Renowned change expert Robert Donaldson is the author of the best-selling book Collaborative Power Grab. Our acclaimed speakers have more than 40 years of careers in diverse industries and have established themselves as thought leaders. His organizational philosophy includes building teams and fostering collaboration within workspaces to achieve personal and organizational goals.
Robert is a strong believer in collaboration and has contributed his knowledge almost freely. Over the years, he has hosted numerous employee empowerment and leadership training sessions at several professional locations. Today, he helps organizations build collaborative cultures to maximize their growth potential.
We recently reached out to Robert to explore his thoughts on collaborative culture.
What is a culture of collaboration and what does collaboration in the workplace mean?
Robert Donaldson: A highly collaborative workplace is what it is because it is intentionally designed to create a workplace of shared values. Shared values are fostered by leaders/managers who give equal priority to collaboration skills as they do to technical skill sets. Shared values have proven that everyone becomes an expert, advances inclusion to reduce fear, shares control with those who have proven to handle responsibilities, and increases transparency to promote the common good. spread by. This is a lot less work than you might think.
The key here is that all human brains use the same basic operating structures. Creating a shared values environment reveals a long-embedded tendency for humans to collaborate with each other in deliberately designed shared values workplaces.
Workplace collaboration means a predictable and consistent culture. Highly effective interpersonal relationships are defined by a highly supportive work environment supported by training, excellent problem-solving training, superior innovation that drives productivity, and a highly supportive work environment that regularly and accurately recognizes superior performance. I hope.
In a culture of collaboration, poor leaders don’t survive long, and at the same time the right people start making their way into leadership. Everyone in the group is important and there is now a large mainstream of the working population who are energized to contribute to the success of the mission.
How would you describe a culture of healthy collaboration?
Robert Donaldson: A healthy culture of collaboration is where employees work together for personal growth while working with teams to bring their expertise back to the group. This is kind of a win-win situation for both workers and organizations. Employees communicate frequently, freely exchange information and share ideas for improving the organization.
A healthy culture of collaboration focuses solely on mission success, but does so only using a trusted, expert-led collective approach that maximizes the group’s chances of successfully leveraging long-term strategies. increase.
On the other hand, unhealthy cultures may also focus on mission success, but instead pursue that purpose at the expense of group culture. It is completely blind because it supports long-term goals using flawed, short-sighted strategies that actually undermine the .
It would be interesting if many group members were injured along the way and it wasn’t so tragic. It’s also a pain not to be able to get a .
Why is a collaborative culture important? What are the benefits for your organization?
Robert Donaldson: Arguably, the greatest benefit of a collaborative culture is that it creates greater mission success for the group while increasing job satisfaction for top talent. Other benefits include increased productivity based on innovation driven by group members. If you have a collaborative culture, your team will work together using a systematic process to solve problems.
A work culture that shares information, ensures work is prioritized according to mission (even across internal silos), and develops new ways to save time and money.
Over time, each person in the group gains a legitimate impression that they are part of something larger than themselves, while leaders and managers seek the most productive opportunities for improvement to avoid mission failure. ideas at the same time.
Therefore, leaders and managers weigh the strengths and weaknesses of business processes rather than approach them blindly. As a result, organizational growth rises while attracting and retaining top talent while meeting all mission-related metrics.
What are the key elements of collaboration?
Robert Donaldson: Collaboration comprehensively covers eight performance categories: Mission, Culture, Effective Interpersonal Relationships, Quality Communication, Technical Competence, Productivity, Problem Solving, and Continuous Improvement.
By training leaders/managers to use highly effective behaviors, followers in groups are more likely to exhibit interactive communication, shared responsibility, mutual trust, and independent mission center decision-making. Become. Giving leaders and managers specific behaviors encourages group members to show cooperation, while reducing toxic behaviors within the group lowers fear generation and encourages everyone to be rational, logical, and intelligent. Ethical decision making increases.
Aside from the moral imperative of rational, logical, and ethical decision-making, it is also coincidental that the leader/manager’s group mission success and the follower’s job satisfaction are enhanced simultaneously.
Finally, if leadership is creating collaborative priorities to distribute power only to the most cooperative current and future leaders and to create experts among the general population at large, leaders and managers should: Administrative tasks can now be delegated downward to the organization, leaving more time for leadership responsibilities. With more time to lead, leaders and her managers are able to uphold a culture aimed at simultaneously creating mission success and job satisfaction.
I know I use comparisons of success activities in the parallel interdependencies of mission success and job satisfaction quite a bit. I hope my point gets across.
How do you build a collaborative culture in your workplace?
Robert Donaldson:
1. Create collaborative priorities
In collaboration groups, the actual act of collaboration is as important as the technical skills of each person. In the past (and still in most groups today), good technical skills were the primary way new leaders/managers were promoted out of the worker pool. This is very important. Hiring a leader/manager who has a combination of collaborative and technical skill sets makes for an unbeatable combination.
By prioritizing collaboration as a way for people to progress within an organization, you start alienating people who don’t value collaboration. By prioritizing joint action, leaders and managers reduce the amount of fear present in the group by promoting inclusion, delegating control, and increasing openness. When leaders and managers do this, group members move away from the workplace mental toolbox of flight, struggle, and freeze and replace it with a rational, logical, and ethical workplace mental toolbox.
By creating collaborative priorities, you attract and retain top talent, and those who want to focus solely on their personal agenda simply leave.
remove: If you have enough time, there are many people who just want to cooperate. Imagine.
2. Create an expert
In a collaborative work environment, leaders and managers want to enhance each member’s independent, mission-focused decision-making. This allows for high levels of job satisfaction and mission-focused productivity at the same time. Training is designed to generate expert-level knowledge of each person’s set of skills, including technical skills, problem-solving skills, and collaboration skills.
Highly cooperative groups believe that the world is inherently undertrained, and they solve that problem by putting a lot of effort into training. When people are trained to a professional level, they make better decisions, reducing the burden of direct oversight of leadership while at the same time enabling group members to make highly satisfying and effective autonomous decisions. It feels good to have the autonomy to make decisions and the skills necessary to make the right decisions.
By training to expert levels and empowering them by delegating administrative tasks to newly developed professionals, leaders-managers can manage less and lead more.
remove: By creating an expert, instead of watching bumper cars crash at a country fair, everyone in the group became a Formula 1 race car.
3. More leads, less administration
Combining the benefits of joint priority creation and expert creation, leaders/managers have less to manage and more time to lead.
Prioritize collaboration and combine it with the creation of experts within your group, and the problems that used to appear on your desk will disappear. In groups that do not have a collaborative spirit, the leader/manager increases direct oversight of the team below to ensure that the output the team is producing meets the requirements of senior management. It is often necessary. Taking simple steps to increase the expertise of group members under the lead manager and to delegate more administrative tasks to new professionals can significantly reduce the amount of time spent in direct supervision, making the lead manager more efficient. You can lead more and manage less. .
When the leader/manager is too busy managing to lead them, it’s a rudderless ship. Hmm. As the best performers leave, the amount of direct oversight to get mission-focused output from the underperforming teams skyrockets.
Bad news for everyone involved.
remove: I don’t care how happy you are while you are busy performing administrative duties. New experts manage their tasks well with proper training and mentoring. So now you can get out there and lead.
Conclusion
When leaders and managers prioritize collaboration, people can move away from fight, flight, and freeze to a logical, rational, and ethical approach. By downplaying personal agendas, group members begin to realize something very satisfying for all human beings. In other words, you are part of something bigger than yourself.
When leaders/managers give each group member a high level of training and empower them to a professional level, these professionals become more autonomous, make mission-focused independent decisions, and work together with performance. satisfaction soars. Combined individual performance improvements have a dramatic positive impact on mission success.
When leaders/managers reduce the vast amount of direct supervision they spend on administrative tasks and lead more, group performance improves dramatically like never before.
media contact
Company name: Collaborative Strategies Consulting Inc.
Contact person: Robert M Donaldson
Live Response Service: 1 (866) 773-4473
Website: www.collaborativepowergrab.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-donaldson-b121b867/
