Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive

The negativist

But these people may also prove difficult to change, so consider asking them to serve as a critic of the effort, rather than an idea generator, to best take advantage of their energy.

Figure P-1. A model for understanding what collaboration is, and is not

The introvert

As a consultant, I’ve been hired by large organizations a shocking number of times to work on problems that other people were already trying to solve.

Dealing with Difficult People in Teams

To handle leaders, Borek suggests giving them an important task — the keyword being important. These folks should be asked to lead a discussion about key decision criteria, or to make critical decisions.

Blair Reeves, a Principal Product Manager at SAS and coauthor of Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software (O’Reilly),

Much has been written about how to do co-creation — from Sprint (Simon & Schuster) by Jake Knapp to “Pair Design”, which I wrote with Chris Noessel for O’Reilly