Collaborative leadership drives better results by creating an organizational culture that empowers, inspires, and fulfills team members.
Cathy Butler, WIG’s Chief Leadership Officer, explains the benefits of collaborative leadership, collaborative leadership behaviors, and why trust is a key ingredient for collaboration.
Key points:
Collaborative leadership produces results that cannot be achieved alone.
Collaborative experiences create an inspiring, fun, and fulfilling organizational culture.
Collaborative leadership is a discipline that requires deliberate effort and practice. Collaborative
leaders are non-judgmental, encourage inclusion, and maintain a calm ego.
Successful partnerships require trust in yourself and those you work with.
Collaborative leaders can unleash, inspire, and bring out the hidden and untapped potential in our organization’s most important resource: our people. In tangible benefits, partnerships help us achieve results we could not achieve on our own. In tangible benefits, collaborative experiences foster an inspiring culture that leaders and their colleagues enjoy and feel fulfilled.
The complexity of the problems facing society and its leaders requires us to work together across traditional boundaries, sectors and disciplines to achieve and accelerate our vision and goals for a better world.
Collaborative leadership behaviors
Leaders can improve their collaboration skills by identifying , developing, and practicing key collaborative leadership behaviors, such as the following:
Using a coaching approach:
Collaborative leaders use a coaching style of leadership. They use creative techniques and powerful questioning to encourage people on their teams to think differently, create, and make decisions about leadership issues on their own. This is the opposite of the command and control style that was dominant in the 20th century.
A more effective coaching approach is non-judgmental and characterized by “unconditional empathy and compassion” (Carl Rogers, 1957). This technique always involves the use of deep listening skills.
Enabling grouping
Collaborative leadership involves a number of factors that promote inclusion, such as connection (characterized by openness, respect, and trust) and bringing people together to work. This is done by inspiring people to share a sense of purpose and a collaborative approach to empowerment. Using these techniques also has the added benefit of incorporating and embracing diversity.
Calming Down
Finally, a key prerequisite for collaborative leadership is the ability to defuse ego (McDermott and Hall, 2016), which involves not only calming down our own ego, but also the ego of others involved in the collaborative effort.
Trust: The Key Component
It’s no wonder that the “T” word (trust) is often cited as a key ingredient in successful collaboration. Anything that undermines trust is likely to cause the collaboration to fail. Ultimately, successful collaboration requires trust and having faith in those you work with.
To develop as a collaborative leader, we need to be able to focus on ourselves and others at the same time. We need to have self-confidence so that we know who we are, what we are like, and how to manage ourselves. We also need to trust and believe in others, and be able to delegate tasks to others.
I am always amazed to hear about the research studies that my friend and former colleague, Professor Mark de Rond (Professor of Organizational Ethnology at the University of Cambridge), cites in his work and books on high performing teams.
When asked by senior executives
When asked, “How confident are you in your ability to make good decisions?” 83% of executives said “confident” or “very confident.” When the same group was asked, “How confident are you in the ability of the colleagues you work closest with to make good decisions?” only 27% of executives said “confident” or “very confident” in their colleagues’ ability to make good decisions.
Our tendency to overestimate our own abilities can be worrying, but even more worrying is our tendency to underestimate the abilities of others. As Forbes magazine noted in 2006, trust is the foundation of cooperation, and without trust, “cooperation is just cooperation.”
Collaborative Leadership Development
Collaborative leadership is a discipline that requires intentional effort and practice, and is best developed through experiential development programs that cultivate collaborative thinking through sharing, peer learning, and reflection on leadership experiences, such as WIG’s new Advanced Collaborative Leadership Program for Middle to Senior Leaders, running from September 2023 to March 2024.
Leaders should practice, apply, and repeat collaborative behaviors, qualities, and approaches in the workplace until they demonstrate true collaboration in their chosen leadership style.
We must continue to seek ways to embrace diverse realities, strive to develop ourselves as collaborative, trustworthy and reliable leaders, and be open to the perspectives of others in our life work of building cross-sector partnerships to impact our future and our world.
