COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP
By
Bill Cottringer

“A leader is a dealer in hope.” ~Napoleon Bonaparte.

And so the opening question is when have we needed hope more than today, if it is just help to be more optimistic in seeing past the ornery information overload that is burying us all? Everything I have read and experienced during the last two decades seems to be hinting at the need to question and transform a basic paradigm we are super-glued to as to how we should be viewing and practicing leadership and management.

I think it may have started with the Princeton mathematics genius, John Nash’s discovery of the common win-lose, scarcity mentality making up the uncooperative economic game theory of competition in the marketplace. You can play the game at: http://www.princeton.edu/~mdaniels/PD/PD.html This novel idea was then carried to the masses further by Stephen Covey and other positive psychologists as the desired transformation to a win-win, abundance mentality in his popular “Seven Habits ” book.

So, what does the shift from the win-lose, scarcity mentality to a win-win, abudnance one require of leaders and managers of organizations today? The volume and complexity of the current information overload seems to be taking us to unfamiliar territory without a map. The common mantra is “what got us here won’t get us there.” For once in our modern history, the problems are more complex and interconnected than our smart rational thinking can penetrate. Some management gurus say we are at the end of our management knowledge.

And this points towards the need for mutual collaboration of creative thinking, as opposed to traditional rational leadership and management models of the boss telling the “what” and “how” of following his or her vision with detailed game plans. Today visions are more difficult to communicate clearly or get consensually accepted and followed. This is because of the volume of information we are trying to deal with and the diversity of values and thinking styles that make up the present worforce.

This notion of collaboration is certainly not new, as it was behind the present team building philosophy, religious conflict resolution strategies, and progressive educational approaches we see so prevalent today. But then again we tend to cautiously baby-step before we close our eyes, hold our breath and jump in with all fours to embrace seeing and joining truth. I suppose most of that caution has with our thinking minds not completely trusting that it is the truth of collaboration that is trying to be seen, past our individual efforts to think near it.

Many experiments have been going on with collaborative leadership in all types of organizations from non-profits to churches to government organizations to for-profit businesses. There are management teams, strategic visioning committees, round tables, and peer boards of directors just to mention a few. The point behind all these responses to the current unmanageable overload is that today, no one person can possibly know all there is to know, especially about where we are going and how we can best get there. The present has never been more complex and the future more uncertain for us as it is today, needing "hope brokers" that live their beliefs more than talk about them.

Making the transition from the traditional leadership paradigm to one of collaboration can be a painfully slow process. Certain things have to happen within an organization to facilitate the emergence and acceptance of the collaborative leadership paradigm. These transition stages are:

1. The organization has to become uncomfortable enough to want to do something about some seemingly irresolvable conflicts that can no longer be overlooked, suppressed or denied. This discomfort can show up in many forms from pervasive negative emotionality to business failure and can be very painful and slow. Most of the time people don’t change until they are forced to and some times it is too late. And sometimes when conflict and turmoil exist in an organization, everybody sees a different cause and solution and then not reaching common agreement about a starting point just adds to the conflict, making it worse and harder to see through.

2. The strong power brokers in the organizations have to see how their egos and cutting edge knowledge keep both themselves and the organization from going from limited surviving to unlimited thriving. This is also something that doesn’t occur overnight. An ego built upon great success and knowledge is a hard thing to give up because it is a titanium security blanket. There is simply no room for superior and over-controlling know-it-alls in collaborative leadership. It has to be a truly equal journey to work correctly.

3. Nothing much happens until some difficult, up-front and very personal campfire conversations occur, where there is good listening, empathy and acceptance, without control, self-centeredness or judgment. This is far from the way leaders are generally accustomed to communicating. And it almost has to be spontaneous to be accepted by all. The conversations have to challenge sacred assumptions and explore vulnerabilities; and peeling away the emotional layers of the onion to get to fundamental cognitive consensus can be tedious and nerve-wrecking, requiring more than the usual amount of empathy and patience.

4. The real key to opening up to a win-win, abundance mentality that sets the stage for all these other things to occur, is the identification of the most important common ground which the group can agree upon and feel comfortable letting go to and trusting that this is the right starting point. This can often be a very simple, but profound and powerful mission or vision statement. This is what spells out the basic thing everyone is wanting to do and get from their doing.But it has to be the right thing for the right reason. Again though, this has to be a neutral idea that no one person in the group owns or puts forward from personal preferences. Fortunately we have a way to see the truth when it surfaces from such peak communication, without personal ownership. It just happens and you know it when you have it.

5. Behind all these things of course is basic trust in life and in the new leadership paradigm. Unfortunately this is typically a catch-22 situation in which results have to precede the willingness to trust enough to get those results. But what you can take to the bank is that the happiest and most successful people are the ones who trust most, let go easiest, and take the most chances because of the abundant, win-win hope they have in their minds and hearts to reach a better place. They have already plowed through the chaos to recognize the land of simple just on the other side of complexity. They are the ‘hope brokers’ Napoleon Bonaparte was referring to.

Collaborative leadership is a major transformational change that is quickly evolving in the Information Age as the only solution of choice. Smart leaders will find out how to make it work in their organizations through good communication and effective use of interpersonal intelligence, in recognizing and removing the barriers to success. And that effort might just start with redefining this “success” thing in clearer and simpler terms, taking it from scarcity to abundance , from the few to the many.