Are You A collaborative Leader

Are You a Collaborative Leader?

HBR, Jul 2011

Social media and technologies have put connectivity on steroids and made collaboration more integral to business than ever. But without the right leadership, collaboration can go astray. Employees who try to collaborate on everything may wind up stuck in endless meetings, struggling to reach agreement. On the other side of the coin, executives who came of age during the heyday of “command and control” management can have trouble adjusting their style to fit the new realities.

In their research on top-performing CEOs, Insead professors Ibarra and Hansen have examined what it takes to be a collaborative leader. Our research shows that collaborative leaders who get results do four things well:

Make global connections that help them spot opportunities RATHER THAN focus on internal connections

Engage diverse talent from everywhere to produce results RATHER THAN rely on homogeneous teams for new ideas

Collaborate at the top to model expectations RATHER THAN serve corporate politics and parochial agendas

Show a strong hand to speed decisions and ensure agility RATHER THAN let groups get mired in conflict or attempts at consensus.

In this article, they describe tactics that executives from Akamai, GE, Reckitt Benckiser, and other firms use in those four areas and how they foster high-performance collaborative cultures in their organizations.

The good news is, our research also suggests that these skills can be learned—and can help executives generate exceptional long-term performance. Ask yourself:

Do you attend conferences outside your professional specialty?

Are you part of a global network like Young Presidents’ Organization?

Do you regularly blog or e-mail employees about trends, ideas, and people you encounter outside your organization?

How often do you meet with parties outside your company (competitors, consumers, government officials, university contacts, and so on) who are not directly relevant to your immediate job demands or current operations?

Are you on the board of any outside organizations?

Engage Talent at the Periphery

How diverse is your immediate team in terms of nationality? Gender? Age?

How much time do you spend outside your home country?

Have you visited your emerging markets this year?

Does your network include people in their twenties (who aren’t your kids)?

Collaborate at the Top First

Do members of your team have any joint responsibilities beyond their individual goals?

Does the compensation of your direct reports depend on any collective goals or reflect any collective responsibilities?

What specifically have you done to eradicate power struggles within your team?

Do your direct reports have both performance and learning goals?

Show a Strong Hand

Have you killed any collaboration projects in the past six months?

Do you manage dynamically—forming and disbanding teams quickly as opportunities arise?

Do the right people in your organization know they can “close” a discussion and make a decision?

Does your team debate ideas vigorously but then unite behind decisions made?

Leaders today must be able to harness ideas, people, and resources from across boundaries of all kinds. That requires reinventing their talent strategies and building strong connections both inside and outside their organizations. To get all the disparate players to work together effectively, they also need to know when to wield influence rather than authority to move things forward, and when to halt unproductive discussions, squash politicking, and make final calls.

Differences in convictions, cultural values, and operating norms inevitably add complexity to collaborative efforts. But they also make them richer, more innovative, and more valuable. Getting that value is the heart of collaborative leadership.

=======Business Leaders Digest======

Information You Can Use. Knowledge You Can Trust

This summary is taken from Business Leaders Digest monthly(www.busleadersdigest.com)

The objective of BLD is to offer strategic insights, how-to articles, thought leadership pieces and other information to help you become more effective at the workplace.

Summaries from global top 100 business & management magazines, newspapers, websites & reports are published monthly in Business Leaders Digest which can be subscribed at a modest annual subscription of Rs1500 for corporates and Rs.900 for individuals in India or US$50 overseas. To subscribe or receive a sample issue, email at busleadersdigest@gmail.com

===========INTRO SUBSCRIPTION========

Business Leaders Digest-Summaries from 100 resources

We are pleased to attach the latest issue of our publication Business Leaders Digest.The objective of BLD is to introduce you to global literature on strategic insights, how-to articles, thought leadership pieces and other information to help you and your colleagues become more effective at workplace.

Summaries of selected literature from global top 100 business & management magazines, newspapers, websites & reports are published monthly in Business Leaders Digest which can be subscribed at a modest annual subscription. More information is given on last page.

Please circulate to your friends and colleagues.

Best Regards

S.Abidi

Mob: 9324053831

http://busleadersdigest.blogspot.com

Information You Can Use. Knowledge You Can Trust