Building Collaboration Externally

You are working in the name of the United States government to support and address an initiative on the other side of the globe. In the same region, you have US military bases, the US State Department, and a handful of NGOs all working towards a shared goal: protecting citizens.

“Can you collaborate with these organizations? How?”

It’s imperative to understand each entity’s mission, their unique institutional culture, and recognize their different approaches to problem-solving. Once this level of understanding is attained, building a collaboration process becomes much simpler.

Understanding the Mission

While there may be a shared larger goal in mind, like protecting citizens, each organization and agency has a slightly more nuanced approach of how to get there.

The military may be conducting operations, the State Department may be communicating through diplomatic channels, and the Red Cross may be implementing care to a community—all at the same time. Coordinating these missions means resources are not wasted, workflows make more sense, and the desired outcome is exponentially improved.

Understanding the Culture

As you develop relationships with agencies and organizations, you have an opportunity to learn about their culture and how they operate. Each agency will define success slightly differently, despite sharing common goals.

At Tesla Government, we prefer to operate like a partner in accomplishing your missions and objectives, not as a vendor. We are actively engaged in promoting your success by being responsive and providing our expert support.

Not only can we facilitate this collaboration, but we’ve nurtured a diverse network across US agencies, NGOs, academia, and the private sector. We know who you need to know to accomplish mission success.

We pride ourselves on our ability to evaluate each entity, understand their strengths, capitalize on their unique missions and capabilities, and then facilitate their collaboration for maximum effect.

Understanding the Mindset for Problem Solving

Community-building is an important part of the process in building a collaborative effort within your organization as well as others. You know that smart people are developing solutions, no matter the problem; but sometimes it can be difficult to find them.

Using your network and services allows problems to be solved—collaboratively and effectively, for success by any standard.

In order to build workflows, collaboration, and strong communication avenues, we encourage you to build a framework of awareness so everyone can work together and capitalize on each other’s strengths and methods of solving problems.

What’s Possible?

Now that you see the value of coordinating your collaboration efforts with external partners, it is time to figure out how to make the most of it.

Instead of starting with a solution (e.g. “We’re going to work together – we’ll work it out as we go!”), consider all the parties involved and be honest about what works for everyone…It’s probably a combination of multiple tools and communication methods.

Our team often helps out here, too. You may not know where to start, but we do things like that on a daily basis.

You already have enough on your plate, so it makes sense to bring in a third party who is focused on collaboration with external agencies. You’ll be able to offload the mental burden of making it happen, and focus on the information transfer and mission. Our Community Building and Knowledge Management teams can set up secure, shared online workspaces people can begin using immediately.

Collaborating with external agencies and organizations makes everyone more effective. We enable the whole of government to reach mission success.

Ready to Get to Work?

Collaborating in any context is hard. If you decide you need an external party to head up the collaboration (or you just want to pick our brains), let’s talk! We love finding ways to bring people together, advancing critical missions through smarter collaboration.