It’s a common misconception that in order to collaborate well with others, you need to “be nicer”. When in reality, what’s usually required is to get far better at asserting your value.
One of the most enduring models for explaining the difference between being nice and actually collaborating is something called the Thomas-Kilmann matrix, named after the two behavioural psychologists who came up with it back in the 1960’s.
They observed that when people are in conflict, or in negotiation with each other, they tend to default to certain preferred styles. And they gave those styles five different names according to their combination of assertiveness and cooperativeness.
It’s often an enlightening exercise to compare how you behave with different people, because the style you adopt towards them is often a subconscious response to the style they show towards you.
The most obvious ones are the “competing” style – high on assertive, low on cooperative – that often means you get your way but rarely wins you friends, and its opposite, the “accommodating” style which generally means saying yes, and regretting or resenting it later.
And of course, there’s the “avoiding” style, which I’m sure most of us have done at some point or another, usually when we can’t find the energy or don’t trust ourselves to bite our tongues long enough to do either of the two above.
So far, so “standard two-by-two matrix”. But then Thomas and Killman broke from tradition, and identified not one, but two other common styles: compromising and collaborating.
Now, imagine you’ve been given a project or a mission to scope out and cost, and you come back having worked out it will take, say, £100 to deliver. Meanwhile, a colleague has been given a different task and has also come back with a £100 price tag.
The problem is, there’s only £100 in the pot to pay for both.
A competing style will argue the case for your project first. An accommodating style will accept the other person’s argument. An avoiding style will say there’s no point discussing it because the boss needs to make the decision (which you’ll then accommodate if it goes the wrong way).
Can you start to place your colleagues and yourself on the matrix yet?
So, onto the final two: a compromising style will play nice; maybe you’ll take £50 each and just do your best. It’s likely that neither of you will entirely succeed, but hey, it was a fair split. And if that metaphor sounds familiar, it’s not surprising – in the charity sector we do like to see ourselves as nice, after all.
On the other hand, a genuinely collaborative style will see the pair of you go back to the drawing board, looking at the aims for both tasks, taking full ownership of both, and trying to find ways that both sets of outcomes could be delivered for £100.
To be collaborative, you have to be able to be assertive. Not just about your needs, but about your counterpart’s too. Neither of us succeeds unless we both succeed – that’s the core of collaboration.
And I’m not going to get you into that collaborative space until I’ve done two things: demonstrated I value your goals and your contribution, and convinced you to value mine just as much.
This is the foundation of trust we need for collaboration, and if I want a collaborative relationship, it’s on me to build that trust – to show I recognise the value you bring and the aims you have, and to know you recognise those same qualities in me.
And I can’t achieve that if I don’t fully recognise my own value.
So often we underestimate and underplay our value. So often that it’s almost endemic in the sector.
When I read threads on LinkedIn and other social media bewailing the lot of underappreciated charities, not being paid for corporate sessions or for their expertise in service design, of course I’m sympathetic, but if you don’t stand up and assert your own value, what do you expect?
Doubtless there’s another article I should write to unpack that last paragraph, and I will, but in the meantime, I hope you get my point.
Until you stop trying to be nice and start recognising and asserting your value, you will never make the move from accommodating and compromising to properly collaborating.
And yes, there are people who will always stay in “competing” mode. But the onus is on us to prove they can’t be moved, and you can’t do that through just being nice.