Collaborative Leadership. How to Succeed in an Interconnected World
Article Type: Recommended reading From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 1
David Archer and Alex Cameron,Butterworth-Heinemann,IBSN:978-0-7506-8705-8
The authors have specialized in collaborative leadership since the early twenty-first century when they were driven by business failures associated with the heroic model of leadership to set up a consultancy company, called Socia,with the mission to “make partnerships work.” While seeing some spectacular business collapses associated with poor leadership, the authors had also witnessed success stemming from leaders who were taking part in complex,multi-party collaborations. Their aim was to investigate successful collaborative leadership in order to build a model that could be applied to develop capability in different partnership situations.
This book is a result of their work and is designed to help leaders who have to get things done through the actions of people they do not directly control. It is divided into two sections. The first looks at the building blocks of setting up partnerships properly and getting them working, and the second looks at the experiences of individual leaders, analyses what makes for success or failure in leading a partnership and examines the skills needed to be a collaborative leader.
The authors have carried out interviews with real leaders and used case studies from a mixture of public and private sector examples. Throughout there are hints and tips, as well as checklists, models and roadmaps, all of which are designed to help apply the theory in practice. For example, there is a partnership roadmap chapter that sets out the four stages of a partnership; the authors provide a simple model for getting the essential partnership structure right; and eight metrics are discussed for measuring the success of collaboration.
With collaboration high on the skills agenda for future leaders, this would make a good book for leaders wishing to develop their skills and further their careers, and for HR teams looking to assess and build the levels of leadership collaboration capability in their organizations.
Sara NolanEditor, Strategic HR Review
