How to Know You're Ready for a Meaningful Collaboration

I don’t remember how I learned the meaning of my name. It was certainly before the internet so it must have been a name card at a gift shop or some other weird way we learned things before we could google it. The primary meaning that stayed with me was industrious; hard-working. And I am, dear reader. I am. Now that we have more ways to look things up, we can know that Emily also means to excel or rival successfully.

Maybe the most backhanded compliment definition I’ve heard of my name is Emily: The Elegant Overachiever.1

Oh dear.

Working hard is baked in to my personality and so is a fierce independence. I have the internal motivation to meet external goals and that independence serves me well most of the time.

But when I’ve wanted to create, make, or explore opportunities that require skill sets I don’t have, I’ve had to accept that collaboration or even long-term partnerships are necessary for certain endeavors.

I’ve been through seasons where I had to learn the importance of saying yes to collaboration, to being willing to jump in and see what happens, to move toward people rather than away, and to believe that we really are better together than we are apart.

I’ve also been through seasons where I jumped a little too quickly, when my eyes were bigger than my schedule, or my hope of something outweighed my ability to see clearly. I’ve been guilty of falling in love with the potential of a partnership rather than the reality of it.

When that has happened, it’s easy to swear off collaborations forever. While this could be a good reset for a season, that’s not how I want to be. I love to work alone, but I don’t want to only work alone.

Making a list of dream collaborators is a good practice for me. I write down actual human people (some I know, some I don’t) who I would love to link arms with in some way. If I have a project I want to explore but don’t have the skills or bandwidth to do it alone, I can consult my list. In turn, if people on that list reach out to me, I’m one step closer to yes!

Here are 5 questions I ask myself before entering into a collaboration:

1. Are we aligned?

The necessary points of alignment are up to you, but in general the wheels have to be turning in the same direction if we hope to get anywhere. For me this includes:

• Do I know this potential partner’s core values and do they know mine? They don’t have to be the same, but they do have to harmonize.

• Do we agree on what success looks like in this endeavor and do we have a way to measure it?

• If this is a faith-adjacent project: In what ways will our theological convictions impact how we make decisions?

2. Have we done something small together?

It’s important to have some experience working together in a small way before committing to work together in a big way. For example, I recently announced that I’m collaborating with The Apprentice Institute and James Bryan Smith to create the Formation Writers Guild, a 12-month guided journey for writers who sense a vocational call within the field of Christian spiritual formation (applications are open until July 10!) But before I decided to link arms with them, a few things were true.