How to Drive Collaboration & Unity on Your Team: Strategies from the Geneva Leadership Alliance

Memorize this line:

“I am not alone anymore.”

That is your mantra for this bright new year of 2025. As we learned in this week’s podcast, the leadership paradigm has changed. Effective leaders no longer lead solo; rather, the most effective leadership is now collective, focusing on shared practices within teams instead of fixating on individual roles and competencies.?

We’ve really known this for a long, long time. Our cultures abound with adages reflecting various aspects of it, from “It’s lonely at the top” to “Two heads are better than one.”

It’s just taking management a few millennia to catch up, but as our podcast guests – Peter Cunningham and Patrick Sweet of the Geneva Leadership Alliance – point out, our modern era of information overload, war, climate crises, and rapid change presents too much for any one person to process alone…much less to make clear decisions through.

The solution runs along two broad paths: shared responsibility with your team (internal) and collaboration with other leaders (external). But first, you must prepare yourself (individual)!

The leadership mindsets we teach at the Innovative Leadership Institute remain critical. Focus first on three essentials: empathy, communication, and alignment. They help you understand the people on your team, share your vision and goals, and ensure their vision and direction align with yours. Then, prepare your mind. We must all grow our cognitive capacities to handle the increasing complexity around us, so stretch your neuroplasticity: read, master new skills, take a class, learn a new language, and generally expose yourself to newness. Of course, keeping abreast of the latest in your industry and specialty remains vital, but growing outside of your narrower experiences helps you see far bigger pictures and solutions which may have been hidden before in what you thought was unrelated knowledge.?

As for the path with your team, the single most critical step remains building a shared vision and aligning everyone’s efforts behind it. You must forge a common purpose. People tend to self-police when they know the common goal the team works toward. Formalize this with shared accountability; groups begin to monitor themselves and their progress when they know success is collective. In these regards, you’re sharing leadership, although the ultimate responsibility remains yours as the titular leader.

Looking outside your team, watch for opportunities to collaborate. It might be a one-on-one collaboration with another leader in your organization, having your team work deeply with a business partner’s team, or even allying with your competition to solve an industry-wide issue. (525 different businesses signing on to Amazon’s climate pledge, as heard in last week’s podcast, is an excellent example of this.) Sharing leadership in this way introduces you to knowledge and experience you would never have been able to access before, reduces stress as workloads spread out, and helps your own morale because others help carry the weight of responsibility.

In short, with these routes of collective leadership, success becomes more and more likely. And that will make for a very happy new year indeed.

Reflect on Your Leadership and Boost Human Potential

The new year is a time we tend to reflect on our journeys, and set our path on how to shape that journey in the next twelve months.

To help your reflection, today we present a special edition of our podcast with the CEO and co-founder of Hologenix, LLC , Seth Casden . His journey took him from the high-stress, competitive world of finance to boosting human potential. In this episode, he tells that story – and how he met and partnered with inventor David Hornick to found Hologenix. Their innovative work is focused on amplifying human potential using body-generated energy. He delves into his transition from a rigid leadership style to a servant leadership approach, emphasizing the importance of creating a supportive environment for teams. Seth also discusses the Johari window concept for self-awareness and the importance of flexibility and curiosity in leadership.

Tune in to learn from Seth's insights on evolving as a leader and fostering innovation. It’s on Podbean now at https://bit.ly/Celliant, or search for Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future on your favorite podcast channel.

Registration Deadline for Our Next Leadership Development Course

Don't miss out on our new course with James Madison University starting next month. “Leadership Innovation in the Age of AI” equips today’s leaders with the skills to carry their careers into the future. Learn how leadership must change with the AI changes in the workplace. It’s a 9-session online class to make you future-ready. Get all the details here.

Be One of the First to Join Our Exclusive Community

Leadership is a collaborative activity. We learn and grow faster when we do so together — and if we’re committed to becoming great leaders, we never really stop learning, no matter what our job titles are.

To help you continue to grow your talents and advance your career, we’ve just launched the Innovative Leadership Community. This dynamic extension of the Innovative Leadership Institute provides a safe space for you to learn, collaborate, and explore alongside other talented leaders in one-on-one or group settings.

In the coming months, we’ll be having in-depth conversations about career advancement, organizational design, workforce development, change management, operational infrastructure, emerging technologies, and everything in between.

What to expect:

• Engage in rich conversations with fellow ambitious leaders
• Ideate, learn, and grow with feedback from the brightest minds in Innovative Leadership
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• Take monthly and weekly deep dives into key facets of leadership development
• Participate in accountability and goal-setting within a supportive community of colleagues

Start connecting today — join the Innovative Leadership community.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our remastered podcast episode Geneva Experts Share Why Leadership is a Group Effort.

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