Collaborative leadership: working through people successfully
HAVING WORKED with many leaders from various organisations, I find the most challenging task for them is to work through people, particularly when collaboration has become a key feature required for better overall performance.
As each individual has unique characteristics, it’s rather difficult to understand them individually and ask them to collaborate. Hence, what do leaders require to be able to work through people successfully and let them work collaboratively?
To be a leader people want to work for – that is, a collaborative leader – one must combine the following four critical capabilities.
First, he or she must possess the ability to manage emotion and focus on the desired direction – “drive to achieve”.
Second, he or she should have “self-acceptance”, which is the ability to express feelings clearly when needed as well as being patient enough to keep things to oneself and stay focused on goals. This capability allows workers to accept the leader’s abilities and emotional changes, even his or her dark side.
We call the combination of drive to achieve and self-acceptance “managing oneself”, in which one needs to accept one’s assets and shortcomings and have a clear focus on what one wants to achieve.
Third is “valuing differences”, or having empathy, caring and being supportive towards people while demonstrating through action.
Last is the ability to communicate and utilise relationships to make people do what you ask or what you need – “relationship building”.
The latter two capabilities are grouped together as “managing relationships”. With these two elements, a person will be able to build trust-based relationships and an everybody-wins environment.
A leader who is equipped with the capability of both managing himself and managing relationships is a person who shows willingness to serve for the benefits of the wider organisation.
Moreover, this type of leader is open to accepting his own shortcomings while managing himself under pressure so as to remain approachable most of the time.
He would interact and exchange with others enough to know what he needs to support them.
In short, these are the qualities many are seeking in their leaders. In other words, these are the types of leader everyone want to work for. However, despite the fact that managing oneself and managing relationships are qualities that sound simple and common for most organisations and leaders, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all high-performance leaders automatically have them.
In fact, some leaders or organisations may even overlook these simple things.
Simply put, as long as your organisation still requires its staff to collaborate and cooperate for better results, the most fundamental element is for leaders to have the ability to make collaboration happen and make it sustainable.
You can start today by having a quick assessment to see what qualities and elements your leaders are still lacking to fill in that gap immediately for your future success.
Pacharin Ongarthachat is the principal consultant of APMGroup’s strategic people and culture transformation business unit. She can be reached at pacharin_o @apm.co.th or www.facebook.com/apmgroupthai.
