The Collaborative Leader

In The Collaborative Leader, L. Michael Hall and Ian McDermott answer key questions about leadership. What is collaboration? How does it relate to leadership? How do you do it effectively? How do you pull people together, inspire them with a meaningful vision, and organise them so that a team spirit emerges and peak performance is achieved?

The Collaborative Leader is a practical guide to collaborating with others and leading collaboratively. That means learning how to win the hearts and minds of those who we lead. Packed with practical and immediate action points, the book will show you how to turn around a non-collaborative group or environment immediately. You will find assessment questions throughout, step-by-step processes on collaboration, and an invitation to action at the end of each chapter: a personal challenge to step up to the collaborative level of leadership. Learn the core competencies that facilitate a healthy, joyful, and productive collaboration.

The foundation of collaborative leadership is self-collaboration. The leader who cannot effectively collaborate cannot effectively lead. If you are to walk your talk, you need to demonstrate collaborative skills yourself, and this book will show you the ‘how to’s’ for developing the critical success elements of leadership. The best collaborators are those who have lots of fun collaborating. The goal can be serious. The collaboration can be fun. Learn how it’s possible by understanding the structure and processes of collaboration.

Whether you’re responsible for team or organisational development, you’ll find plenty here to inspire you to transform your leadership into collaborative leadership.

Chapters include:

Part I: The Foundations of Collaborative Leadership—Leading the Call

1. The Vision—Why Bother?

2. The Mirror—Where Are You?

3. What Is a Collaborative Leader?

4. Challenges To Collaborative Leadership

Part II: Collaborative Leadership—The How To

5. The Collaborative Pathway—How Do We Get There?

6. Calling For and Inspiring Collaboration—Inviting Others

7. Choosing To Collaborate—Making the Decision

8. Creating a Culture of Collaboration—Collaboration Inside Out

9. Combining Differences For Synergy—Welcoming and Integrating

10. Integrating Self and Others—The Collaborative Quadrants

11. Believing In Collaboration

12 The Principles of Collaboration

13. The Bigger Game of Collaboration

14. The States of Collaboration

15. The Call To Be a Collaborative Leader

Part III: Collaborative Leadership Challenges—There Be Dragons!

16. How Collaborations Can Go Wrong

17. Pseudo-Collaboration—The Talk Without the Walk

18. Collaboration In Crisis