Collaboration, the key to success

Success is a strange and fragile beast, so it is sometimes hard to pin down precisely what makes a business successful. At Indaba, we know our dedication to collaboration – one of our six core values – is something that plays a huge part.

Collaboration may be a word that is sometimes overused or even misused, but to us, collaboration is what underpins the relationships we have within our team and with our clients. It reinforces our work together - open, in an aligned, positive and transparent way to generate results, to drive performance and to achieve success.

It could be argued that collaboration really doesn’t have much to do with communication as a profession. But for us, it is integral to everything we do.

Thanks to collaboration, we’re greater than the sum of our parts, and we use that strength with our clients. Our ethos of collaboration is designed so that our clients can do more – communicate in more countries, reach more stakeholders, achieve more targets, hit more KPIs. When we collaborate well, we fill in the gaps in clients’ teams, whether that’s language, skills or experience. And how great is it when you can lean on someone’s wider breadth of knowledge for a particular project – that’s more than being just a supplier. Collaboration sits at the heart of what we enjoy with our clients – relationships that are not simply transactional.

“Here’s the budget, do this job”, from the client is as far away from collaboration as you can get and it means the client has very little skin in the game; you are simply a vendor providing a service for fee. You’ll most likely be dropped if they find another vendor whose price is lower. The client sees it purely as a transaction, like buying a coffee.

But by working collaboratively and as a true extension of clients, clients understand the value you bring to the table. These relationships also lend themselves to better long-term client retention. Our clients value our experience, respect our opinions our and trust our counsel.

Henry Ford, the man who revolutionised transportation with the Ford Model T, said of collaborative working, “Coming together is a beginning. Staying together is progress. Working together is success.” And at Indaba, we agree with him.