I am grateful to belong to a community of business owners and professionals called the San Francisco Council of Business Advisors. The shared mission is to get to know each other and what we all do, and then as we live our lives and do our work we stay mindful of opportunities to make connections. There’s a lesson here for every organizational leader that has to have everyone in the same flow to deliver quality results. An article the July/August HBR titled Are You a Collaborative Leader? How great CEOs keep their teams connected (Ibarra & Hansen, 2011) calls communities such as the Council a culture of trust and innovation and it takes a certain type of thinking and leadership to make it emerge.
Formal and informal leaders of such collaborative environments are described as “connectors” in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. Connectors have a variety of ties to diverse social worlds. They have the ability to link people, ideas, and resources that normally, under their own devices, would not come together, making them critical facilitators of collaboration in any type of organization or community.
Ibarra and Hansen found that collaborative leaders require strong skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to speed decisions when teams “over-collaborate.”
When leaders can put all this together, the result is a style and environment that can leverage our hyperconnected world and harness the power of relationships. Leaders and professionals are working more collaboratively than ever before, not just inside their organizations but outside with customers, donors and funders (in the case of NFPs), suppliers, governments, universities, and, in some cases, former competitors. “Command and control” styles end up in silos that have a difficult time with this reality and managers that lead by consensus get bogged down bringing execution to a crawl.
So you can see why building a culture f trust and innovation is an exceptional skill. When I described the Council above, I used a key word that I believe is the “glue” – mindful. You can’t make it happen without a heightened sense of awareness. This is why the best leaders have coaches – to keep them mindful of what they do and how they are.
