When ‘Collaborative Leadership’ becomes a necessity and how to go about it?

Leaders are an integral part of any business, organization, government, military and/or community to provide vision and guidance. So far, traditional style of leadership was dominant where leaders were managing people, processes, and overall direction using top-down approach, meaning leaders were providing guidance as what to be done and how to be done while subordinates has to just follow. It is assumed that crucial information will be with top management only, roles and responsibilities are rigidly defined and has to be followed as to help management work well and do things when necessary type of approach is observed.

However, with today’s ever changing and much demanding environment, sticking to only one standard type of traditional leadership might not serve well in each and every organization. We need to re-define leadership towards collaborative style where issues are affecting everyone at organization level, problems are of complex nature and multiple stakeholders with different interests are involvement, collective problem-solving is expected and above all instilling ownership expected while roles/responsibilities are changing based on projects or functional areas.

However it is ‘Easier said than done’ because collaborative leadership demands openness, respect, honesty, patience and ability to face challenges / conflicts upfront – and it is not easy to let go many of these human centric qualities. Needless to say that ‘change’ is required at every level of organization to harness the true potential of Collaborative Leadership (CL).

Through experience I have learnt 6 basic principles by which collaborative-leadership collaborative-environment and collaborative-enterprise can be achieved:

• Principal 1: Communicate strategic vision with everyone, be open and honest

It is utmost important to share organization’s overall mission, strategy, goals with everyone, at every hierarchy so to put everyone on the same page. All must know what are we going, why we are doing, what small goals are and how all fit together in the bigger picture. It helps people to understand perspectives without layers and deeper meaning of working with multiple LOB’s, partners and customers. Instilling ownership is one of the key factors that come easy once you know your place, your work, and your task is important in shaping organization’s future.

• Principal 2: Identify barriers to collaboration and fix them

Leaders are leaders because of their extensive experience and their suggestions and guidance comes from real life experiences that has been tried and tested multiple times, therefore, one of the biggest barrier for leaders are to be patient with questioning from colleagues or subordinates while practicing CL. This means surrendering ego, being attentive and re-thinking solutions that are being proposed from 360 degree. One of the hidden barriers in CL is that it will kill extensive amount of time. As a CL practitioner, you have to deal with these issues positively.

• Principal 3: Make idea sharing a fun process and ensure everyone’s heard

We all know that there is immense amount of practical knowledge to do certain tasks is only with those individuals who are working at that level. It’s not uncommon that these individuals do not share this wisdom for reasons like leaders have not heard them before; their ideas were not welcome, they have been instructed to mind their own work etc.

If organization has to be truly agile, flexible, and would like to understand the real business that they are into, they have to start creating groups, forums, meetings – some foundation where everyone gets involved and everyone’s ideas are appreciated. Who knows by listening to something important, management might realize a big mistake and millions of dollars and tremendous amount of time and effort can be saved.

• Principal 4: Form group of diversified people

While practicing CL, if you make group of people from same geography, same region, same culture, same experience, and same sector – you probably are going to hear the same strategy, same steps to achieve it and same expectations. However, should you mix-n-match people from different experience levels coming from different geographies; you will probably hear more options to achieve the same targeted result. This improves your chances of success.

• Principal 5: Adapt organization wide ‘Change Management Strategy’

Change Management means introducing change to the organization in a controlled and coordinated manner. In the case of CL, we need to make sure that process of change in leadership style is bought by senior management, strategy is defined and platform is developed where steps to incorporate this change is advertised, practiced, implemented and monitored for reverse engineering.

• Principal 6: Genuinely connect with people

Please do not fake a smile, fake an emotion or even fake being Collaborative Leader if you ain't practicing it genuinely. Watch your body language as people sense it very quickly. In short - Just be genuine.

Connect with everyone at a human level, appreciate their efforts, motivate them, mentor them and make them part of the success. Create a platform for them to try new things, fail fast and learn from it. Appreciate the courage of trying something new and voice their opinion. Communicate at professional as well as personal level (if accepted by other party), extend helping hand (we all need that once in a while), Give opportunity and delegate responsibilities. To become the leader of choice, just be YOU :)