How can you support your employees effectively? What stance should you adopt to guide your teams? These are questions that you are certainly asking yourself as a manager, and which are probably taking up more space in your mind with the development of remote working, especially if you have always favoured a command and control management style. We want to support you in this reflection by suggesting a new path to explore: collaborative leadership.
What is collaborative leadership?
As you are certainly aware: there is more than one type of leadership! Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist who graduated from Harvard, distinguishes six types of leadership: directive, visionary, participative, leading, coach and collaborative. If collaborative leadership is a model in its own right, it is first and foremost through the emphasis on the collective side. It is no longer a question of imposing actions in order to move forward (“do what I ask you to do“), but rather of relying on collective intelligence. This implies adopting a particular posture in your management, by developing the following points:
How can you support your employees effectively? What stance should you adopt to guide your teams? These are questions that you are certainly asking yourself as a manager, and which are probably taking up more space in your mind with the development of remote working, especially if you have always favoured a command and control management style. We want to support you in this reflection by suggesting a new path to explore: collaborative leadership.
- Open-mindedness and curiosity. Collaborative leadership is about letting team members express their ideas freely. It therefore requires instilling within the team values that allow this mode of operation, such as listening and respect for divergent opinions.
- Humility. Unlike the directive leader, the collaborative leader does not manage by constraint and control. Rather, he plays the role of conductor of facilitator. In order to exercise collaborative leadership, you will therefore need to consider your collaborators as peers rather than subordinates.
- Trust. Collaborative leadership is not a question of controlling everything. To give your teams more freedom, you need to start by accepting the idea of “letting go” and believing in the group’s ability to produce results more autonomously.
- Emotional intelligence. Collaborative leadership is sometimes criticised for not valuing individuals sufficiently. In order to take full advantage of its benefits, it must be handled with empathy, taking into account both group dynamics and individual operating modes.
3 reasons to switch to collaborative leadership
The directive style often generates frustrations and struggles. In a professional world marked by the search for purpose, the traditional command and control management has lost its effectiveness. While this management style is doomed to disappear, the time has come to make room for a culture of agility: it is now a question of delegating responsibilities (and no longer tasks) in order to make teams autonomous.
1. More commitment within your teams
The collaborative model is changing the relationship you have with each of your employees, but also within the team. Exchanges give meaning to work and strengthen the feeling of belonging to the group, with the emergence of new ways of working (mutual aid, reduction of harmful behaviour in meetings, …). All this contributes to professional well-being and improves the motivation and involvement of each individual.
2. A benefit for the organisation as a whole
By improving the engagement of your teams, you increase productivity and limit the risks of turnover. But that’s not all! The benefits of collaborative leadership can also be seen throughout the organisation. By unleashing the collective intelligence of your teams, you give them the opportunity to innovate, to exploit new ideas or to find solutions to previously unsolved problems.
3. A leadership style more adapted to remote working
The sanitary crisis has led to a massive development of homeworking, and the trend may well become established over time. In practice, close monitoring of the actions carried out by the teams is therefore likely to become impossible. It is therefore better to adapt now to the new ways of working and to promote trust and dialogue!
How to transition to collaborative leadership?
Changing your leadership style takes time, and that’s perfectly normal! Here are our tips to start.
1. Gather and give everyone the means to understand their role
In the collaborative model, your role is to federate. At the collective level, this means setting the course and ensuring that the team stays together (for example, through rituals such as short daily meetings or convivial moments). At the individual level, it also means enabling everyone to find meaning in the common project and to express their potential.
2. Delegate results over tasks
A collaborative leader does not delegate tasks, but rather results to be achieved, which gives meaning to the teams involved.
Collaborative leadership can therefore take inspiration from the OKR method (Objective Key Results), in which objectives are set at the highest level of the company and then specifically defined by each team. Transparent communication on the objectives is required, as this common vision is likely to motivate your teams and help them to define their own objectives (team OKRs). In this process, you also need to ensure that you send a clear message: while they have more freedom, they are also responsible for their own performance.
We want to get to the point where, as Peter Drucker says: “Everyone sees himself as a manager and takes on the full weight of managerial responsibility: responsibility for his own work and his own team, for his contribution to the performance and results of the entire organisation, and for the social tasks of the professional community.”
Harvard Business Review
3. Foster sharing and informal discussions
All these practices will help you to establish a culture of cooperation, but also to be part of a continuous improvement process.
Would you like to find out more and develop your collaborative leadership, especially for your remote projects? Wemanity has designed offers to facilitate the work of your teams in a remote context. Find out more!
