Radical Collaboration

Book excerpt: Collaborative skills have never been more important. At work, you can't afford to be defensive, hostile, or even too cynical. It's never easy, but getting along with your colleagues or customers is imperative, whether you're on a long-term assignment, a temporary project, or a virtual team where you're connected to colleagues only by cell phone and e-mail. Radical Collaboration: Five Essential Skills to Overcome Defensiveness and Build Successful Relationships is a how-to manual for anyone who wants to be more skillful at building relationships, both professional and personal. James W. Tamm and Ronald J. Luyet will show you how to gently look inside yourself for the answers, with page after page of thoughtful exercises and probing tools that will increase your skills. The four introspective skills you will learn are: Collaborative Intention, Truthfulness, Self-Accountability, and Self-Awareness and Awareness of Others. You also have to get what you need from the world around you. That's why Radical Collaboration teaches a critical fifth skill: Problem Solving and Negotiating. Tamm and Luyet teach you how to negotiate using the highly effective interest-based approach to problem solving. At the heart of the book is a theory of human relationships called Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation, or FIRO. It explains how unmet emotional needs can sabotage our efforts to collaborate. How does the online profile work? When you get to chapter 7, you will be directed to a unique code number printed on a sticker on the inside back flap of this book. Take this number to the Web site for the book, www.radicalcollaboration.com. Here, you will be able to take a free relationship profile called the FIRO Element B. This profile will increase your awareness of how you behave in relationships and give you information about your behavior in three areas that strongly influences your ability to collaborate. The test will measure how important control is to you, how important it is for you to be included, and how comfortable you are being open about yourself. Are you are defensive and fearful? Is that preventing you from collaborating? Use the exercises in this book to identify your habits, and then learn how to moderate them. You will quickly become more effective at work and at home.