What constitutes a collaboration, why is collaboration important, how do you develop a collaborative team, what are the measures of success and what do you do when a collaboration fails, are the questions that will addressed.  A mentor-mentee relation can provide a testing ground and a framework for learning how to create effective collaborations.  A collaboration is defined as working with someone in order to create or produce a product.  A collaboration is task focused. Although this is not the same as mentor-mentee relationship, it is offspring and where collaborative skills can be learnt and tested.  A successful collaboration should result in improved efficiency, an improved product and development of a strong working community.  Building your own collaborative team requires maximizing and correctly assigning tasks to each member, ensuring responsibilities are clearly defined, establishing milestones and success metrics for each team member and importantly, establishing effective communication between members.  Collaborating a learnt skill that needs to be grown and honed.  Learning, as collaborators to keep communication open and never withholding information required to carry out tasks is a key attribute needed to reach a collaborative goal.  Being able to identify obstacles and address problems cooperatively can require placing the group goals above personal satisfaction and/or recognition, especially if you're the leader.  Like mentors, collaborative team leaders require emotional intelligence and empathy.  An ability to identify and manage your emotions and to recognize driving emotions in others and react appropriately is essential and learning these skills in the context of a mentor-mentee relation is a place to start.  A collaborator is not the same as a friend or a mentor. However, both a collaborator and a mentor focuses on enhancing a defined product or career development by imparting knowledge, expertise and wisdom in context to a define interactive framework.

Building collaborative skills via your mentor-mentee relation

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.