To try and answer the challenge, the article featured excerpts from the book The Collaboration Imperative - Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organisation's True Potential by Cisco executives Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese, which outlines 4 keys behaviours that leaders must exhibit to support and enhance collaboration
In order to become a chief catalyst for collaboration, you will have to model behaviours that embody the way you'd like your employees to work. For 150 years, corporations, governments and militaries were built for up-and-down leadership, with incentives and rewards that discouraged cross-organisational thinking, and in many cases actually created or encouraged internal competition. Your challenge is to develop and model behaviours required to inspire people and teams to genuinely break through organisational silos and make collaboration a competitive advantage. In our experience, both inside Cisco and with our customers, highly collaborative leaders share 4 leadership traits. They,
- Focus on authentic leadership and eschew passive aggressiveness
- Relentlessly pursue transparent decision making
- View resources as instruments of action, not as possessions
- Codify the relationship between decision rights, accountability and rewards
Each of
these traits are familiar from the work that FranklinCovey does with clients,
and a key focus for us is developing not just the skillsets but also the
mindsets which enable them.
For example, the authors define authentic leadership as a willingness to follow through on commitments and passive aggressiveness as the nuanced behaviour of undermining others. The way in which FranklinCovey develop these characteristics is to focus on building Integrity as one of four cores of credibility and through defining, then enabling, 13 behaviours of high trust leaders.
When it comes to transparent decision making, the authors advocate that leaders should make it clear how they go about navigating tricky decisions, and this aligns closely with FranklinCovey's emphasis on a Principle-Based approach and ensuring people connect with their intent, so this is perceived correctly by others. The authors also talk about fighting the instinct to make it personal, recognising that there can be different approaches to making a decision. Here, FranklinCovey helps people to develop a mindset whereby they value this diversity of perspective and to build on this with skills which allow them to be less reactive, to leave their ego at the door and to meet pushback with enquiry.
When they talk about viewing resources as instruments of action, not possessions, the authors refer to suboptimal situations where resources are stockpiled and not shared rather than used optimally. While organisational systems. processes and incentives can have an impact here, our experience is that the biggest breakthrough in this area can come when a leader changes their mindset from one of 'scarcity' to one of 'abundance', and this is a specific focus for FranklinCovey.
Finally, the authors recommend codifying the relationship between decision rights, accountability and rewards, building a common vocabulary and reinforcing cultural norms. The key vocabulary FranklinCovey uses to encourage collaboration is based around 'win-win thinking' and to codify the component parts of this, we use a 'win-win agreement' format which defines desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability and consequences as they relate to any given colleague or client scenario.
For example, the authors define authentic leadership as a willingness to follow through on commitments and passive aggressiveness as the nuanced behaviour of undermining others. The way in which FranklinCovey develop these characteristics is to focus on building Integrity as one of four cores of credibility and through defining, then enabling, 13 behaviours of high trust leaders.
When it comes to transparent decision making, the authors advocate that leaders should make it clear how they go about navigating tricky decisions, and this aligns closely with FranklinCovey's emphasis on a Principle-Based approach and ensuring people connect with their intent, so this is perceived correctly by others. The authors also talk about fighting the instinct to make it personal, recognising that there can be different approaches to making a decision. Here, FranklinCovey helps people to develop a mindset whereby they value this diversity of perspective and to build on this with skills which allow them to be less reactive, to leave their ego at the door and to meet pushback with enquiry.
When they talk about viewing resources as instruments of action, not possessions, the authors refer to suboptimal situations where resources are stockpiled and not shared rather than used optimally. While organisational systems. processes and incentives can have an impact here, our experience is that the biggest breakthrough in this area can come when a leader changes their mindset from one of 'scarcity' to one of 'abundance', and this is a specific focus for FranklinCovey.
Finally, the authors recommend codifying the relationship between decision rights, accountability and rewards, building a common vocabulary and reinforcing cultural norms. The key vocabulary FranklinCovey uses to encourage collaboration is based around 'win-win thinking' and to codify the component parts of this, we use a 'win-win agreement' format which defines desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability and consequences as they relate to any given colleague or client scenario.
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