Four Roles for Collaborative Leadership

Traditional Management Advice is Pretty Consistent 

People have been thinking about leadership for basically all of human history.  We all grow up with examples of leadership in our homes, schools, and communities that imprint images in our minds. For the last several decades academics, business school professors and the training industrial complex have been churning out lots of leadership models and management advice…. So we have all of that swirling around in there too. 

From Frederick Taylor, to John Kotter, to probably your high school principal, a lot of the mainstream traditional idea of leadership boils down to this:

The traditional leader is: 

The decider, who knows what to do 

• The persuader who convinces everyone to do it 

• The director who tells them how to do it 

• And the enforcer, who makes sure they do it 

If we’re honest, that’s the narrative a lot of have deep in our head about corporate leadership: The leader sees the problem that others don’t. They set the strategy. They create buy-in and alignment. There are sure to be project plans and timelines. The leader makes sure everybody knows exactly what they are supposed to do. They remind everybody repeatedly to do it and they have a dashboard of key indicators to see if it’s being done.  

Except It Often Doesn’t Work 

There are times where traditional leadership works, but it is actually quite limited. Organizations have had access to classic management advice for decades. So, they’ve racked up lots of practice with traditional management techniques. But the stats on the failure rates of corporate leadership are still pretty bad. 

Depending who you ask and how you ask it, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of major initiatives don’t meet their goals. By some recent indicators, that number is only getting worse. Think about your own organization; how many stalled or failed initiatives have you witnessed or even been part of? If our traditional ideas about leadership are right, then why don’t they work all the time? 

The World Has Changed 

For one thing, we’re not living in the industrial revolution anymore.  In today’s world, complexity is high: 

• You can’t know everything 

• You can’t plan everything 

• You can’t predict everything 

That means no single leader can possibly see all the issues and dictate everything that needs to be done.

Plus, formal authority is limited in most organizations today.  In the old days, a manager might have had direct control over everything they needed to deliver on their goals.  It’s rarely that way anymore.   

• You rely on people who don’t report to you 

• You use processes that you don’t own 

• You need resources that aren’t in your budget 

• Even people who do report to you don’t always do what you ask of them  

The Challenges Have Changed 

If you go back and really look at that classic management stuff, you’ll see there are some key assumptions that are subtly baked into most of it, about the kinds of work people are taking on: 

1. Defined Initiatives:  Challenges are generally presented as a defined initiative. It may be complex, but ultimately there is some particular thing or limited set of things that need to get done. 

2. Known Solutions:  It’s generally assumed that the right thing to do is known, or at least knowable, in advance. We may have some questions to answer and options to choose from, but we can get to a right answer with a little work. 

3. Steady State A to B:  The assumption is usually that we’re moving from one stable situation, through a relatively brief transition, and arriving at a new stable state of affairs. 

4. Top-Down:  In the classic view, leadership is usually something that the leader does to or for people below.  There’s a lot of time spent on things like driving alignment down through the organization or creating “followership.” 

5. Process, Structure, System:  Classic management advice assumes the leader needs to focus much of their time on altering organizational processes, structures, and systems. 

6. Now think about the biggest challenges facing your business today.  

• Do they fit that set of classic assumptions? 

• Does any single person have all the answers? 

• Is traditional leadership going to be enough? 

You’re Facing Big Challenges  

When we look at the biggest problems and opportunities of most companies today, the old assumptions don't really fit: 

• Broad Scope: Rather than a simple defined initiative, we’re talking about issues with broad and ambiguous implications for the business. 

• Uncertain Challenges: We don’t have established solutions to pick from. In fact, we don’t even have a complete handle on the problem yet. 

• Continuous Waves: Nor do we have the luxury of those long steady-states punctuated by short periods of change. Conditions keep evolving at a rate where we have to move from one challenge to the next. If we get a brief breather now and then, we consider ourselves lucky. 

• Multi-Directional: Increasingly, we are responding to forces outside the organization, and our response to those challenges is being sparked by people at various levels and in unexpected places inside the organization. 

• People and Culture: Of course, we need new processes and systems from time to time, but the bigger challenge is how we are going to develop our people and evolve our culture to the place we need them to be. 

Companies today are coping with new technologies that are reshaping industries; generational trends that are yielding a new workforce and a new customer base; even environmental changes that carry radical implications for established sectors. 

If you’re a services firm trying to become a leader in AI, you can’t know everything that entails, because the field is advancing quickly, and nobody has done it before. If you’re a company that needs to tap a new and diverse employee base in order to grow, you’re looking at more than just some new hiring processes - you need to evolve your culture. If you’re a legacy company attempting digital transformation, you’d better not count on a savior CEO with all the answers. You’ll be waiting a long time. 

You Need Impact-Focused Leadership 

Great leaders bring people together to harness the collective genius of the organization and then unleash it on your biggest challenges. They work with others to get important work done. They involve others in providing leadership to the organization. In a word, they collaborate to make an impact. 

In leadership situations, we think about people making an impact through the lens of four roles:

Leader as Sense-Maker 

Sense-making is about helping others make meaning of what’s going in the world. Leaders first need to have a  broad view of what’s happening, so they can make sense of it themselves. Unfortunately, our view tends to get narrower as we go higher in our organizations. We have our go-to sources of information. Other people filter and interpret things based on what they think we want to hear. It can take some effort to broaden our view: seeking out perspectives from new people and gleaning insights from new sources of data. 

Once we’re able to form a point-of-view, then impactful leaders share their insights with others in a way that is meaningful. So, framing the challenges facing the business is incredibly important. That’s not done with reams of data and statistics alone. For thousands of years, people have made sense of their world through stories and metaphors. The most compelling leaders use a variety of communication tools to help others make sense of what’s going on and find their place in the story. 

If you look at great historical leaders, this is what some of the most successful did to galvanize people to meet challenges of the day. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” were key to his ability to implement the New Deal. He was able to break down economic concepts and policy decisions into terms and metaphors the average person could relate to. You don’t need to be FDR, but you do need to get good at framing the situation your organization faces if you want to forge your own new deal. 

Leader as Connector 

Impactful leaders bring people together to build a complete understanding of the challenge and work out the best solutions for the business. That may certainly mean bringing specific individuals together, but as the scale of challenges grows, it increasingly means bringing different groups together.  

But it’s not enough to just put people in the same room for some kumbaya moment– only to have them go back and do everything the same way they did before. Creating new opportunities requires redefining the relationships between those groups. In many organizations, working relationships are defined by a process. Here are my deliverables, here are yours. Too often, people feel responsible to the process, but not to each other, or about the larger outcome. Specific processes become brittle as conditions change, but commitments have staying power. 

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. But he didn’t become President of South Africa until four years later. He spent those years working to bring together the various parties to create democratic elections and a new constitution. Just think of the incredibly charged environment he was working in and the depths of the divisions and tensions. If that’s not bringing different groups together and building new commitments, I don’t know what is. You and I don’t have to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but we can all learn something about the power of connecting people to achieve great things. 

Leader as Challenger 

Part of a collaborative leader’s role is to challenge the status quo. It’s frequently the case that  some things are not working.  If problems are going to block progress, it’s a leader’s job to address that, not sweep it under the rug. Talking about risk and conflict isn't comfortable and people don’t like it, but it’s what you sign up for when you step up to lead. 

Challenging people isn’t only about surfacing problems.  It’s also about tapping into aspiration and shared purpose. Leaders challenge the organization to do better.  They connect people’s work to achieving those shared aspirations and tap into that motivation and energy. They challenge people to grow and develop. 

Civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr., exemplify the leader as challenger. Dr. King had no formal authority to dictate national policy, but he sparked tremendous change by forcing a national conversation about the problem of racism. Marches, protests, and sit-ins shook things up, bringing attention to injustice. We rightly remember the aspirational parts of his famous speeches, but they were at least as much about calling out the very real problems of the day. You and I will never be MLK, but we can have the courage to force conversations about tough issues in our organizations and challenge old ideas and practices that deserve to be left behind.

Leader as Partner 

A lot of traditional leadership stuff talks about people as though they are lifeless blobs that you need to "inspire and motivate"; that they won’t do anything unless you “light a fire under them”… all that kind of stuff. That’s usually not the case. Most people want to come to work and do a good job. They are full of their own motivations to achieve, to develop their career, to provide for their families, and so on. But people can’t do everything on their own.   

Impactful leaders are partners who work with others to achieve shared success.  Rather than just demanding from subordinates, they commit to what they will do to help. They give others the support they need to do great work. Sometimes that means providing counsel or rolling up your sleeves and literally doing the work together.  Other times it may mean providing access to resources or removing barriers and obstacles that stand in their way.  

Putting It All Together 

Providing Impactful Leadership is a big ask, but it’s worth it. The people who can do it will always be in high demand and see their careers advance. The companies with collaboration as an organizational capability will have huge advantage in the marketplace. Anyone who tells you there’s an easy answer is lying to you. It will take time and a lot of concerted effort.  
Focusing on these four roles for impactful leadership is a great place to start. 

-Al Preble

Founder, CLG