Collaborative leadership

"Collaboration needs a different kind of leadership; it needs leaders who can safeguard the process, facilitate interaction and patiently deal with high levels of frustration"[2] In 2013, Harvard Business Review[3] authors Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas (co-founders of The InterSector Project[4]), explore the complex relationship between the business, government and social sectors as it relates to said sectors role in addressing society's most pressing challenges; issues such as managing resource constraints, controlling health care costs, training the twenty-first-century workforce, developing and implementing smart-grid and intelligent-urbanization technologies, and stabilizing financial systems to foster sustainable economic growth.

and answers "You are a collaborative leader once you have accepted responsibility for building - or helping to ensure the success of - a heterogeneous team to accomplish a shared purpose .

Echavarria cites the work of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, who developed the Operative Group method for working with groups, Wilfred Bion an influential British psychoanalyst, Kurt Lewin and others and describes the Operative Partnership Methodology for coaching teams to collaborate (an issue which is addressed vis-a-vis strategic alliances in said publication.

The authors identified six major, distinguishing characteristics:[3] Madeline Carter, writing for the Center for Effective Public Policy as part of a research project funded by the United States Department of Justice and State Justice Institute, defines five qualities of a collaborative leader:[9] Archer and Cameron list ten key lessons for successful collaborative leaders:[7] Rod Newing writing in a Financial Times supplement special report says "If a collaboration is to be effective, each party must recognise and respect the different cultures of the other".

Leaders must show a willingness take risks, continually question their own ideas, and reward others for their clear communication and valuable insights.

[10] The need for collaborative leadership is being recognised in more and more areas; An Ipsos MORI research report published in 2007 found that relationship management and collaborative leadership were the top two qualities or capabilities that Directors of organisations involved in large business partnerships would have liked to have had more access to when setting up or running a partnership.