You really want a spirit of collaboration in your work team, your club or society, your family, your neighbourhood group. When everyone works positively together, the group dynamic tends to keep just about everyone on side, and by definition a collaborative group will all be working to the same shared ends. If you’re at the bottom of the ladder at work, your ability to achieve this may be limited, but, as soon as you have any managerial role, you can put it into practice. Meanwhile you can aim for collaboration in your family and any non-work groups you’re involved in.

There are lots of useful strategies for getting everyone to work together, but the key one is very simple: set collective goals rather than individual ones, and give collective rewards. The whole team needs to perform well, and then the whole team will be rewarded together. There’s still room for individual praise and rewards too (so long as they’re not competitive within the team), but the emphasis should be on the collective effort.

Once everyone has grasped this central idea, it’s much easier to get them working together on a daily basis. It’s a logical progression, so all you have to do is encourage it. Here are a few ways you can do that:

• Include everyone in making important decisions.
• Be flexible about roles – the important thing is to exploit everyone’s strengths.
• Practise what you preach: share credit, rewards, fun tasks with the rest of the group. Don’t hog the best bits.
• Encourage people to share knowledge so they understand where each other fit in to the group.
• Don’t judge people for bad ideas and suggestions. Demonstrate that all ideas are welcome. (Yes, I know some of them will be daft. You don’t have to use them. But that person’s next idea might be genius. Only they might never suggest it if they were made to feel stupid over the last one.)

If you’re in charge of a group that can subdivide, let people choose their own teams. This might be training groups within your local swimming club, or pairs of family members doing chores, or sub-groups within a big project at work. The fact is that people will be happier and more co-operative if they collaborate with the people they want to. We’re all different, and some people will always rub others up the wrong way. You can’t stop that happening, no matter how motivational and collaborative you are when you’re running the show. You can still have a collaborative overall group. In fact, that’s much easier with happy sub-teams. If everyone wants to do well, they’ll opt for groupings that will work. They’ll get that they need an organiser on their team, or someone who understands programming, or whatever it is. Left to their own devices, people who want to succeed don’t just choose to work with their best mates. Trust them, and they’ll sort themselves into productive and effective teams pretty much every time. And be happier for it.