Group Collaboration: The Advanced Leader Skill
“Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative.”
–Steve Jobs
When no single division, department, or team has all the needed skills and experience to find the best solution, collaborations across your organization–or even between organizations–are essential. The complex problems confronting today’s organizations increasingly require collaboration, but many leaders struggle to effectively lead groups of varied stakeholders.
Think of how telemedicine collaborations arose during Covid. New tools and approaches had to be employed for people to receive care while distancing, no doubt requiring cross-organization collaboration to execute. We all know providers that have done well with this and others that have floundered with delivery methods that frustrate patients. Poor collaboration, including not listening to patients’ needs, is likely the cause.
If you lack the leadership skills to convene and guide successful collaborations, you lose the benefit of diverse experience, perspectives, and input. Your initiatives may not be strong enough to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
When You Can’t Collaborate Effectively
If you’re given an opportunity to lead a collaboration that collapses into infighting or simply doesn’t yield innovative solutions, it reflects poorly on your leadership skills. And could impact your chances of being promoted at your organization and may tarnish your reputation across your industry.
But fostering collaboration between disparate groups and individuals takes time and effort. It’s an advanced people-management skill many leaders lack.
Watch Ted Talk How to Manage for Collective Creativity by Linda Hill
Improving Group Collaboration: Your Competitive Edge
Become skilled at convening and leading collaborations and you gain the opportunity to be noticed and lauded at your organization. Executives who can drive innovation by bringing together diverse stakeholders across the organization and even outside it are seen as vital to future success. Because it’s a rare skill, effective change leadership well-positions you for promotion.
How can you bring together people from diverse departments or even different organizations and productively collaborate? It takes seven key elements:
Identify the right people who have both needed skills and an openness to collaboration.
Overcome defenses by building a sense of shared community.
Build trust to get people to open up and share their ideas.
Define a shared purpose that all collaborators buy into.
Create a culture where everyone feels motivated to contribute and comfortable speaking up.
Develop scalable processes, including clear communication to coordinate the efforts of individuals and diverse working groups.
Build infrastructure by choosing inclusive tools all participants can easily use.
With all the ‘Let’s collab!’ chatter in business today, it’s important to clarify what collaboration is–and what it isn’t.
What is Collaboration Leadership?
Collaborative leaders are able to engage people and groups outside their normal sphere of control and inspire them to work toward a common goal. Skilled collaborative leaders can achieve this despite the many differences these individuals and groups may have in their cultures and beliefs.
If you’re trying to coordinate a broad array of talent to address a problem, you’re leading a collaboration.
Case: Collaboration Stops a Digital Invasion
Early in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Microsoft detected a malware attack targeting Ukrainian government agencies and banks. Forming a collaboration with the affected entities and other potential targets, Microsoft employees were quickly granted security clearances to access government intelligence and computers, while sharing their own technical knowhow.
While Microsoft might have been able to figure out a software solution on its own to protect its own systems from the attack, it undoubtedly would have taken longer and left the affected agencies and companies still compromised. The collaboration brought a fast resolution that helped a nation defend its borders, while the Microsoft team gained unique insights into fending off such attacks.
CHEAT SHEET: Do You Need a Collaboration?
Too often, executives declare that a collaboration with many different stakeholders and even various subgroups is needed to work on a project, when the situation may not require a collab at all.
Do you need a collaboration to resolve your current challenge, or could you use less complex problem-solving approaches? Ask yourself these four questions to find out:
Could an individual or small group tackle this? If so, skip the work of building a large collaborative team.
Is there a compelling reason to add to the team? Can you solve the problem with your existing small team or working group’s knowledge base? If so, collaborators aren’t needed.
Do you need diverse contributors? Do you want opinions from both millennials and boomers, product designers and salespeople, senior leaders and junior staff? If the insights you need are all present in your department, it’s not a collab.
Is all the expertise available in-house? If you need outside participants for the skills or insights to solve your problem, you need to create a collaboration.
Read how to Improve Group Collaboration as part of coming a stronger leader in the book Twelve Skills: the guide to becoming a stronger leader and accelerating your career.
Resources on Leading Collaborations:
Lorna Davis–A guide to collaborative leadership
American Management Association–6 Ways to Strengthen Collaboration at Work
How Strong Are Your Leadership Skills?
Take the Twelve Skills assessment and find out.
About Us
Ed Barrows and Laura M. Downing have nearly 60 years’ experience as certified coaches and university professors who work with high-potential leaders in the world’s top organizations. They’ve distilled their knowledge and research into twelve fundamentals leaders need most to advance in their organizations today. Learn more at www.twelveskills.com.
Read the Other Skill Briefs
Interested in developing your skills in the other Twelve Skills areas? Visit the homepage and just scroll down Twelve Skills
Free Download
Read an excerpt from Twelve Skills here