What this is about
Anyone who wants to cooperate is looking not only for skills but for people and organisations with whom acting together can succeed. This phase clarifies how to recognise that before much has been invested.
The guiding question
How do I recognise the ability to cooperate before there is a contract?
Professional competence can be checked: references, samples of work, qualifications. The ability to cooperate is harder to see. It shows in how someone deals with the contributions of others, whether they keep their word, how they react to disagreement and whether they can admit mistakes. You rarely see any of this in a presentation. You see it in what someone has already done with others, and best of all in what you do with them yourself.
What helps now
Combine trust with scrutiny. Trust here is an advance you can measure: no larger than what you could afford to lose if it is not returned. Whether it is returned is then the real test.
Look for traces of joint work. More telling than any self-presentation is what someone has achieved with others: joint publications, projects with changing partners, relationships that have lasted for years. Someone who always appears alone, or always at the top, may be an excellent professional and still a difficult partner.
Start small, together. The most reliable test is a small joint beginning: a manageable task with a clear end, to which both sides contribute. Afterwards both know more than after many conversations. Such a beginning is not work given away for nothing; it is already the first cooperation, on a small scale and at low risk.
Different skills, shared ways of working. If you look only for similarity, you find people with the same strengths and the same blind spots. What should match is what you will need in the first dispute: reliability, a comparable way of handling conflict, a compatible understanding of the goal. What else decides whether it succeeds is discussed on the page The click and its conditions.
The typical mistake
Choosing the best partner on paper. Profiles, turnover and references are compared, and the one who looks best is chosen. Whether you can work together is discovered only after signing. Choosing on liking alone is no better: the first conversation was warm, so scrutiny is skipped.
Both mistakes have the same cause. People judge the potential partner instead of doing something with them.
Online
Online, collaboration often leaves visible traces. Jointly maintained projects, public discussions, co-authored texts or the way someone answers questions in a professional forum reveal more about their ability to cooperate than a CV. Such traces are only excerpts. They prepare the conversation but do not replace it.
A trial collaboration is easy to set up online: a shared document, a two-week task, a short video call at the start and another at the end. It shows how someone works asynchronously, whether they meet deadlines and how they give and take criticism in writing. These are exactly the skills a cooperation online will later depend on. What has proved useful is described under Good practice for working together online.
Before the trial, two things should be clear: who may use the results, and which data will be shared. Anyone who processes personal data together with others and helps decide on its purposes and means may be a joint controller with them (Article 26 GDPR).
Law in this phase
- Competition and cooperation: If the potential partner is a competitor, competition law sets limits (Article 101 TFEU, Section 1 Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB)), even for exchanging information on prices, customers or plans.
- Data and rights: Who owns the results of a trial collaboration and who is responsible for shared data.
Next
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