How Leaders Develop Collaborative Environments

A Critical Leadership Skill You Need In Your Arsenal

Collaborative environments give you happy motivated workers resulting in projects being completed ahead of schedule with a minimum in turnover of resources.

In this article Tanveer gives us some excellent insights into the process.

When it comes to thriving in today’s fast-changing, interconnected global economy, one of the attributes of organizational success that often comes up is ensuring that we promote greater collaboration among the various teams and departments within our workplace.

Indeed, the ability to foster collaboration in your organization has become a critical leadership competency as technological, process-driven differentiators give way to people-centric ones in today’s knowledge-based global economy.

Unfortunately, while leaders may state that they want to engender a more collaborative environment in their organization, they don’t realize how often own actions are actually serving to stifle collaboration, promote the growth of silos, and ultimately hindering their organization’s ability to innovate or incur any real forward momentum.

Time and time again, I’ve met with leaders who are eager to champion collaboration among their different teams and departments, but who unknowingly create or reinforce barriers that prevent their employees from challenging their assumptions or beliefs of how things can be done.

Although in some cases, the actions and behaviours are specific to a particular situation, there are nonetheless some common missteps these leaders share which have only served to impede collaboration among their employees.

To address and prevent these common mistakes from happening in your organization, I’d like to share the following four measures that leaders should take to ensure that they’re creating an environment where employees are compelled to dedicate their discretionary efforts to the shared purpose of their organization.

1. Define at the start what to expect from one another

At the start of any new initiative – whether it’s the development of a new product or service line, a change initiative to improve things, or coming up with an action plan to address a current crisis, there’s the natural and understandable tendency for all involved parties to focus first on the end goal, followed by a discussion of what measures or steps should be taken to get the ball rolling.

While these are critical points to address, there’s a third element that leaders often overlook that’s vital to communicate and establish early on in the process. And that is to define the nature of the working relationships of those involved in this endeavour. Specifically, that you help them to articulate what they should expect from one another.

In several cases, I noted how problems arose not simply because team members disagreed on a particular point or issue, but because they were operating from different perspectives of what they should be expected to do, and what they saw as being their team mates’ responsibility to address.

This lack of clarity in expectations made it difficult for everyone in the team to accept responsibility for what needed to be done, which naturally lead to finger-pointing instead of problem-solving when something invariably went wrong.

Consequently, the team began to fragment into various splinter groups, focused on protecting their interests and reserving any faults or recriminations for those outside their social cluster.

This is why from the very start of any initiative, we need to make sure that we make it very clear what our team mates should not only expect from us, but what they should expect from one another. This will not only help to reduce misunderstandings, but it will also make it easier for your employees to collaborate as there won’t be any concerns over accidentally stepping on the toes of their team mates.

2. Leave intentional spaces for others to contribute

When it comes to the proposal of any new initiative, it’s natural for leaders to want to define all the steps involved and how the organization would go about attaining it.

However, if we want to promote collaboration within our organization, we can’t come into these initiatives with a full game plan in hand. Although it’s easy for us to envision the whole process and various steps involved to get us to where we want to go, we have to restrain ourselves from doing such and instead, create these intentional gaps in our vision or plan.

What these intentional spaces do is allow for our employees to add their own contributions – their talents, insights, and creativity – towards the achievement of the overarching objective behind this vision or initiative. And this will allow for your employees to have a greater sense of shared ownership in that vision or goal.

One of the best examples of this measure in action was in how President John F. Kennedy presented his vision for how the US would send a man to the moon in less than 10 years. While he defined both the end goal and the timeframe for completion, he left these intentional spaces so that the various teams of scientists, engineers, and politicians involved in the endeavour could collaborate towards making his vision a reality.

The effectiveness of this measure is often seen in the story of the NASA janitor who when asked by journalists – who thought he was one of the scientists – what he did at NASA replied that he was helping to send a man to the moon.

The fact that the story continues to be shared as an example of what it was like to work at NASA during the Apollo missions demonstrates just how powerful this gesture is to creating the kind of collaborative environment that allowed for such fantastic achievements to move into the realm of possibility.

3. Don’t let assumptions prevent you from asking questions  *** Read More ***

How Leaders Develop Collaborative Environments