Collaborations can drain your resources or create access to unparalleled capacity – 4 key capabilities can make the difference.
By Kris Cummings & Suhanya Ketheeswaran
The promise of collaboration is that it can help fuel your mission in ways that might not otherwise be possible. But you need 4 key capabilities to truly leverage this potential:
- Shared Leadership
- Strategy Management
- Distributed Action
- Mindset for Change
In this article we’ll break down what these capabilities are and how they can help your collaborative tap into the capacity and agility of all of the people at the table, ultimately driving the big, shared benefits we all want.
Shared Leadership
Shared leadership is the practice of setting a collective purpose and making decisions together. To do this, you and your collaborators want to arrive at a common agreement on:
- The purpose you’re working towards
- What success will look like
- The boundaries you’re agreeing to work within
It’s time-consuming to keep negotiating and building consensus. It’s far more productive to define upfront what you’re going to work on as a network and the approach you plan to take.
It also helps to co-create, co-learn, and avoid competing over who has the right idea. Strive for an exchange where you build on each person’s ideas.
Strategy Management
Strategy management is a process of:
- continually assessing whether each of your strategies are performing well in the environment; and
- determining which strategies can continue to function status quo, which need to be adapted, which need to be set aside or replaced, and which ones need to be newly developed to fill a gap.
Sometimes “change” can seem all or nothing – either incremental and slow, or all-encompassing and dangerous. Strategy management straddles these perspectives. It offers a method to channel your collaborative’s attention and effort to where it’s most needed. As a result, you’re only changing the few things that need an overhaul, while keeping or tweaking the things that work.
Once you decide the 2-3 strategies you’ll take on for transformational change, identify set points along the way where you can hit pause, take stock, and adjust before continuing.
Distributed Action
Distributed action is about sharing the work of implementing the strategies you’ve agreed upon on as a network. Trusting and accessing the strengths and agility of all the people at the table multiplies each organization’s capacity for delivering results. It also makes clear what exactly each person is contributing to the work of the whole so that each organization has clarity on its actions.
You can strive for a match between tasks and the interests of individual leaders, their skills sets, and the performance of their organizations. Distribute responsibility based on what people are good at and then let them take the work away – this maximizes the capacity of the whole by leveraging the skills of each partner fully.
Mindset for Change
A mindset for change is about taking on a perspective that sees a changing environment as an opportunity for better performance on your mission. It enables you to shift roles, resources, how your organization is structured, or whatever else needs to adapt in order to respond to a change in your environment and still continue producing benefits for your stakeholders.
A mindset for change allows you to continually define relevance and success for your organization or collaborative. You can shift away from preserving roles and budgets and structures, and instead focus on sustaining your performance and ability to produce results.
Rather than avoiding or trying to contain changes in your environment, consider how those same changes might be an opening to adapt or try something new.
Collaborations can create unparalleled results – with the right capabilities in place
Shared leadership, strategy management, distributed action, and a mindset for change can help unlock the power of collaboration. Together, they can give your collaborative or network the breadth and capacity to keep up with not only a rapidly changing environment, but also the complexity of issues you’re working to address. And importantly, the capacity and results of a stronger network enable each member to better serve their individual missions – something of particular value in an austerity environment.
Get in touch with DO/ABLE!
We love helping networks tap into their shared capacity to get things done. If you’d like to chat about how DO/ABLE can support you and your collaborative, please get in touch with us here.
