Overcome Obstacles Through Collaboration
In a prior post, I gave a brief overview of the collaborative Participative leadership style. I covered a few ways to increase your collaboration within your own team.
Today, I want to pick up the discussion around successfully adopting the Participative leadership method by identifying and overcoming obstacles you may encounter.
1. Clarify and communicate your vision. Lead your team through inspiration and motivation while reducing confusion. This becomes more important as you expect your team members to create and commit to greater contributions. By clarifying your vision, you set a clear mission that will resonate to their emotions. Your vision must be in alignment to the organization’s core values or you will risk conflict in how they approach deliverables. This is not a one-and-done task either; regularly reflect and communication your message through team meetings, 1:1s and ad-hoc discussions to ensure it is top of mind.
2. Teach and mentor the skills you want to see, specifically around communication. Because collaboration requires so much focus on open and honest discussions, your team may need to level up their own communication styles and methods. I find that the topics of ‘active listening’ and ‘constructive feedback’ are evergreen agenda items that will always be applicable to teams. Recognize your personal strengths and offer training or mentoring. Understand your personal areas of opportunity and pursue training for yourself and your team. Share tips, new advice you find, and above all make these educational moments as positive as possible.
3. Anticipate delays in active development. Because you are front-loading discussions within your team, actually pressing ‘start’ on active development may feel like it’s lagging behind your ideal timeline. Through your discussions, you are likely negating future pitfalls and errors so your throughput will likely be faster and more efficient. If you support a live product, you may need to develop a separate process for handling sensitive or high priority issues (for example, outages or client issues).
4. Create the optimal environment for discussions by providing structure to meetings. Create and share agenda ahead of meetings so that attendees are prepared. Communicate the purpose of the meeting and hold attendees accountable for sticking to the subject.
5. This may be a sticky subject but- set boundaries on where and when your team collaborates and influences decisions. Collaboration works best when the participants have a minimum level of expertise or familiarity with the subject. IF you are overseeing multiple projects or issues, you may need to limit input on some matters to those who can contribute without a lot of education on the matter.
6. Prepare for differing opinions before, during, and after a path is decided upon. Once a decision has been made, you will likely have team members who believed that another option is better. Clarify and communicate to every team member that they need to ‘disagree and commit’ to the final decision. If your team is not fully supportive of the vision, they will not deliver their best results.
7. Lastly, be prepared to make the final decision. As the leader, there will be times when you will need to be decisive and cast the vote that shapes the team’s direction. As always, you are responsible for resolving sensitive issues that impact your team.
With time, practice, and a positive attitude you can develop your skills as a leader that incorporates your team’s input and participation. If you want to discuss in depth how you can best deploy Participative leadership into your own organization, please reach out to me!