How can you encourage collaboration across different seniority levels?

A diversified team with different seniority level in term of expertise, competencies and value set should be considered as strength to leverage innovation and collaboration for setting and achieving sustainable goals/ objectives. First as a team leader you just need to recognize and respect the dynamics of a diverse team e.g. strengths, weaknesses, value set and perspectives. Then focus to set a shared vision with clear roles, responsibilities and accountabilities in line with team dynamics and your business strategy. Lead by example, celebrate both success and failures (learning), build trust, collaboration and a culture of team engagement to bring the best out of your team.

Open Communication Channels: Create open communication channels where employees feel comfortable sharing ideas, feedback, and insights regardless of their seniority. Cross-Functional Projects:Encourage cross-functional projects that bring together employees from different seniority levels to work towards a common goal. Ensure that project teams are diverse, including members with varying levels of experience and expertise. Mentorship Programs: Establish mentorship programs that pair senior employees with junior ones, fostering a two-way learning process.

Defina quais s?o os papéis e responsabilidades de todas as partes interessadas. Dessa forma, todos se sentir?o incluídos no projeto e ter?o propriedade para colaborar, independente de sua senioridade. Ao iniciar projetos de mudan?a cultural, costumo construir um Stakeholder Map, atribuindo metas alinhadas aos objetivos organizacionais para cada perfil. Essa abordagem garante que todos sintam-se incluídos e compreendam como sua contribui??o impacta diretamente o sucesso do projeto. E lembre-se: clareza sobre os momentos de atua??o valoriza o tempo de cada colaborador, tornando o projeto ainda mais eficiente.

Anyone who has worked for or is working for a successful start-up will tell you, failing fast is more important than maintaining status quo. One can fail fast, only if one feels secure about expressing their ideas and taking action on them. When multiple seniority levels are involved in a single project or strategic ideation, creating an environment which celebrates failures is key. This allows junior employees to be more expressive. Furthermore, it allows the cushion to the senior employees, where they do not have to be paragons of knowledge and infallible decision making.

Understanding the strengths of each key player in the SLT or CLT can give you usable insight into potential complimenting skill sets. This also enables you to find key weaknesses in each role and the "potential" partner in other business units to support the identified weakness. More often that not, if you show any person support, especially when they know the need it, they will be cordial to accepting it. This first step often flourishes into greater celebrative working and a more successful business.

Culture change is always difficult. This is especially true of established businesses. If they have been doing some thing they deem success full for a decade why change it? Well, often to take a step change people need to step out of their comfort zone and see their business from an unbiases perspective. These individuals, although perfectly competent are often the most resistant to accepting change. They often see if as a threat to their control or power. So be aware that whatever change you make will nearly often effect at least one such person in a business and adopt the relative onboarding approach needed to bring them along the journey.