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.
Collaborative Leadership Program Many leadership programs generally allow participants to discover their unique strengths and build on them. We take it one step further. We help you become a leader who both knows their own strengths and relies on collaborating with others to complete complex initiatives successfully.
So why should leaders collaborate if they’re in control?
- Our collaborative leadership methods are delivered using an advanced approach to a skill development learning process. Leaders learn how to work more efficiently and effectively in the intensity of the day-to-day business process.
- A collaborative team isn’t a group of people working together. It’s a group of people working together who trust each other. Trust is the belief or confidence that one party has in the reliability.
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.
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.
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 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.
As an organizational psychologist, I’m curious about the role of leaders in a virtual work world with uncertain futures. Leaders are looked to for guidance during these uncharted times, but assuming we have to revert to command-and-control leadership to get everything done is wrong. Collaborative leadership is desperately needed at this moment in history.
Why Collaborative Leadership?
Beyond the current critical need for collaborative leadership, recent research suggests it is highly in-demand. Case in point: Millennials make up approximately 40 percent of the workforce and they view leadership as the means to empower others. This is having significant spill-over effects and influencing the views of other generations; the workforce is looking for leaders to empower, serve and enable collaboration—not tell us what to do and how to do it.
Jay Sanderson, Solution Consulting Director for Infor, a cloud software company based in New York City, suggests that a leader’s job should be to “…remove obstacles preventing your team from being successful, not give them a to do list. Ultimately, this enables a team to be more self-directed and empowering them to ask for assistance. I want my team to understand asking for assistance is seen as a strength not as weakness—we move ahead when we collaborate.”
Science is behind collaborative leadership. Collaboration boosts intrinsic motivation resulting in team members working on tasks longer, 64 percent in fact, and increasing positive emotions. Positive emotions are going to be critical in the face of this crisis and shift to a virtual work world. When positive emotions outweigh negative emotions, our brains can more effectively handle complex and/or novel tasks as we are more open to new ideas and tend to approach things with a growth mindset. We need leaders who can nurture collaboration.
What Is Collaborative Leadership?
Collaborative leadership breaks down hierarchical silos to bring executives, managers, employees and even customers together. Everyone has a say and through collaborative efforts new efficiencies are achieved. This is already being realized by collaborative organizations, even those directly in the crosshairs of the current crisis.
Dr. Mark Mitchell, Chief Accounting Officer for Frontier Airlines, is helping Frontier weather this storm by not only relying on his financial expertise, but also his deep expertise in soft skills.
“As with everyone in the airline industry, we are facing unprecedented changes and the people at Frontier are rising to the challenge with equally unprecedented levels of collaboration,” said Mitchell. “Our senior leadership team has empowered everyone to be more involved in working across functional boundaries and are removing obstacles to increase efficiencies in this ‘all hands-on deck’ situation. It is working—everyone is chipping in to help not only Frontier, but each other as well. We can weather this storm by working together.”
Nurturing Collaboration
Here are seven proven collaborative leadership tactics, for both face-to-face and virtual work:
- Relationship Practices. Without building relationships, collaboration will fail. This means providing every person you work with the respect and dignity each human being deserves. In a virtual setting, make sure everyone has the technology needed to enable relationship building (technology with good data connection and a video camera). Take time to see each other with video, don’t just dial in with audio. Seeing each other’s faces makes virtual meetings feel human. And, if you have pets or kids running around in the background, it makes you more relatable, which enhances relationships further.
- Common Goal and Purpose. Often times, collaboration breaks down because individuals dig in their heels for personal gains. You must help your team take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see how all individual goals are likely to roll up to a shared common goal. Now, you have highlighted mutual purpose. As the leader, you need to help your team members connect individual goals with higher-level goals. In a virtual setting, make sure you are consistently referencing these linkages, so they are not lost in the absence of psychical connectedness.
- Be the Model. Show your team you are being collaborative—excessive modeling is needed if the virtual mode is new. Model the behaviors you want to see in your team. Humans efficiently acquire knowledge and skill via social learning (watching and modeling others). This best translates into long-term behavioral change if the model is trustworthy. If you have had success with Steps 1 and 2, this will be fruitful—your team will see you as trustworthy because you have invested in relationship building and connecting individual goals with higher level organizational goals.
- Gifting. As a leader in a virtual setting, one of your first gifts you provide your team should be your time. In a virtual setting, set up open-screen periods where your team members can drop in and simply chat—work, weather, sports, whatever. Also, have a standing invite for a team member to schedule one-on-one time with you. If someone schedules one-on-one time, give the person your full attention when meeting. Talk to them about their goals, hopes, aspirations and fears. Share your thoughts as well—be vulnerable and humble. It will help them open up and drive more collaboration. You will discover what drives each team member and be better prepared to continue building relationships and rewarding collaboration.
- Supporting Community. Leader support is extremely powerful and significantly drives employee morale, performance and well-being. The leader sets the tone for building community support via development of supportive norms where team members feel psychologically safe. Co-create a support contract with your team by identifying a set of guidelines to drive and reinforce mutual support.
- Role and Task Clarification. As a collaborative leader, you need to clarify each member’s role based upon member expertise. When moving to a virtual setting, this will require some tweaking as members will have different strengths in a virtual world versus a physical world. Then, allow the members to work on clarifying work tasks. This will build more collaboration, strengthen relationships, and allow tasks to be accomplished more effectively.
- Eat Humble Pie. At the beginning and end of the day, you are just another person putting in a good day’s work. Egos have no place in collaborative leadership; if you are concerned with your ego, you are going to fail. Leave your ego at the door (or under the screen for virtual connections). Also, when you screw up, and you will screw up, admit your mistake, apologize, ask for clarification and move forward.
You will need to work on these guidelines to make sure they align with your team in a virtual world. You should also exercise caution as with anything new at work, there will be some bumps along the way. Be open, over communicate and don’t delay—we are moving forward with a virtual work world whether you like it or not—so make sure you are evolving as a virtual leader as well.
Sanderson has some advice to help: “I calculate a rough amount of time I would spend in an office environment interacting other employees—how many times would I walk past their office and wave, bump into each other in the breakroom, join for a meeting to discuss a project, have a quick conversation, or even grab lunch? I work hard to recreate a high percentage of those moments virtually. I know if I spend more time caring about my employees, I don’t have to worry about them caring about our organization.”
Mitchell adds, “I have found that it is really beneficial to continue having one-on-one conversations when working remotely. I am available to my team via a virtual open-door policy. While most drop in to discuss work, it is not uncommon for some to simply want to chat. Those conversations about life is where the magic happens—it reinforces, and can even strengthen, relationships that are often lost in the virtual world that is usually laser-focused on getting tasks done” said Mitchell.
Collaborative Leadership Def
While we are working in a new virtual world, never forget that what gives us strength is our profound humanity and that is still the backbone of our organizations.
Collaborative Leadership Training
Originally published on the HRPS blog.
Craig Wallace is an organizational psychologist and currently the Department Head of Management in the College of Business at Clemson University.
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