55 Examples of Collaboration Skills

John Spacey, updated on September 14, 2024

Collaboration skills are talents, skills and knowledge that allow an individual to be productive and creative in groups. This relates to influencing, teamwork and the ability to involve a large number of stakeholders in your work. Collaboration skills are highly valued by employers as it is common for employees to be disconnected, disengaged, overly political and overly independent such that the organization fails to act together. The following are common examples of collaboration skills.

Assertiveness	Building Rapport
Building Relationships	Challenging Assumptions
Communication	Conflict Resolution
Constructive Criticism	Cultural Capital
Debate	Delivering to Commitments
Emotional Intelligence	Facilitation
Flexibility	Handling Criticism
Handling Objections	Influencing
Languages	Leadership
Listening	Managing Expectations
Negotiation	Openness
Personal Resilience	Persuasion
Presentations	Professional Networking
Professionalism	Public Speaking
Responsibility & Accountability	Setting Expectations
Social Perceptiveness	Sustaining Relationships
Taking Action Items	Taking Initiative
Tolerance for Disagreement	Verbal Communication
Win-win Thinking	Wit
Written Communication

Resume Skills

Collaboration is the basic type of productivity within an organization such that is it natural for employers to look for collaboration skills from job candidates. The recent trend in this area is to look for experience with cross-functional teams and broad initiatives that run across an entire organization.

Clearing Issues	Commitment
Consensus Building	Constructive Feedback
Cross-Functional Collaboration	Driving Company-wide Initiatives
Interdisciplinary Collaboration	Meeting Management
Multidisciplinary Collaboration	Organizational Visibility
Personal Presence	Program Management
Project Management	Relationship Management
Stakeholder Management	Team Leadership

Barriers to Collaboration

If you list collaboration skills on your resume, a natural follow up question is to explain the barriers you faced and how you overcame these challenges. A good answer here is how you took on action items that helped the group to solve a problem or agree to a common direction.

Stakeholder salience is when people in a group take the lead in areas where they lack knowledge or authority. For example, a designer who takes the lead in a discussion about cybersecurity whereby they are beyond their competence area. If you are leading a group effort, it is important to ensure that those with authority and expertise have much input.

Summary

Collaboration skills are abilities that allow an individual to work well in groups to achieve outcomes such as strategies, plans, designs, decisions and the solutions to problems.