Collaborative leadership


Collaborative leadership is a form of leadership that emphasizes shared decision-making and joint problem-solving rather than authority concentrated in a single leader. It is a team-management approach to leadership.

History

The phrase "collaborative leadership", as used to specify a particular type of public sector leadership, can be traced back at least to 1992, with the founding of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership, a U.S.-based nonprofit serving the public sector.
In her 1994 Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Advantage", Rosabeth Moss Kanter addressed leaders who recognize that critical business relationships exist "that cannot be controlled by formal systems but require a dense web of interpersonal connections".
In 2013, Harvard Business Review authors Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas, co-founders of The Intersector Project, explore the complex relationship between the business, government and social sectors as it relates to said sector's role in addressing society's most pressing challenges. These issues include managing resource constraints, controlling health care costs, training the 21st century workforce, developing and implementing smart-grid and intelligent-urbanization technologies, and stabilizing financial systems to foster sustainable economic growth. Their research suggests that the future of collaborative leadership depends on the ability of leaders to engage and collaborate with businesses, governments and social sectors.
Hank Rubin, founder of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership, and Leonard Brock differentiate collaborative leadership from collective impact, defining the latter as beginning when a community agrees on shared outcomes. "Individuals then return to their respective organizations to determine how they, both personally and organizationally, can contribute to achieving those goals."
David Archer and Alex Cameron, in their 2008 book Collaborative Leadership: How to succeed in an interconnected world, identify the basic objective of the collaborative leader as the delivery of results across boundaries between different organizations. Stating that "Getting value from difference is at the heart of the collaborative leader's task; they have to learn to share control, and to trust a partner to deliver, even though that partner may operate very differently from themselves."

Characteristics of collaborative leaders

There have been a number of research projects and reviews of key lessons learned for collaborative leaders.
Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas, writing for the Harvard Business Review, interviewed over 100 leaders. Many of these leaders demonstrated the ability to engage and collaborate across the business, government and social sectors. The authors identified six major, distinguishing characteristics:
  1. Balanced motivations: A desire to create public value no matter where they work, combining their motivations to wield influence, have social impact, and generate wealth
  2. Transferable skills: A set of distinctive skills valued across sectors, such as quantitative analytics, strategic planning, and stakeholder management.
  3. Contextual intelligence: A deep empathy of the differences within and between sectors, especially those of language, culture, and key performance indicators.
  4. Integrated networks: A set of relationships across sectors to draw on when advancing their careers, building top teams, or convening decision-makers on a particular issue.
  5. Prepared mind: A willingness to pursue an unconventional career that zigzags across sectors, and the financial readiness to take potential pay cuts from time to time.
  6. Intellectual thread: Holistic subject matter expertise on a particular intersectional issue by understanding it from the perspective of each sector.
Madeline Carter, writing for the Center for Effective Public Policy as part of a research project funded by the United States Department of Justice and State Justice Institute, also defines five qualities of a collaborative leader:
  1. Willingness to take risks
  2. Eager listeners
  3. Passion for the cause
  4. Optimistic about the future
  5. Able to share knowledge, power and credit
Rod Newing, writing in a Financial Times supplement special report, said that "If a collaboration is to be effective, each party must recognize and respect the different cultures of the other." Traditional development paths do not prepare leaders well for this. "Traditional management development is based on giving potential managers a team of people and a set of resources to control – and success is rewarded with more people and more resources to control. By contrast, collaboration requires managers to achieve success through people and resources outside their control and for this they have had no preparation".
Steven Wilson mentions four major key leadership traits that all highly collaborative leaders share in his article, "Collaborative leadership: it's good to talk":
  • Focus on authentic leadership, placing the goals of the organization ahead of their own self-interest and following through on their commitments
  • Relentlessly pursue transparent decision making, clarifying how their decisions are made and who is accountable for the outcomes
  • View resources as instruments of action, realizing shared goals through the flexible use of shared resources
  • Clarify the relationship between decisions, rights, accountability, and rewards, taking time to establish decision paths and using a common vocabulary that everyone can comprehend for successful collaborations
Wilson further states that the best thing a collaborative leader can do is to lead by example. Leaders must show a willingness take risks, continually question their own ideas, and reward others for their clear communication and valuable insights. Chantale Mailhot, Stephanie Gagnon, Anne Langley, and Louis-Felix Binette conducted a research project to examine the qualities of distributing leadership and the effects diversity has on groups. They found that "coupling of leaders and objects helped to maintain the worldview of the different groups involved at different levels in the research project, while directing them towards project objectives". In retrospect, the differences of each individual increases innovation due to the variety of minds at work. With everyone having their own qualities and prior experiences, the integration between them in a leadership role contributes to the overall experience.

Applications

Collaborative leadership is being used in the following areas:
  1. Public Private Partnerships
  2. Global Supply Chains
  3. Civic collaboration to solve complex community problems
  4. Online collaboration - Linux, Wikipedia etc.
  5. Political collaboration to deal with issues such as the 2008 financial crisis, climate change and terrorism
  6. The Government - According to Heather Getha-Taylor and Ricardo S. Morse as part of their article, collaborative leadership has an impact on the roles of local government officials. It is said that public administration is shifting to a more collaborative leadership-oriented field because it helps with the set of skills necessary for the jobs.
  7. Education - According to Abdolhamid Arbabi and Vali Mehdinezhad, collaborative leadership adds to cooperation which allows for adaptability and consistency, "increas organizational commitment and decreas employee resistance to changes." There is a significant correlation between the teacher's self-efficacy and the principal's style of collaborative leadership. According to Gialamas, Pelonis, and Medeiros collaborative leadership allows for leaders to work together. It allows for a better adaptability to change which in turn allows for "growth and development."
  8. Health Services- According to Markle-Reid, Dykeman, Ploeg, Stradiotto, Andrews, Bonomo, and Stradiotto, collaborative leadership in the health area will allow for a more widespread set of skills required to help the patients. An example brought up is the idea that the elderly do not receive the help they require because the people do not know how to react in the given case. They know what to do, but when confronted by the situation they do not know how to act. Collaborative leadership will allow for the skills necessary as well as a uniform set of actions they must follow.
An Ipsos MORI research report, published in 2007, found that relationship management and collaborative leadership were the top two qualities or capabilities that directors of organizations involved in large business partnerships would have liked to have had more access to when setting up or running a partnership.