table and ask more questions. And then the other part of that is that by asking questions, you can delve deeper into the problem and really pinpoint what it is that you want to be solving. So instead of working on a really vague high level question, you can be diving in, and really, you know, solving whatever pain point is happening. So, that is Mr. Gerson's idea for sure, I don't want to be plagiarizing, but I thought it was a really genius idea, and one that would kind of twist some brainstorming sessions on their head.

When I'm saying that you would like to choose a format based on your team. You need to think about do you have the ability to meet in person, maybe in person is the best way to go over you know, a finalized product before you share it. But you do want to think about and consider the travel time and or costs of having a meeting in person. It's not that it's never appropriate, you just want to consider those because, you know, it'll quickly become a meeting with all the negative connotations. If somebody spent three hours driving to a one hour event. You also want to think about what your team members are going to be doing at that time.

Do you have a team that travels a lot? Do you have somebody who you know is going to be driving and they can only be present on the phone, and you really want that person's ideas there? Well, then you need to make sure that you are limiting this the need for screen during that collaborative event in particular. So again, not saying that the next one can't be a little more screen based. But that current line if you want to include you know, Susan, if she's going to be driving, you need to make sure that you're doing a phone based type of event. You also want to work with the personalities that you have.

And this is where the managerial part, I think really comes in. Because for me management was so much more about knowing who you're working with, and really tailoring your perspectives to them and you know that I found that to be the best way to get the most out of your people. So if you know you have a whole bunch of talkers, then you're gonna want to maybe limit say, Okay, I'm gonna give everyone a three minute platform and like time them and have a buzzer Haha, that's a joke, go off of a joke and have it go off and and limit people. If you know you have some introverts on the team, give them a chance beforehand, maybe to write it to you and you can encourage them to speak up different things like that, or you know, maybe if you have a whole bunch of introverts Just emails going to be a great way to work on almost everything up to the final product, things like that.

So tailor it to your team and who you've got, because the more comfortable the happier those people are, the better product you're going to get. All right, so that's all about formatting. So you can choose a million different ways to do your collaborative event. And you want to let everybody know what type of event is happening. So is it going to be email, phone, webinar, etc. And you're going to base it on the goals of your collaborative event, the needs of your company.

I don't wanna say limitations, but the practicalities of your company, and the personalities that you're working with. All right, I'll see you at the next lecture.