Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tupper and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Each week we discuss a different topic to do with work and share practical ideas for action to help you and us navigate our squiggly careers that little bit better.

This week we're talking about collaboration. We're going to start off our conversation talking about the skills of collaboration.

And then we're going to move on to thinking a bit about the structure of collaboration,

specifically thinking a bit about how our ability to work together is going to be impacted by that hybrid world of work that everybody's talking about right now.

So we're going to start off thinking about the skills of collaboration. And this was really inspired

by a brilliant article I read by Francesca Gino, and she is a professor over at Harvard Business School.

And we'll link to that article because it really is worth a read in our

pod sheet, which you can download and you can sign it for the pod mail where you get everything

about the podcast all in one place now. So we hope that's proving useful for everybody. And one of

things that she says at the very start of the article that really struck me is that collaboration

is often approached by organisations as a value to cultivate

rather than a skill to learn. And I think what struck me then is when we talk about something

is like, oh yeah, we should just collaborate better. It feels quite abstract and it's quite hard

to know what to do with that. What does that look like? How do we know we've got any better?

Whereas when we think of it as a skill,

we know that skills are things that you can learn, practice and improve,

and it just feels a bit more specific and useful.

And she's worked with lots of really interesting companies

all across the world and observe those that collaborate particularly well.

And she got to six skills that contribute to teams and organisations that have really high

and positive, useful collaboration. So what we thought we'd do is just summarise those six

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