Collaborative teaming – the future of freelancing

I believe that the future of freelancing is not about working as an individual. In order to meet the demands of clients freelancers will be forced to move toward collaborative teaming, permitting the individual to focus on their strengths whilst benefiting through leveraging the strengths of others and diverting the focus from their weak areas.

Believe it or not freelancing is still in the infancy stage when you might consider that the future of the workplace will see a predicted 40% of the workforce become self-employed by the year 2015. Freelancing has traditionally focused on a number of key occupational demographics including copyrighting, IT, PR and writing, but will sure to expand greatly as large organizations streamline operations and delayer levels of management and personnel. My contacts tell me that some well-known, multinational organizations are planning over the next five years to sustain only a small core of permanent headcount and employ contractors and freelancers when and where required.

So there is little doubt in my mind that freelancing will continue to increase as a percentage of the total workforce. However the important distinction to make is that it just is not any kind of freelancer that will command success in the workplace of the future. Clients will become more demanding and already the trend of organizations is to focus on high performance teams. No longer does the individual reign supreme rather it is collaboration that organizations require. Why is this? It’s because teams provide a number of benefits that individuals cannot provide. These include; blending and leveraging of individual differences, diversity of skills and experience, preference to manage one team rather than a group of individuals and a team can be multi-focused much easier than an individual. Organisations, from an administrative perspective, are also not going to want to focus on hiring many individuals when they can contract out to a multi-talented high performance team.

When it comes to freelancing those of you already working as a freelancer would be aware of the limitations that come with working as an individual. Those range from the administrative tasks to the need to self-market and network, to the fact that it is difficult to develop your skills and experience when working the same kinds of contracts. Sure there is the freedom that comes with working as an individual but there is also the loneliness. Many freelancers find the transition from working within an organization to freelancing difficult simply because their personality is not suited to working in such an environment.

For me high performing collaborative teams are the future of freelancing, not because individual freelancers don’t have the skill sets or experience but because clients will demand the flexibility and efficiency that results from such an approach. The challenge will be to learn how to operate within a freelancing team and to welcome collaboration rather than fear it. Many of my coaching clients are currently moving through this transition and already at the early stages of working within a collaborative team the benefits of increased business opportunities, sharing of networking and marketing activities and ability to develop professionally is being experienced.