The 10 C's — Competence, Collaboration, Coordination

Start here In a car race, a car zooms into the pit lane. Within seconds, a crew changes all four tyres and fuels it up, and it’s gone. Each person has one job and does it perfectly. Nobody bumps into anyone. That’s competence, collaboration and coordination in a few seconds.

A team has many kinds of skills: technical, domain, leadership, managerial, soft skills and life skills.

• Different strengths fill each other’s gaps.
• Members learn from each other, which sparks creativity.
• Like the geese, each member leads themselves, owns their work, and plays for the team, not just for themselves.

Lecture example — the race-car pit crew Each crew member has one specific job, practised again and again. A slow pit stop can lose a race. Right person + right skills + right role + right place + right way = magic.

Collaboration means working together to bring out ideas, creativity and new solutions. It gives a team a big advantage.

How to collaborate well:

• The leader acts as a facilitator (a helper, not a boss) and builds psychological safety.
• Power is shared: shared vision, goals, leadership and credit, not strict top-down orders.
• Everyone gets an equal chance to speak, share and present.
• It’s OK to take risks and make mistakes.
• Icebreakers and informal events help people open up.
• Collaboration can happen inside a team, across teams, and with clients and partners. Online tools and clear processes help.

Lecture example — Sundar Pichai Google has many brilliant engineers. Sundar Pichai is very skilled, but what helped make him CEO was his ability to get experts to work together: listen to every view, then guide everyone to agreement. A leader is often “one among equals” who brings people together.

• Everyone should see their own and each other’s progress.
• Peers help each other.

Lecture example — Mumbai’s dabbawalas About 5,000 dabbawalas deliver home-cooked lunch boxes to about 2 lakh office workers in Mumbai every day, by bicycle, train and handcart, and very rarely get one wrong. It works because of clarity, commitment, communication, competence and coordination together.

Lecture example — this very event The outdoor training needed the studio team, the Dean of Students’ office, faculty, students and helpers, all in sync. Coordination made it a success.

In one line: Mix complementary skills (competence), share ideas freely and safely (collaboration), then narrow to one plan and execute it together (coordination). Exam words: competence, complementary strengths, skill gaps, pit crew, collaboration, facilitator, psychological safety, shared leadership, icebreakers, Sundar Pichai, consensus, coordination, divergent vs convergent thinking, dabbawalas.