Leadership Trends 2024
Collaboration involves pushing beyond your typical day-to-day interactions
If collaboration has become a critical leadership skill – what’s next?
Collaboration is not simply a synonym for teamwork.
They mean different things, yet all too often the concepts are used interchangeably. Gaining the power of teamwork while losing the impact of true collaboration.
What is the difference?
Rather than the act of collaboration, think about the people involved.
What do collaborators do?
In times of war they are often known for collaborating with the enemy.
Which means leading true collaboration involves crossing traditional boundaries. Not just working with your usual team. But expanding your horizons to work more closely with others you normally would not.
Advancing beyond running focus groups with customers. Instead working alongside them in their environment to explore and co-create the future. Not just meeting with other divisions within your organisation but redesigning the way you work to co-locate and shift dynamics. Doing more than just partnering with external stakeholders by exploring the possibilities of ethical co-opetition.
While teamwork suggests a group of people with common goals and related skills working together, collaboration implies a group with differing priorities and areas of expertise working together. As a result collaboration involves pushing beyond your typical day-to-day interactions – which is why collaborators cross established boundaries.
Ultimately collaboration is something that is very easy to agree with, yet very difficult to make happen in practice.
It makes a lot of sense to broaden the scope of our meetings and discussions outside of the ordinary. Which then by definition means it requires extraordinary effort.
To arrive at extraordinary results.
Collaboratively.
If collaboration has become a critical leadership skill – what’s next?
Join us online for Leadership Trends 2024 at next month’s free Futurist Hour on 2 October