Collaboration is Key to Great Leadership

There's a Swahili proverb that goes: “A boat doesn't go forward if each one is rowing their own way.”

I've spent 13 years of my career working with numerous cultures and my job entailed collaborating virtually and managing project teams on the ground. Collaboration is a major factor in ensuring success in every project and allow me to share with you key points that helped me through my journey.

1) Listen and seek to understand. Sometimes, our minds work faster than our lips and we tend to over think and say a lot of things especially when our emotions are high. We tend to be defensive and we neglect what is being said to us. So, Listen and seek to understand is very important especially in a virtual environment, where 55% of body language is not visible anymore. You tend to judge based on how you interpret the voice, the pitch, the tone. What more an email message? so another 25% is lost to interpretation of how you read it and how you will say it. But if you listen and try to understand, or check back your understanding of what was being said, it is easy to figure out the core of the message. Life would have been more simpler without judgement and biases, right?

2) Appreciate Diversity. They say, everyone has tapes. What are tapes? Any guess? Tapes are referred to as what we've been accustomed to, or the cultural background that each person may have. So in a global environment, you must learn to appreciate that reasonable people can and do differ from each other. And this is where RESPECT comes in. The need to understand why people react that way, or need to analyze where they're coming from during a discussion, what is their purpose or intent. You should not ignore the differences among team members, business partners, stakeholders or colleagues. This also comes with the opportunity that you can learn as much as you can from others. When the discussion goes haywire, this is also where you should focus on attacking the ISSUE/PROBLEM, not the person. Not the differences between the 2 of you.

3) Trust Each Other. In everything that we do here in the company, always keep in mind that there is good intent in what is being done. Being in a company where DOING THE RIGHT THING is a key value, you should always have that assurance that everyone you're working with has the best of intentions. Even if it seems that at first it may go against the original purpose/goal/objective. That is why seeking to understand is very important plus Trust. Don't keep it under the rug if you don't feel comfortable and there are apparent conflicts of interests. Trust your teammates- being a leader, you should be the first one to do so. Do not wait for them to give their trust first because they are just following your lead.

4) Lead by Example. When people see you are effective in collaborating with colleagues, business partners or what have you, they will emulate and look up to you as their motivation to practice this skill. If you need to get your hands dirty in solving an issue, you yourself need to exhibit the characteristics of being a good collaborator. You will be the go to person for them in times when they have difficulties dealing with business partners or colleagues. And it translates to a WIN - WIN solution for both of you.

5) Reward and Recognize. Being team leaders, you should be able to ensure you have time to recognize and reward the efforts of your team members who have shown collaboration- this would result to sustaining the good practice of collaboration. Praise individual effort and allow this motivate the whole team. After all who doesn't want to be recognized?
As a fitting end, a collaborative environment is essential for the team's success. This is very essential in bringing together the team and allowing them to feel that it is very motivating to work in your team because they see that collaboration is not just a simple leadership attribute that's being measured or considered every year in their development plan . It is something tangible, something that they can bring and leverage as they go and build their careers. With that, I leave you with another quote from Vince Lombardi : Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.