The Collaborative Leader

The ultimate leadership challenge

Ian McDermott, L Michael Hall

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781785830099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785830556
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In The Collaborative Leader, L. Michael Hall and Ian McDermott answer key questions about leadership. What is collaboration? How does it relate to leadership? How do you do it effectively? How do you pull people together, inspire them with a meaningful vision, and organise them so that a team spirit emerges and peak performance is achieved? The Collaborative Leader is a practical guide to collaborating with others and leading collaboratively. That means learning how to win the hearts and minds of those who we lead. Packed with practical and immediate action points, the book will show you how to turn around a non-collaborative group or environment immediately. You will find assessment questions throughout, step-by-step processes on collaboration, and an invitation to action at the end of each chapter: a personal challenge to step up to the collaborative level of leadership. Learn the core competencies that facilitate a healthy, joyful, and productive collaboration. The foundation of collaborative leadership is self-collaboration. The leader who cannot effectively collaborate cannot effectively lead. If you are to walk your talk, you need to demonstrate collaborative skills yourself, and this book will show you the 'how to's' for developing the critical success elements of leadership. The best collaborators are those who have lots of fun collaborating. The goal can be serious. The collaboration can be fun. Learn how it's possible by understanding the structure and processes of collaboration. Whether you're responsible for team or organisational development, you'll find plenty here to inspire you to transform your leadership into collaborative leadership.

Part I

The Foundations of Collaborative Leadership—Leading the Call

Chapter 1

The Vision

Why Bother?

Collaboration will be the point of differentiation between the companies that grow successfully into the next decade and those that don’t.

Neil McPhail, CEO of Best Buy

Successful collaboration is the science of the possible.

Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets Of Creative Collaboration (1998)

As a leader, why bother with collaboration? What is in it for you and for those you lead? Consider any of the truly great achievements that human beings have created—the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, nations uniting to stop Hitler, putting a man on the moon, building sky-scrapers in modern cities. When you do so, you are contemplating acts of collaboration. People came together, worked together, shared a vision, and achieved what would have been impossible alone or apart. Because of a collaborative effort the incredible happened. This is the magic of collaboration.

Or think of the great corporations that exist today—those in the auto industry (Toyota, Volkswagen, General Motors, etc.), the IT industry (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.), banking (JPMorgan Chase, HSBC Holdings, Citigroup, etc.), and so on. When you do, you are contemplating acts of collaboration—human beings operating as collaborative partners.

So collaboration is good for the bottom line of profit and it is also good for the other two bottom lines of highly successful companies—people and passion. In other words, via collaboration you can create synergy out of the dichotomy between what many people think of as opposites—the hard side and the soft side of business. Collaboration can actually solve many of the problems which businesses suffer today, such as a one-sided overemphasis on money as the sole criteria of corporate success. Money is important but it is not the sole purpose of commerce. Business also requires a focus on people; it requires responsible, ethical, cooperative individuals. This saves companies from suffering from a silo mentality, indulging in unethical business practices, sacrificing people for the return on investment (ROI), and so on.

At its best, a collaborative vision unleashes hidden and untapped potentials which, in turn, can create a better world for all. Collaboration facilitates a broader vision for work, organizations, and corporations which transcends just profit. Collaboration also enables good people to be great together. The very experience of collaboration changes us. It changes how we relate in our work environments and it changes the business and political cultures we have inherited. Through collaboration we can also tap into emergent expressions of creativity that put us, and our organizations, on the cutting edge of innovation, leading us to pioneering new products, services, and information.

The collaborative vision is about who we are together and the quality of the way we relate. Collaboration therefore expands what we do and the results that we create together. Potentially, it also expands the quality of our relationships. Here, then, are two great benefits from collaboration. First, we are able to achieve results together that we cannot achieve alone. Second, the quality of our group experience—the culture that results—gives us both a competitive advantage as well as a community of which we can enjoy being a part.

Fostering collaboration also addresses one of the most destructive problems troubling all businesses and organizations—disengagement. Employees who are not engaged in the business—who are bored, resistant, and disloyal—are people who cost the company. They are also dangerous people—a danger to the group spirit, to creativity, and to sustainability. A collaborative culture changes this. Work becomes more engaging because of the quality of our relationships in the workplace and the quality of the teamwork.

When you get people truly caring, connecting, and working together, all kinds of creative ideas and projects emerge. Sometimes this means that individuals begin to have a sense of how they can access their higher values, such as making a difference in the world or contributing to the larger good. When this happens, more is unleashed—and this can take an organization to a whole new level.

The Power of Collaboration

There is an incredible power in collaboration. Human history has demonstrated repeatedly how we can do so much more together than alone or apart. Single heroic leaders are nothing if they cannot foster collaboration.

The power of collaboration has brought about this age of science, technology, space exploration, the social media, and so on. Consider the incredible immensity of the collaboration at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.1 CERN, the official name for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is a large-scale international collaboration of people from seventy countries working together. Palestinians and Israelis working side by side. Iranian and Iraqi scientists working together. All in all, there are more than 2,000 staff members and up to 13,000 people can be on site at any one time.

If collaboration enables science, technology, the arts, and civilization, what then is collaboration? Collaboration is people working together in a partnership to create something that no one individual can create or do single-handedly. This very special state, and state of mind, is about far more than just complying with authority. It is about positively and actively wanting and acting in unity with others to achieve a common goal.

If collaboration refers to working with others, then the opposite is going it alone—the drive for independence, separation, and stepping out alone when no one else believes in our vision. The fascinating thing about human beings is that every one of us feels the pull of both of these forces; they are built into our neurology and psychology. We want to be independent and we want to be a part of a community. We want to be true to our innermost self and we want to be part of a winning team.

We all begin life within a collaboration, inasmuch as we begin in a family, a community, a town, a nation. Without others, we wouldn’t survive at all. All of our basic human needs are met by others. After that begins the developmental pull within us to separate, to individuate, to become a self in our own right, to define ourselves, to find our own way. This instigates the individuation process of childhood and the teenage years as we gradually become independent adults. But, at the same time, we feel yet another urge emerging—the social urge, the pull to be a part of a group, to have close friends, to find a special one to love, to become interdependent.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

John Donne, Meditation XVII, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: The Foundations of Collaborative Leadership—Leading the Call
• Part II: Collaborative Leadership—The How To
• Part III: Collaborative Leadership Challenges—There Be Dragons!
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index
• Copyright