Collaborative leadership

Collaborative leadership is a management practice which is focused on the leadership skills across functional and
organizational boundaries.

Contents
1 Term Exploration
2 Characteristics of collaborative leaders
3 Applications
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading

Term Exploration
The term started to appear in the mid-1990s in response to the twin trends of the growth in strategic alliances
between private corporations and the formation of long term public private partnership contracts to rebuild public
infrastructure.

“Kurt Lewin was first to apply cooperative system in scientific method in 1947 about individual nutrition in the United
States.”[1]

In her 1994 Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Advantage", Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about leaders
who recognize that there are critical business relationships "that cannot be controlled by formal systems but require
(a) dense web of interpersonal connections...".[2] And in a book published in that same year Chrislip and Larson
looked at the attributes of great civic leaders in communities across the US and found some similar attributes.
"Collaboration needs a different kind of leadership; it needs leaders who can safeguard the process, facilitate
interaction and patiently deal with high levels of frustration"[3]

In 2013, Harvard Business Review[4] authors Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas (co-founders of The InterSector
Project[5]), explore the complex relationship between the business, government and social sectors as it relates to their
role in addressing the most pressing challenges facing society – issues like managing resource constraints, controlling
health care costs, training the twenty-first-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 the business, government and social sectors (see below for the distinguishing characteristics of such
leaders).[4]

Hank Rubin author and founder of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership has written "A collaboration is a
purposeful relationship in which all parties strategically choose to cooperate in order to accomplish a shared
outcome." In his book "Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools"
Rubin asks "Who is a collaborative leader?" and answers "You are a collaborative leader once you have accepted
responsibility for building - or helping to ensure the success of - a heterogeneous team to accomplish a shared purpose
. Your tools are (1) the purposeful exercise of your behavior, communication, and organizational resources in order to
affect the perspective, beliefs, and behaviors of another person (generally a collaborative partner) to influence that
person's relationship with you and your collaborative enterprise and (2) the structure and climate of an environment
that supports the collaborative relationship."[6]

David Archer and Alex Cameron in their 2008 book Collaborative Leadership: How to succeed in an interconnected
world, identify the basic task of the collaborative leader as the delivery of results across boundaries between different
organisations. They say "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."[7]

Characteristics of collaborative leaders

There have been a number of research projects and reviews of key lessons for collaborative leaders.

Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas, writing for the Harvard Business Review,[4] interviewed over 100 leaders who
have demonstrated their ability to engage and collaborate across the business, government and social sectors and
found six distinguishing characteristics:[4]

1. Balanced motivations. A desire to create public value no matter where they work, combining their motivations to
wield influence (often in government), have social impact (often in nonprofits) and generate wealth (often in
business)
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 intersector issue by understanding it from the
perspective of each sector
Madeleine Carter, writing for the Center for Effective Public Policy as part of research project funded by the United
States Department of Justice and State Justice Institute, 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
Archer and Cameron list ten key lessons for a successful collaborative leader:[7]

Find the personal motive for collaborating

Find ways of simplifying complex situations for your people
Prepare for how you are going to handle conflict well in advance
Recognize that there are some people or organisations you just can't partner with
Have the courage to act for the long term
Actively manage the tension between focusing on delivery and on building relationships
Invest in strong personal relationships at all levels
Inject energy, passion and drive into your leadership style
Have the confidence to share the credit generously
 Continually develop your interpersonal skills, in particular: empathy, patience, tenacity, holding difficult
conversations, and coalition building.
Rod Newing writing in a Financial Times supplement special report says "If a collaboration is to be effective, each
party must recognise and respect the different culture of the other". And traditional development paths don't 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 in “Collaborative leadership: it’s good to talk,” four major key leadership traits that all highly
collaborative leaders share. They:

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 clear 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 a common vocabulary that everyone can comprehend for successful collaborations
Chantale Mailhot, Stephanie Gagnon, Anne Langley and Louis-Felix Binitte did 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".[8] 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. In this study, the case was made
that collaborative leadership has many benefits and is more practical than just one person solely having the role as the
leader.

The best thing a collaborative leader can do is to lead by example. They have to ‘walk the talk’, and be seen to model
the right behaviors. Leaders must show a willingness take risks, continually question their own ideas, and reward
others for their clear communication and valuable insights.[8]

Applications
The need for collaborative leadership is being recognised in more and more areas;

1. Public Private Partnerships

2. Global Supply Chains
3. Civic collaboration to solve complex community problems
4. On-line collaboration – Linux, Wikipedia etc.
5. Political collaboration to tackle global issues such as the credit crunch, 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.[9]
7. Education- According to Abdolhamid Arbabi and Vali Mehdinezhad collaborative leadership adds to cooperation
which allows for adaptability and consistency. It “increases organizational commitment and decreases employee
resistance to changes.” There is a significant correlation between the teachers self-efficiency and the principles
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.”[10]
8. Health Services- According to Markle-Reid, Dykeman, Ploeg, Stradiotto, Andrews, Bonomo, & 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 of the
fact that 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.[11]
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 organisations involved in large business partnerships would
have liked to have had more access to when setting up or running a partnership.[12]

See also
Business partnering
Collaboration
Shared leadership
Situational leadership
Strategic alliance
Wikinomics
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

References
1. Abdolhamid, A. (2016). School principals’ collaborative leadership style and relation it to teachers’ self-efficacy.
International Journal of Research Studies in Education, Vol 5, Iss 3, Pp 3-12 (2016), (3), 3.
doi:10.5861/ijrse.2015.1218.
2. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss (2003). Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management. Harvard Business
Review. Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 1-59139-323-X.
3. Chrislip, David (2002). The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook - A guide for citizens and civic leaders. Josey
Bass. ISBN 0-7879-5719-4.
4. Nick Lovegrove; Matthew Thomas (February 13, 2013). "Why the World Needs Tri-Sector Leaders" (https://hbr.or
g/2013/02/why-the-world-needs-tri-sector.html). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 22, 2016.
5. The InterSector Project (http://www.intersector.com/)
6. Rubin, Hank (2009). Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools.
Corwin Press.
7. Archer, David; Cameron, Alex (2008). Collaborative leadership – how to succeed in and interconnected world.
Butterworth Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-7506-8705-8.
8. "Collaborative leadership: it's good to talk.: ".Start Your Research" " (http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pd
fviewer?sid=50202a11-e515-462e-b046-643cdfe41aa7@sessionmgr103&vid=2&hid=114). eds.b.ebscohost.com.
Retrieved 2017-04-14.
9. GETHA-TAYLOR, H., & MORSE, R. S. (2013). COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT FOR LOCAL
GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS: EXPLORING COMPETENCIES AND PROGRAM IMPACT. Public Administration
Quarterly, (1). 71.
10. Arbabi, A., & Mehdinezhad, V. (2015). The relationship between the school principals' collaborative leadership
style and teachers' self-efficacy. Palestrica Of The Third Millennium Civilization & Sport, 16(2), 125-131.
11. Markle-Reid, M., Dykeman, C., Ploeg, J., Stradiotto, C. K., Andrews, A., Bonomo, S., & ... Kelly Stradiotto, C.
(2017). Collaborative leadership and the implementation of community-based fall prevention initiatives: a multiple
case study of public health practice within community groups. BMC Health Services Research, 171-12.
doi:10.1186/s12913-017-2089-3
12. "Business Partnerships Survey" (http://www.socia.co.uk/knowledge/Research.aspx). Ipsos MORI. 2007.
Retrieved 2008-12-01.
Further reading
Middleton, Julia (2007). Beyond Authority – Leadership in a changing world. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-230-
50001-3.
Tapscott, Don; Williams, Anthony D (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Atlantic
Books. ISBN 1-59184-193-3.
Reffo, Gerry; Wark, Valerie (2014). Leadership PQ: How Political Intelligence Sets Successful Leaders Apart.
Kogan Page. ISBN 9780749469603.
Echavarria, Martin, (2015). Enabling Collaboration – Achieving Success Through Strategic Alliances and
Partnerships. LID Publishing Inc. ISBN 9780986079337.

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This page was last edited on 21 October 2017, at 23:39.

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