At first glance, the term “collaborative leadership” may seem like an oxymoron. Leaders are supposed to be the decision-makers: they’re expected to make the right call when faced with tough choices—and by doing so, they’ll inspire employees.

So why should leaders collaborate if they’re in control?

Because in the end, lone-wolf bosses rarely succeed. Nobody wants to work under an overbearing manager who won’t listen to them.

According toBusiness Insider,the number one thing employees want more of from management is communication, and communication goes both ways. Using the right communication tools and listening to your employees (instead of just telling them what to do) could help you find key missing pieces and take your business to the next level.

Collaboration is not a “nice to have” organizational philosophy. It is an essential ingredient for organizational survival and success. One my most popular speaking topics is “The Power of. Through interactive lectures and engaging group exercises, you will cultivate essential collaborative leadership competencies, and gain the conceptual framework, vision, and tools you need to effectively incorporate these principles. Program Benefits. Develop a new, collaborative leadership style.

But just listening isn’t enough: leaders need to ensure that they’re hearing from diverse and empowered employees. That’s what collaborative leadership is all about.

In this post, we’ll look at:

What is collaborative leadership?

Collaborative leadership is basically the alternative to siloed working styles. Instead of top-down management, a collaborative leadership style encourages access to information, different perspectives, and collective responsibility.

Managers who practice collaborative leadership tend to assemble diverse teams comprising different experiences and viewpoints. It’s well-known that there’sstrength in diversity—and it’s better and more authentic to start with diversity as a key foundation of your business, rather than trying to incorporate it later on.

Even when working with people outside your business—freelancers or partners, for example—a collaborative leadership style can bring out the best in everyone involved. And working together remotely doesn’t have to get in the way of this: collaborative leaders just need to make the most of online tools to keep everyone aligned. (Here are a few tips for nurturing a collaborative culture.)

Why is collaborative leadership important?

Businesses benefit from different perspectives and employees who aren’t afraid to voice dissenting opinions. We’ve seen many examples of this—a commonly cited one (and cautionary tale) is Nokia, whose mobile division was bought out by Microsoft in 2013.

Collaborative Leadership Pdf

According toHarvard Business Review, Nokia’s long-serving executive team before the buyout was 100% Finnish. In addition, middle managers wereafraid of being honest with their bosses. This unhealthy communication culture led to their homogenous leadership team not getting the information they needed, and in the end, Nokia was unable to compete with Silicon Valley’s innovation.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of diversity in business. Even one unorthodox idea can help build a better strategy, whether you’re trying to launch a new product, attract new clients, or beat a competitor.

But different perspectives will have only marginal impacts if they’re confined to their respective teams. To practice collaboration in the workplace, you need to foster communication between all parts of your business, and use the proper tools to do it. Even if your business is less than 10 people, opinions need room to thrive.

3 collaborative leadership characteristics

1. Open communication

As we mentioned above, communication needs to flow both ways. Make sure your employees are aware of business goals, and pay attention to their thoughts and ideas on how to meet and exceed these goals. A good employee engagement app will come in handy here.

2. Connection of ideas

Let’s say that two different employees, at different times, mention their interest in a particular initiative. Let them know they’re not alone—connect them with each other and encourage them to pursue it. This will show employees that you trust them, and it promotes the circulation of new ideas, which is essential to prevent stagnation.

3. Unification

Collaborative Leadership Traits

Collaborative leadership requires a keen sense of balance. While employees need to be free to voice their opinions and make their cases, this kind of freedom can also create paralysis in an organization.

As the leader, it’s up to you to make the final call. Ensuring that perspectives have been shared will help you unify ideas into a cohesive strategy that’s been strengthened by diverse views.

How do you demonstrate collaborative leadership?

Good leaders lead by example. Preaching collaboration will be ineffective if your employees don’t see you living by it. For example, if you request your team to use tools in your collaboration hub, you have to use them regularly yourself. Here are six solid steps you can take to demonstrate collaborative leadership.

1. Set goals

This one may seem obvious. But you’d be surprised at how often employees feel misinformed about company goals. As the leader, it’s your job to set clear and actionable goals, and to communicate them to your employees. No matter which area employees work in, they need to understand how their efforts impact and contribute to the overall business.

2. Enable access to information

What’s the point in creating guidelines and roadmaps if your team doesn’t know where to find them? Whether it’s a task management tool like Asana or a team messaging platform that keeps everyone in sync like RingCentral, you need an easy way for your team to share information with each other.

A platform like RingCentral Office®, for example, offers task management for teams and projects, as well as easy file sharing. You can add tasks for yourself and your teammates right in your conversation threads in the app:

3. Be an active listener

When you’re talking to your employees, whether in a group meeting or a one-on-one, they deserve your full attention. Limit distractions: don’t pick up your phone or check your emails, and don’t interrupt your time with them. This applies to remote meetings, as well: in video calls, don’t start flicking through unrelated windows.

In the end, if your employees feel like you’re not fully present, they might not be comfortable expressing unique or controversial views—and those views might be exactly what you need to hear.

4. Encourage speaking up

Meetings are often dominated by extroverts. To demonstrate collaboration, it’s up to you to make sure everyone has their turn to speak. Quieter voices may need more encouragement, so ask around, promote healthy debate, and let the best idea win.

5. Avoid silos

As organizations grow, so do departments. It’s common for workers in larger companies to say things like “I have no idea what they do in ____.” So it’s best to tackle this issue from the beginning: get employees to work together as much as possible, and make them aware of what others are up to. This way, perspectives on different aspects of the business will course through the organization, and employees will feel better informed.

6. Turn failures into lessons

In any size organization, the blame game can create a toxic environment. If something doesn’t work, don’t waste time allocating blame or letting your employees scapegoat. Instead, try to create an open dialogue about what happened and why. Collaborative leadership emphasizes responsibility across the business, so it’s everyone’s job to learn from failure and build on it. “Each failure is an opportunity” may sound like a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Build your collaborative leadership skills with the right tools

Collaborative leadership doesn’t just happen in-person anymore. You have to keep up with your team digitally, no matter where they’re located.

Find an all-in-one team video conferencing app (that ideally has voice calling and team messaging too) to help you and your team work closely together. This will give you the power to share goals, strategies, viewpoints, and files across any device in real time across borders and time zones.

Truly practicing collaborative leadership isn’t easy. You have to build a diverse team, empower your employees to speak up, strengthen cooperation between both individuals and groups, and learn from failure in a forward-thinking way—all while keeping debate healthy and productive. But the benefits of a collaborative leadership style are undeniable, and your colleagues will thank you for creating a trusting and constructive work environment.

For several years now, many management authors have been discussing how the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world in which we live requires a new set of leadership skills. The health and financial crisis brought on by COVID-19 has greatly amplified this. On the current global stage, it is largely women who are standing out as effective leaders, praised by Forbes and other media publications for their handling of the pandemic. As Nicholas Kristof noted in The New York Times, “It’s not that the leaders who best managed the virus were all women. But those who bungled the response were all men, and mostly a particular type: authoritarian, vainglorious and blustering.”

It is not so much gender that is a differentiator in leadership success during these VUCA times; what is really at play is a fundamental difference in style. Men are demonstrating traditional command-and-control leadership while women are demonstrating collaborative leadership.

What is it about these two very different leadership styles that cause failure or success in turbulent times? Based on our research and more than 25 years as leadership development practitioners, we think it boils down to how power and information are shared.

For many years, the “hero” leaders in industry tended to be strong, forceful, charismatic and authoritarian. This traditional leadership model is often associated with what Carol Dweck labeled a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset believes that we have a certain amount of ability that is fixed and unchangeable, and that people rise to the top because they have the greatest abilities and are the “smartest person in the room.” As a result, the traditional CEO approach is to gather information, analyze the situation or problem using their superior ability, and then direct everyone to carry out their plans.

Yet, with the coronavirus, we are dealing with a novel disease for which no one has clear answers. The pandemic has presented us with both a health crisis and a business/economic crisis that include a large amount of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. No one person has the necessary knowledge and experience to solve these problems alone — it requires multiple people with different kinds of expertise and the ability to work together to create novel solutions.

1. Assemble a group with diverse expertise and experience.

The collaborative CEO approach is to evaluate a variety of different sources of information and expertise and incorporate other people into the decision-making process. It’s an approach that draws from diverse perspectives, thereby stimulating collective problem-solving. The collaborative CEO can do this because they don’t feel a need to be “the smartest person in the room” who knows all the answers.

In our research with collaborative male leaders, a key characteristic that emerged was their ability to temper their ego. In side-stepping ego, they focus outside of themselves and beyond their self-interests. Because they are not striving to prove themselves and bolster their position of authority, they are able to be vulnerable. By admitting they do not have all the answers, they become more approachable, attracting a network of support.

2. Share power and information liberally.

In a traditional organizational structure, role responsibilities and levels of authority are clearly spelled out. When issues or problems occur, the information is pulled together and referred to the person who has the appropriate authority to make a decision. In crisis conditions, decision-making is often pushed higher up in the organization. But as we have seen during this pandemic, leaders using this model were too slow to act.

Collaborative leaders organize differently. They share power and information with their teams. Information flows easily and doesn’t get hung up in the bottlenecks created by “need-to-know” hierarchies. This information flow breaks away from the paradigm of a linearly controlled process to a matrixed connective process so that things can happen fast and everyone can quickly get on the same page to take action.

With continual dialogue up, down and across the organization, there is a level of coordination in how people’s thinking evolves because they are hearing the same thing at the same time. There is no staccato transmission of information where some people are more in-the-know and have had more time to digest and process what they’ve heard. In addition to accelerating action, the perpetual conversation allows for a constant infusion of new information and ideas from a broad, diverse circle of people and for changing direction when necessary.

This efficiency of information flow and speed to take action is often a challenge in a traditional authoritarian-led structure. People at the ground level who observe a problem can hesitate to raise the issue for fear of telling their senior leaders something they don’t want to hear. As Amy Edmonson points out, employees are often afraid to speak up or ask a question in this kind of culture because they might be punished for their comments or look stupid. If a person makes a mistake, the tendency is to be unwilling to admit it or to look for someone else to blame to avoid the criticism or punishment. This environment generally leads to inaction as subordinates will sit back and wait for instruction rather than take a risk and jump to action.

Further reinforcing this culture of inaction is that leaders in these organizations are often viewed as infallible. When they project an image of being in total command, not showing any mistakes or vulnerability, it sends a message that subordinates should behave the same way. Making a mistake is viewed as an indicator of a person not being smart enough.

3. Empathize, listen and relate.

Collaborative leaders create a culture of trust where people will speak up, share ideas and not be muted by fear. They build connections with and among people at a personal level by tapping into our shared humanity. They create common ground that diminishes hierarchical differences and values inclusiveness and empathy, which helps people feel more secure during crisis and change. Collaborative leaders ask questions, listen and respect all. And in doing so, they communicate “I care, I’m interested and I understand.” They establish a sense of community and belonging.

Key takeaways

During times of change and turbulence, in stark view during the pandemic, it is collaborative leaders who are the most effective. Foundationally, they leave ego out of the proceedings and thereby can reach out for help. They utilize and involve people who have relevant expertise in analyzing the issues and making a decision. They connect with people on a personal level, they connect others and they are inclusive, offsetting the isolating feelings associated with losing our familiar world and venturing into the great unknown future. Their openness engenders trust and a sense of security in those they lead. As a result, collaborative leaders are successfully navigating the turbulence of the pandemic by quickly assessing the situation, acting promptly and decisively, adapting as circumstances continue to develop, and gaining the respect and cooperation of their people.

Steve Heinen, Ph.D., is an executive coach and organizational leadership consultant. Carol Vallone Mitchell is co-founder of Talent Strategy Partners, a leadership development consulting firm. To comment, email editor@clomedia.com.