Strong leadership isn’t about having all the answers or being autocratic in decision making, especially when leading to tackle inequalities or complex issues. It’s about being collaborative by design and proactively including partners, stakeholders, colleagues and communities from the outset. It means ensuring that the voices and lived experiences of a wider network of people are central to leader’s plans, processes, operations and delivery mechanisms.
“If you’re trying to fix the world alone, it’s an impossible challenge – but if you build a tribe where everyone is solving different parts of the problem, that’s how real change happens.”
Jaiden Corfield, Big Change
Being collaborative by design requires leaders to get comfortable with the concepts of:
- Distributed leadership. This requires leaders to step aside from being a sole leader to one that enables and empowers their team, other partners and the wider community to own and share the responsibility for decision-making. Find out more on our ‘Whole systems approach’ page.
- Co-design. Creating space and time for co-design requires getting more people involved in contributing towards developing solutions. The knowledge, skills and experience found in communities are often those that bring about the best solutions. This doesn’t need to be open-ended and works best within defined objectives.
- Organisational culture and values. Being open and confident in discussing opportunities for collaboration and providing a defined and psychologically safe space for people to contribute in a way that isn’t hierarchical or judgemental is important. The behaviour of leaders is critical in creating this culture. Role modelling the values of a collaborative organisation helps to underpin this.
- Purpose and goal setting. Having a clear purpose with goals or targets that are shared and understood internally and externally can help leaders to ensure there’s a shared commitment, and endeavour to achieve them. People are often more inspired and motivated to collaborate if they’re part of shaping the direction of travel.
Collaborative leadership isn’t about a single organisation dominating. It’s about creating and working in a space where people genuinely believe that a shared approach is more creative and effective than a leader, or group of people from a single organisation, working alone.
It relies on creating a common purpose, a safe space, trusted environment and solid, mutually respectful relationships that are built over time. Working in a collaborative way can be unifying. In getting to this point there may be occasions where conflict has to be surfaced so it can be dealt with before moving forwards. Leaders need to be prepared for being able to deal with this too.
Reflective questions
- What would it look and feel like to create psychologically safe conditions for collaborative work?
- What concerns do you have about sharing decision making? What negative outcomes might this incur and how could you mitigate these? What would the positives be? How might this challenge and enhance your personal leadership style?
- What would it take to create a collaborative leadership space with other leaders from within the community you work with? Who would be involved? How would you navigate the inevitable conflict that might surface as you were building trust together?
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