Collaboration can be the start of Big Wins for your career.
As the old saying goes:
“If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
A major shift in your career is often sparked by a strategic collaboration. Finding partners that will work together with you towards a common goal can turbocharge your efforts.
Or, it can be a source of tension, disappointment, and exhaustion.
What’s the difference between a fantastic collaboration and one that doesn’t work out?
Finding the Right Fit
You may be looking for a partner with a specific skill set, the right industry connections, or with an artistic aesthetic that matches your own.
Even with an important element like that in place, there is still a lot to learn about a potential collaborator to decide if working together is the right fit.
The Collaborator Interview
When screening potential collaborators, it’s a good idea to conduct an informal “interview” to gauge the potential success of the collaboration.
- Think through what you are looking for in a collaborator and what you want the relationship to look like before the interview.
- Find out what their long-term goals are and what they are looking for in a collaboration.
- Try to understand what motivates and energizes them.
- Get a sense of what situations cause them frustration and stress.
Examples of signs that the collaboration will likely not succeed:
- Your intuition is telling you to stay away!!
- You are looking for different things in a collaboration.
- Your long-term goals are not aligned.
- You get a sense that you will frustrate each other more than help each other.
Examples of signs that the collaboration will be fruitful:
- Your collaborator brings out the best in you! He/she energizes you, helps you achieve clarity or come up with new ideas, and helps keep you calm.
- Your collaborator is a productive problem-solver.
- You have open lines of communication between you and are comfortable talking about underlying issues.
- You trust each other and look out for each other.
- You have synergy together: what you do together as a team feels bigger than what you could do solo.
Collaborations Are What Make the World Go Around!
Want to learn more about how to start and grow a successful collaboration directly from the co-founders of iCadenza and Cadenza Artists, Jennifer Rosenfeld and Julia Torgovitskaya Rapoport?
Jennifer and Julia’s mini-course on collaboration and 20+ more fantastic courses are available through a subscription to Coro.
