Give Collaborative Leadership a Try

The iconic sheriff of classic Westerns walks towards the town’s folks with his spurs jangling. He tells them what has to be done, and he makes damn sure it’s done.

The lone heroic leader commands dramatic attention, but history has long observed that the most effective leaders know two things – one, they can achieve the most when others are willing to help them to the best of their ability; and two, how willing others are to help them depends on the sense of togetherness they can engender.

Leaders who leave others feeling excluded will at best be tolerated like a minor princeling, or at worst, disposed of like Caesar. In the cabinet of government or the boardroom of corporations, the daggers may be metaphorical but they can just as swiftly put an end to any flawed ambition.

To steer clear of passive-aggressive mutiny in the office, and generate the kind of synergy where the sum is substantially greater than its parts, one should turn to the art of collaborative leadership. In essence, it calls for four simple things:
• Articulate shared objectives
• Promote open communications
• Engender a culture of mutual support
• Oversee joint reviews and adaptation

With collaborative leadership one can build a team that will enable its members to play to their individual strengths while covering each other’s weaknesses, and thus maximise their collective capacity to achieve what they all want to attain.

Contrary to any suggestion that this is only suitable for relaxed leaders working with a group of cooperative-minded people, it is in fact most called for in situations where collaboration seems to be completely out of sight.

Without the collaborative leadership of Dwight Eisenhower who firmly and respectfully made uncollaborative characters such as Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton work together on a unified plan, D-Day might not have led to Allied Victory over Nazi Germany. If not for Mary Seacole’s charm and determination to get a disparate band of individuals to contribute to the realisation of her unconventional vision, there would never have been a care and catering service in the darkest hours of the Crimea War for the wounded and battle-weary alike.

And when José María Arizmendiarrieta trained and guided the first generation of managers to build in the 1950s what became the Mondragon Corporation, Spain was still under Franco’s authoritarian rule. It was Arizmendiarrieta’s unwavering commitment and promotion of the ethos of solidarity that paved the way for a federation of cooperative enterprises that by the 2010s are generating €11bn in revenue worldwide with over 74,000 workers (whose pay differentials average no more than 1:5).

We won’t go into the advice and training needed to develop such leadership, but we can use a model called the Synetopia Protocol to check the extent to which any aspiring collaborative leader has managed to put in place what is needed to nurture cooperation and multiply synergy. The nine elements to consider are:

S hared Mission
Y ou-and-I Mutuality
N imble Membership
E ducative Collaboration
T esting of Claims and Assumptions
O pen Access to Information
P articipatory Decision-Making
I mpartial Distribution of Power
A ccountability for Action
-
More details on these 9 elements are set out in: ‘The Synetopia Protocol’.