Collaborative Team Meetings and Collaboration Techniques Essay

Collaborative Team Meetings and Collaboration Techniques - Essay Example There are several elements that must be present in a collaborative team meeting. One of these elements is participation and leadership (Schied 2010). Members of the collaborative team must at all times view themselves as equals. This helps in encouraging and supporting participation. The person with the greatest expertise is normally assumes the role of leader or facilitator. In some cases however, leadership is held by the members in rotation. This is commonly the case when the tasks to be performed are repetitive with members holding responsibilities jointly. The facilitator must be unbiased in the meeting to avoid being regarded as a manipulator. Another element of the collaborative meeting is the establishment of collaborative strategies and goals according to Mcie (1999). Goals and strategies to be achieved by the team must be developed through cooperation. Ensuring that the members of the team understand the goals help in keeping the team on track and helps in directing the teams activities and decision making. Decision making is one thing that cannot be avoided in collaborative team meetings according to (Pascale, 2008). Decision making is a joint responsibility, such decisions being made by consensus. Having consensus as opposed to voting ensures that the decisions made by the team are agreed on by members of the group. Without good communication, decisions cannot be made in a group setting. Collaborative meetings involve communication in which cases members of the team are encouraged to open up and express themselves freely without regard to the extent to which other members will agree with their opinions (Mcie, 1999). Whenever the collaborative team is faced with an issue, brainstorming is applied to come up with possible solutions (Pascale, 2008). The ideas that members in the meeting come up with are noted down and discussed as the meeting progresses. Since