Collaborative Leadership

As a collaboration specialist (actual job title), my main goal is to foster an environment where our internal staff can easily share information and collaborate with external clients. In doing research on Collaborative Leadership, I came across several different points of views and many approaches on how to apply it to a virtual team. One Article worth mentioning is the The Seven Secrets of Effective Collaborative Leaders. (See below)

While I agree with most of the “seven secrets”, I would like to add to number 7 that collaboration emphasizes learning from others, so even though collaboration happens one person at a time, it also means to test assumptions and to share thoughts and concerns with team members to share the knowledge and effectively foster collaborative leadership for virtual team success.

1. Cultivate a shared vision right from the start... even if it's vague

2. Take care to recruit the right mix to reach your stakeholders and decision-makers

3. Become or ensure you've identified the institutionalized worry.
This is the person who will pay unwavering attention to:

sustaining the momentum and attending to the management details of the collaboration and

engaging the perspectives and addressing the process needs of each individual partner in the work of the collaboration

4. To the greatest extent possible, ensure that each partner's individual and institutional self-interests are served by both the process and products of the collaboration.

5. Don't waste time. Meetings must be efficient and productive; management must be lean and driven. Remember: for everyone else this is no more than a second priority.

6. Routinize the structure and the Roster of Participants. Make the collaboration a regular item on participants' schedules.

Develop clear roles and responsibilities for participants (even if these roles and responsibilities regularly shift among partners).

Recognize that it is easier and much more popularly received to cancel a meeting or remove a responsibility than it is to add a meeting or responsibility to participants' lives.

And secure commitments from all participants that every human effort will be made to ensure that the same people come to the table each time the collaboration meets -- scarcely anything stifles creativity, productivity and commitment more than wasting time each meeting bringing a new delegate "up to speed".

7. All collaboration is personal. "Inter-institutional collaboration" is a common misnomer. Effective collaboration happens between people-one person at a time.

It is also very interesting how they differentiate and define the meaning of collaboration with that of collaborative leadership.

Collaboration: A collaboration is a purposeful relationship in which all parties strategically choose to cooperate in order to accomplish a shared outcome. Because of its voluntary nature, the success of a collaboration is dependent upon one or more collaborative leader's ability to maintain these relationships.

Collaborative Leadership: Collaborative leadership is the skillful and mission-oriented management of relevant relationships. It is the juncture of organizing and management. And whereas community and labor organizers are trained to patiently build their movements through one-on-one conversations with each individual they want to recruit, collaborative leaders do this and more by building structures to support and sustain these productive relationship over time.

Comments

[Alan Christensen]

Maria, I love your job title and do not envy your position, espeically if I had to live by those seven points to be successful. It seems to me that it is nice to have someone who can go into a bubble and author an ideal guide on how to get people to collaborate. The real world makes these points are to accomodate, especially if you need to make things happen.

It seems too static and inflexible for me, because my personality type thrives in chaotic environments. As a former Marine, I'm forever trapped in unique mindset that is based in collaborative methodolgy...

I thought overall your posting was informative but would not work for someone like me, and the kind of collaborative endeavors I embrace. I believe political correctness, which these seven points seem to be full of has gone too far in how we function to get things done. I feel like so much energy and resources are spent on trying to create an environment rather than get going on the project or task at hand... What do you think?

Alan

Alan

[Jacquet Jordan]

I think the seven points guide are goods rules to form a collaborative environment but an organization must have the culture to implement those seven points. It has to come from the top down before everyone in the organization takes it seriously.Collaboration puts eveyone on the same page; most people in the organization are afraid to share information because they feel that they will lose control.