Freeing Collaborative Genius

Freeing Collaborative Genius. An Imperative for Executive Leaders Overview

At its best, collaboration has a revolutionary impact on dramatically improving business outcomes. Nevertheless, it is poorly leveraged within organizations and frequently not adopted as a business proposition. This paper demonstrates how leaders can embed collaboration as a business proposition and utilize a collaborative orientation to create a growth mindset and innovative culture.
At the heart of collaborative leadership is the mechanism to shape where the mindsets, attributes, emotions, behaviors, skills, and knowledge are all freed and deployed to deliver on what the business needs to succeed. Executed well, collaborative leaders achieve four key outcomes.
• Strong alignment regarding what’s truly important to success at the enterprise, team or individual performance
• Highly engaged members motivated to contribute to collaborative genius.
• Access to the diverse capability mix required to succeed
• A cultural characterized by deep ownership and accountability
The roadmap to freeing collaborative genius has seven key building blocks. Six of the seven blocks as a pre-requisite belong fairly and squarely at the level of executive leadership. These blocks include:
1. Building a coalition aligned around a meaningful purpose
2. Achieving the level of trust that will enable psychological safety, risk-taking and conversations that get to the heart of the matter
3. Leveraging the infinite forms of diversity that enable ‘genius’ within groups and teams
4. Communicating timely, quality information leading in turn to more effective problem-solving.
5. Building a robust problem-solving culture
6. Celebration of success to maintain buoyancy and energy
7. Creating the multiplier effective within the organization

1. Aligning around the Unique Value Proposition of the Leadership Team

This first building block enables executive or sponsoring leadership teams to align on their unique value proposition as one team and on their unique role in facilitating a culture of ownership, accountability, and responsibility. Distinct from clarifying organizational purpose or organizational strategy, this process refers to the leadership team galvanizing around their role in shaping the culture of the organization to deliver on organizational strategy. With this fundamental anchor, executive leadership teams can more successfully leverage the ‘leadership, culture performance equation.’
Each leadership team must contribute to and shape their unique value proposition so that there is strong alignment and ownership.
Therefore, teams need the space to grapple around pivotal questions, including:
• Why (beyond being a collection of functional leaders) this leadership team exists
• Who the leadership team serves, and how they benefit?
• Critical non-functional capabilities the leadership team needs to bring to the table
• The aspects that give urgency to the work of the leadership team
• The legacy the leadership team seeks to leave behind.

It is quite common for leadership teams not to have their clear compelling why articulated and shared. This lack of clarity leads to
• Diverse assumptions
• Excess noise in the system
• Conflict
• Leaders valuing different work and different outcomes
• Diluted impact

2. Agreeing Priorities for Focus

With alignment regarding the leadership team’s unique value proposition, leaders can explore ‘the how’ or the critical strategic enablers it must focus upon to deliver on its value proposition. Enablers will be different for every leadership team. Still, they may include such elements as building culture, providing direction, leading innovation, increasing accountability, driving growth, strengthening capability, and influencing the agenda.
With the articulation of their strategic enablers, leadership teams need to agree and communicate how they will operationalize their strategic enablers over 90, 180, and 360 days and how each person will own and contribute their achievement.

3. Deepening Team Trust and Shaping Team Culture

Team trust is fundamental to delivering on the team’s value proposition and to creating a positive organization-wide impact. In this building block, the leadership team works on building contractual trust, articulates shared values, and signs up to granular behaviors and explicitly agree to fundamental ways of working. In effect, team members grapple with the pivotal question: how must we operate as a team if we are to deliver on our value proposition?
As such, leadership teams take ownership of how they design and author their own team culture. How they approach this task has a profound impact.

4. My Commitment and Contribution to the Leadership Team

Beyond contracting, effective leadership teams pay attention to other aspects of team trust. These include disclosure, creating an environment of safety and becoming nimble in seeking, receiving, and providing feedback
Feedback and openness are two practices that rapidly deepen trust and accelerate team effectiveness, and as such high performing leadership teams regularly engage in both practices. Working on this building block provides a space whereby leadership teams engage in deeper ‘authentic dialogue’ that facilitates trust and creates a space for deeper, more transformational collaboration.
When team members freely share their unique contribution to the team (role, diverse skillsets, experience, life path, profile, capabilities, values, drivers, and beliefs), they create new openings, new possibilities for dialogue and a better ability for the team to draw upon its strength and deliver its value proposition. As the team grows in its trust base, there can also be a valuable dialogue about individual and collective areas for growth and how the team can support individuals and themselves to contribute optimally.

5. Collaboration in Practice

Leadership teams who build such a collaborative ecosystem influence a set of performance-related cultural drivers:
• Alignment around strategic imperatives
• Freeing ‘the x-factor.’
• Capability to deliver on strategic goals
• Personal and team accountability

The capabilities required in a hierarchal ecosystem are different from those needed for a collaborative one. They include the ability to create resonance for others and to connect purpose with others’ currency, building a platform of trust and psychological safety, truly leveraging difference and dissonance, facilitating the investment of others, embedding a problem-solving orientation that pushes boundaries and a culture of celebration.
In this building block, leadership teams learn how to positively influence the four cultural drivers of alignment, engagement, capability, and accountability by adopting a collaborative approach to working together. Leaders require developed influencing characteristics and the mindsets, attributes, and behaviors to facilitate high-value dialogue, where they can learn into versus avoid dissonance.

6. Ongoing Individualised Development

Not only do high performing teams attend to group development, but individuals within the team also develop themselves as individuals.
Whether this is about scaling strengths, minimizing the impact of derailers, or developing new leadership muscles, the growth of each team member is pivotal to team success.