Introduction

Building collaborative relationships

As organizations move to more collaborative cultures, your continued success as a leader increasingly depends on your ability to build collaborative relationships within your team and across the enterprise. I’m Carol Kinsey Goman, and I’ve presented speeches and seminars on collaborative leadership at hundreds of conferences around the world.

This course highlights the insights, attitudes, and strategies that are vital for leaders at all levels of today’s highly-networked organizations.

• tips fordesigning collaborative meetings
  • room setup
  • add music
  • bring art supplies
  • serve food
• strategies for leading virtual collaboration
• learn how to use body language to assure you look like a collaborative leader.

Warren Buffett once said before you invest in anything else, invest in yourself. If you’re ready to make a key investment in your future, I hope you’ll join me in this course on collaborative leadership.

Collaborative Organizations

The need for collaboration

Years ago Albert Einstein was teaching a physics class at Princeton. At the end of the term, he handed out a final exam with the identical questions that had been on the midterm exam. It wasn’t a mistake. Einstein explained, “These are the same questions, “but by now the answers have changed.”

When I started working with organizations three decades ago, here are the questions my clients were asking. How can we delight customers, nurture innovation, stay ahead of the competition, attract and retain great people, and increase sales? Back then the answer was hire the best and brightest individuals.

Today my clients are asking the same questions, but the answer has changed. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We still need talented employees. But as a report from the Yale School of Management points out, if you want to outstrip the competition, you need to focus not only on how people work, but how they work together.

Here’s why collaboration has become essential for today’s companies.

• First of all, customers are demanding it. Whether your industry is high-tech or healthcare, manufacturing or management consulting, your customers want a seamless, personalized experience. And seamless customer-centric service takes collaboration.
• Collaboration also brings a huge innovation advantage. Creativity thrives on collective diversity, that potent combination of ideas from people across the organization with different backgrounds, thinking styles, and perspectives.
• A collaborative culture increases employee satisfaction. Whenever I’m asked, “What does that new generation “of employees want?”, I always say the answer is easy. They want more. They want more communication, more control, and more collaboration.

With all the advantage of collaboration, silo mentality remains its greatest organizational obstacle. When boundaries are created around a team, a department, a function, a product line, or a geographic region, it becomes a silo. If those silos focus only within, the result is silo mentality. Silo mentality is characterized by a just let me do my job attitude with little recognition for the power of working collaboratively to obtain superior results for the good of the entire organization. Wherever it’s found, silo mentality increases power struggles and kills collaboration.

Everyone on your team needs to understand why collaboration has moved from a nice to have corporate philosophy to a must have business strategy and how this takes knowledge sharing and partnerships across the organization. So take time at one of your next meetings to review the advantages of collaboration. Discuss how your team supports or influences other areas of the organization and invite members from those areas to join the discussion.