Normally I’m all about creating successful partnerships and smooth collaboration. So why draft list of strategies on how to kill collaboration?

Well, during the past decades of collaboration building, I've encountered many collaboration killing approaches. As an optimistic person, I rarely assume that these killers are used intentionally or deployed as a strategic weapon to kill potential collaboration.

In most cases they pop up as simple statements or questions that seem only small thresholds for collaboration however, they have the potential to kill it.

Being aware of these killing approaches helped me to become a better partnership builder. During our masterclasses on Win Win Collaboration we help our trainees to identify the thresholds in an early stage, we provide strategies on how to tackle them and how to avoid falling into the pitfall of the collaboration killing strategy.

So here's my first shot at a list of collaboration killing strategies

1. Enlarge the problem so it becomes "too big to solve"
2. Encourage involvement of all stakeholders from the start in large meetings
3. Stick to strong principles, don't deviate from the strict rules
4. Question the expertise of the others
5. Play hard to reach
6. Use the past to block the future
7. Question the mandate of the persons in the meeting
8. Hide behind trade secrets
9. Initiate lengthy discussions to determine who's in and who's out
10. Request huge budgets prior to the partnership building process
11. Question the personal integrity of the people joining the meeting
12. Adopt a very dominant attitude
13. All partners need to learn my terminology to collaborate
14. Create a dictionary of partner terminology to better understand each other

Which ones have you encountered already? Which one is missing on my list?

Let me know!