Why an executive leadership that collaborates can eliminate an 'everyone for themselves’ culture

All for one and one for all.

It’s simple yet profound.?

Many of us have worked in businesses in which austere leaders created an atmosphere of ‘my way or the highway’. It may also have led to senior execs and managers with effective fiefdoms, running their departments as siloed units, emulating that strident style they saw at the top.

The truth is that while every business needs vision from leadership, it is made a reality by a team.

I’m experienced enough to know how rivalry and infighting at the boardroom table take a toll on a business, producing suspicion and resentment. Politics gets in the way of?doing what's right—right for the company, and right for its people.

For me, collaboration is key. If you have a leadership team who don't get on, that feeds down, creating silos.

Collaboration performs

Business experts and research alike confirm that companies that collaborate perform better and have higher staff retention. One i4cp study of 1,100 companies found that companies can be 5× more effective when they promote collaborative working. That being said of course, employees and managers need that example to be set by the senior team. They need to see collaboration, unity and cooperation.

As many businesses have evolved flatter hierarchies, especially in the tech sector, the need for exemplary figures to emulate has grown. Old and rigid structures for reporting and communication are being left behind for more direct and accessible lines of communication and command. This is manifesting most notably in the emergence of the decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). The point is, modern businesses need collaboration at their core—and that means bringing it right back to the culture. It’s not easy to forge such a culture, and it won’t happen overnight. But if carefully implemented, the results can be staggering.

Facilitating and evolving

I work closely with our CEO Keri Gilder to understand her vision and translate it into what is needed. But as CFO, I also have a duty and remit spanning the entire organisation. I see a key part of that role as being a facilitator of collaboration. I can use my knowledge and insights from working with every part of the organisation to bring people together, show them common ground, and encourage them to help one another succeed.

The historical lack of interdepartmental cooperation would hold back a modern business, but sometimes we just don’t even know where we are failing to collaborate. With the best of intentions, we sometimes fail to see or don’t understand where we could help others, or where they could help us.

As CFO, my oversight allows me to share where things are done well or differently, or where one function can aid another. Through a collaborative approach in the C suite—as set by Keri and implemented by the board—we can let that flow down to every person in the organisation. As they understand the contribution their role makes to the overall success of the business, so too can they be educated about how their collaboration can do the same.

This is the evolving role of the CFO: not just balancing the books and futureproofing the organisation, but also using that awareness of the business as a single unit comprising a multitude of parts to spread awareness of the power of collaboration.

The CFO can be a partner to the business unit heads, bringing business knowledge beyond their individual areas of expertise to enhance their awareness and multiply their efforts to collaborate with each other.

Communicating success

We need to communicate the fact that success for the team is success for everyone. Facilitating another department’s success is success for all. Just as the CTO and CIO can bring a better understanding of how to leverage technology, so the CFO can bring a better understanding of how managers can utilise the levers of business to work together and succeed.

And that’s not all.

When results are achieved through collaboration, they need to be recognised and rewarded.

Great leaders do not stand alone in the limelight. Have you ever noticed how someone receiving an award in leadership will stand aside to acknowledge the people without whom the lauded achievement would not have been possible?

By making those they work with part of the acknowledgement, they are building a culture that fosters collaboration and that values those who contribute to it.

One business expert opined that company culture is hard to define and impossible to measure. That may be true, but the effects of a toxic or hostile company culture are easily recognised: unmotivated and disaffected staff suffering high turnover rates, with little effectiveness and even less productivity.

From the top

A culture of collaboration needs to come from the very top, and it can be facilitated by those roles that have an organisation-wide perspective. Open and accessible lines of communication will bring that culture to everyone, resulting in a sense of purpose and empowerment. The principle that success for one means success for all will encourage the kind of collaboration so urgently demanded by today’s business world.

To other CFOs, I ask: Are you looking beyond the numbers to help your organisation understand the power of collaboration? Do you have the processes to let collaboration flourish, in whatever form it takes?