What Makes a Perfect Collaboration? Weakness, Conflict and Doughnuts

To collaborate another person is to admit weakness. There's way of getting around it. If you weren't a position of weakness, wouldn't need anyone else's help. When engaging a collaboration, you're saying, I don't know to do this on my . You're both saying that. You're co-failing, really. Which is best way to start a partnership. Because with vulnerability comes trust. And trust is everything.

Who to Collaborate With
There two criteria. You want a peer, obviously--you can't have a true collaboration someone who is above or you hierarchically. But more important a peer, you want a complement. You need a Jobs to your Wozniak, a Hall to your Oates, a rhino to your tickbird. You want someone knows as much you do, just not about the things.

"The fact that I don't have technical background means I'm not impeded my knowledge of what it's to take to build something, so I'm free to just dream features and ideas," says Cyrus Farudi, founder along Omri Cohen of Capsule, a web and mobile app built event planning, group interaction and photo sharing. "Luckily, my partner, has a technical background, has a very ‘yes, it can be done' attitude. There been screaming matches when I've tried to get involved in something on the tech side."

Related: It helps your collaborator is a person don't like all that much--or at is someone with you're always on the verge of arguing. Tension can produce wonderful things. It has .

"Collaborating is about co-laboring," says Nilofer Merchant, innovation expert, Harvard Business Review columnist and author The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy. "It's not hugs. I think people think about it this positive thing, but it's really about how you solve tough problems neither party could solve on their own."

If you've chosen someone only on skills and intelligence, there might be a personality conflict that, normal circumstances, could lead a standoff. But you're a team, so conflict personalities would be distracting and frivolous. Sure, the tension of your differences might push of you right up to the point of failure (the brink doom, we'll call it). But there are two reasons you're likely to go over the brink of doom: One, your fate is connected ( the handcuffs of mutual interest, for lack of a better metaphor); and two, because a lot of great ideas happen right before people fail--a kind of adrenaline kicks , which keeps you creative inaction (the abyss of "Man, we got nothin'"). The point is: Collaboration is harnessed conflict.

The Meeting
A good way to start the meeting is to say: We know what the goal is, but don't know how to get there. "You have to have the difficult conversations first," says Jim Moran, co-founder, president and COO of Yipit, a New York-based deals aggregator and recommendation service. "You have determine who is better what. That transparency will make everything flow."

To ensure transparency, we've developed a set of four proclamations with which every collaboration should begin:

1. This is why you're here.
2. This is why I'm here.
3. This is the goal.
4. These are the doughnuts.

(In business texts you'll often find this referred to the YMGDI, or the You Me Goal Doughnuts Imperative.)

The rest of the collaboration can't be codified. It shouldn't be. A meeting in which two people collaborating is a secret place defined by its rules and rhythms. To offer up techniques for interaction would be to undermine the sacred bond two people working together a cloak of mystery to solve an important problem.

Well, actually, there's this one technique that intrigues us-- contrived as it may be. It's called "behavioral mirroring." The neurologists believe it happens subconsciously-- dates and during job interviews, especially.

"It's nonverbal behavior beneath people's awareness, but you can skilled at doing it deliberately," says Steve Kozlowski, professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University and editor of Journal of Applied Psychology. "You mirror the subtle behaviors of others an interaction. It's part of the attraction process. It tends build rapport."

So if your cohort laughs, you laugh, too. If your cohort slumps his chair, you slump. If your cohort raises his eyebrows, you yours. If your cohort uses the term cohort, momentarily disengage behavioral mirroring because you don't want to be the kind of person who throws the word cohort.


Adapted and abridged from: Entrepreneur.com, June 22, 2012.