In this instructional video, Jermaine Edwards, a customer growth specialist, presents a four‑step framework for turning collaboration into a powerful growth engine for businesses. He first redefines collaboration as the purposeful harnessing of multiple people’s skills, intellect, and abilities to achieve results greater than any individual could alone. He then outlines the four actionable principles: 1) Discern – clearly identify the specific business outcome you want and the resources needed; 2) Identify – locate the internal “super‑powers” or best‑in‑class people, even across departments, who can contribute; 3) Harmonize – engage those people by articulating the personal benefits of participation, defining roles in a way that respects their time, and co‑creating realistic commitments; and 4) Engage – launch the collaboration with frequent communication, transparent accountability, and regular review cycles to maintain momentum. Throughout, Jermaine provides concrete dialogue scripts, negotiation tactics for time commitments, and emphasizes the importance of a clear review process. He concludes with a call to download a supplemental PDF, like, subscribe, and watch future videos.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guy. And if you're old, welcome back. If you're new, welcome to the fold. In this specific video, we're going to talk about how to turn collaboration into a secret growth weapon for your business. Now we're talking about collaboration and how we can turn that collaboration into a secret growth weapon for your business and for your customer growth. So I want you to hold something in mind just for a moment. What do you think collaboration actually is? Because oftentimes we'll feel that collaboration is simply just a group of people kind of working together, ideally, you know, with common goals in mind. And that would be true, but actually, if we took a very clear view of the results that collaboration should bring, we get a much different feeling, a different experience. And collaboration for me is the harnessing of the skills, the ability, the intellect of two or more people to achieve greater or better results together than you would have done apart. Now, if you think about collaboration like that, the harnessing of skills, abilities, intellect of a group to a common purpose, ideally, to achieve greater results and greater results together, that would be something I'd like you to consider. So how do we get that kind of result where we can harness those things and generate greater results together faster and even better than we could if we were doing it ourselves? Well, you as an individual, if you want to collaborate with other people, there needs to be a way in which you do that that encourages that kind of interaction, that creates an environment for you to do that. So I'm gonna take you through 4 really clear, really simple principles that you could apply today to begin to accelerate and to activate collaboration in your business and with your teammates and with your teams starting right now. The first is, We need to be able to discern. Now, what do I mean by discern? Well, the first thing we need to do is to discern what is it that we actually want to achieve. What kind of result do I want? What kind of result do we want as a business, as a team, as a department? What does that look like? And once we understand the results, the benefit we're looking after, We then need to ask ourselves the question, discern and really consider, what would we need in order to achieve that? What kind of resources? What kind of skills? What kind of ability? What kind of ideas would we need to draw in, in order to achieve that specific goal? That's all in the discernment period. This is before we go to any kind of ask or asking or requesting anything from everybody. We want to Discern. Be really clear on what we want, the results, and the benefit. So that's number 1, discern. So now we've looked at discerning, we want to look at part 2, which is identification. So once you've understood what we want to achieve, what we want as a result from collaboration, from connecting with others, from gaining benefit from this collective goal, we go to identification. And that's being able to identify the right people to bring into the team to drive and get that specific result. And for you, we need to ask a very clear question here. Where are the superpowers in our business? Who has the ability to do X, Y, and Z very well? And this might require you to go and do a little bit of networking inside your own business. Sometimes the skills might not be directly correlated to your department. You may need to go outside of that department, go and speak to other peers in different places to bring in the right skills and resources needed to achieve that goal. So it's your job now to identify where the people that are excellent, that are best in class at the skills or abilities or resources, accessibility of those resources that we need to achieve the goal. Identify those people, write down those names, because then we're going to move into the next session, which will help you to understand how to engage those people well. So now we've identified, we go to step 3, which is to harmonize. And we want to bring the team together in a way in which they want to engage and be part of the project, be part of collaborating. That's not always easy to do, so we need a way to engage that allows us to create the environment for greater success. Now, in most collaborations and teams, team members are told to be part of those teams, or it's part of their role just because of a title. And those are never good motivators for getting people engaged in a project. People want to feel connected and inspired to do something. So in the harmonize area, we want to do two things. We want to define roles and define responsibilities, but we're gonna do this in a different way. So the first is we're going to take some time to think about what is the actual benefit to this individual being part of this project? What's the benefit to them? Is it a feeling? Is it emotion? Is it a result? Is it, does it give them greater status? What are those things? Then we want to really be clear on why we're actually asking them to be part of the team, and that's what's going to change this engagement for you. You're going to go directly to that person, and you're not just going to ask them to do a task, you're going to tell them why they are best for it. So an example of this might be, hey Bob, hey Susie, I was told you are best at doing this specific task of planning, of engaging and negotiating with customers, whatever that thing is. I was told that you were the best at it, and we're trying to achieve this specific goal with our customers, this result, and we can't do this without you. We know that you're the best at this, and we'd love to have you part of that particular team. However, before we even say yes, we want to talk about this other thing, and the other thing is about responsibilities. Now, responsibilities are what people tend to push back at. You know why? Because it's a commitment to time. It's a commitment to the time to get something done. So instead of giving them an artificial time that we may not be able to keep or even say yes to completely, we want to invite them into a conversation so they tell us what they can actually commit to based on their expertise and their knowledge of what needs to be done. So what we do then is we say, look, here's what we're trying to achieve. Here's the goal. Here's a role we believe that you can play that would add significant value to us. Here's the benefit we believe it might have to you. However, we don't want to assume the time that it would take to really get things done. So could you tell us, based on this, what we're trying to achieve and the role that we're asking for, what kind of time do you think this would take for you to come in and do this and help us with this? And we're supporting you and working together to achieve it. What do you think that might be? Now they're going to give you an opinion, and what's going to happen is they're going to overinflate it. They're going to say, oh, take lots and lots of time. And then you're going to ask them this. Well, if we only had an hour a week, what do you think we could achieve with that? What will happen is, go, um, they'll go, an hour a week, that's really interesting. Then they'll give you something else and you go, well, what would be reasonable? And then they'll tell you what's reasonable and you say, hey, that sounds great to me. On that basis, would you be open to consider being part of the team? Now all of a sudden, just through those really simple set of questions, you've got them into a place where now they're giving you answers on what needs to be done, how it can be done, and the time it would need to be taken to get that thing done. And you've had to do no work at all except for ask questions. That's the beauty of bringing people together, is that we're inviting people into their own state of brilliance, their own excellence in that particular area. And our job is simply to present the facts, give them the benefits, and invite them into a conversation. So now we've got to the final stage, which is Engage. So we would've now got it really clear on our goals and results. We've identified the right team. We've gone out to harmonize with them in terms of asking them to be part of the team, telling them why, defining the responsibilities. Now we need to go and engage. We need to go and really communicate together and start to action the stuff. That we've just talked about. So this is the point in time where you bring the team together and you begin to just engage on the activities that's needed to get the result done. Now, this doesn't just end there. What we want to have is frequent communication and a clear review process that helps everybody to be held accountable, ensures things are transparent, and that people are actually being tracked and know that their work is being monitored, not because you want to be a big brother or anything like that, but because if the team as a whole doesn't believe that everybody needs to be held accountable or is not involved in the process, you're unlikely to get the kind of commitment that's needed to follow through. So having frequent communication and making sure you have regular reviews allows you to keep engaged and keep momentum and keep the energy flowing throughout the project, throughout the process that you need to go through in order to get those results. So that's the 4-step process for really collaboration that sets teams on fire, starting with real discernment, real identification, harmonizing that team, and then engaging effectively. Now I've got more resource for that actually in a PDF below, so I encourage you to download it so you can get more information about how to do this well. Make sure you like and subscribe to this video if you've really found value, and I'll see you in the next video.
