Collaborator
Collaborators are warm, informal, outgoing, and congenial people who get along comfortably with most people.
Highlights: Cooperative Empathetic Patient Friendly
Maximize your business potential by tapping into people’s natural strengths.
The Collaborator Reference Profile—like all Reference Profiles—has many unique strengths and characteristics. Understanding the differences in your people can help you build a company that achieves the results you’re after. The same way you’d build a world-class sports team, knowing how your people think and work helps you optimize for success.
Characteristics of the Collaborator
Collaborators are naturally responsive; they want to help. They seek to build consensus, and they are comfortable delegating tasks. For a more detailed and accurate reading of your behavioral pattern and how it pertains to your unique business situation, schedule a consultation.
Natural Strengths
Cooperative
Empathetic
Patient
Friendly
Common Drivers
Freedom from competition
Opportunities to collaborate
Supportive work team
Freedom of expression
Blind Spots
Not strong at technical work
Limited attention to detail
Difficulty adapting to frequent change
Needs reassurance
The Collaborator on a team
Collaborators are natural team players. They’re known to be understanding, people-oriented, and persistent. They thrive in and help contribute to a culture of teamwork. Teams are often designed by default rather than intention. A strategic, data-driven approach to building teams is what helps organizations win.
Business strategy and the Collaborator
Before you know whether someone is the right person for the job, you need total clarity and alignment on the results you’re after. What’s the goal or desired outcome? When we ask questions like this, we get a better understanding of the need to align people strategically for specific results.
When you put people in the right roles, you avoid turnover, toxicity, disengagement, and lost productivity. In the case of the Collaborator, while they can do a variety of things well, they naturally gravitate toward strategic activities that seek to cultivate company culture and teamwork.
Managing the Collaborator
Often managers try to manage everyone the same way—and that’s usually the way they like to be managed. But this approach can backfire. People like to be managed differently—and it may not always be in a way that comes naturally to you. Even beyond the individual needs, teams require different leadership styles. You wouldn’t manage a sales team the same way you’d manage a team of developers.
When working with Collaborators, remember that they’re unassuming, cooperative, agreeable, and socially-focused. They’re typically less effective with complex, siloed work that requires exactness and accuracy with details. Collaborators also have an intuitive understanding of others’ viewpoints and feelings. When managing this profile, consider some of the following suggestions:
Provide opportunities to work with others.
Allow freedom of expression; rigid rules and formality are typically off-putting.
Let them communicate and involve others.
Provide consistent and dependable support.
Build friendly environments; competitive pressure is less fun for them.
Explore talent optimization.
Companies that struggle to build high-performing teams are often missing critical people data. With our tools, expertise, experiance, and talent optimization, you can stop guessing at how to get the most from your people— and better align your people to deliver on the results you’re after.