Collaborative Leadership

Recently I was asked what kind of a leader I was—did I lean more towards micromanaging or releasing? I didn’t really answer the question: “I’m a collaborative leader,” I said, “somewhere in the middle.”

So, what is a collaborative leader? A picture might come to mind of a person who brings everyone together and takes a vote, “majority rules” style, or worse, “we’re going to lock ourselves in this room until we all come out in full agreement.”

That’s not collaborative, and it’s not leadership for that matter. Collaboration is not the same thing as consensus. Collaboration reflects a team of people working hard together to create something of value. But a collaborative team still needs to be led.

Within collaborative leadership, there continues to be a point person who has the authority—and often the necessity—to call the plays, but that leader does not hold up somewhere while repeatedly making and delivering unilateral decisions from a vacuum. Sure there are times for Moses to come down from the mountain to deliver the commandments, but until we’ve spent a month in the direct presence of God and He has given us tablets of stone, let’s be careful about comparing ourselves to Moses.

A secure, collaborative leader wants to be surrounded with a team of the strongest, smartest, most competent people available, and then listen to what that team has to say, even when there is disagreement. The whole team works together to bring their wealth of experience, insight, and discernment to the table. In strategic decisions, every angle—positive and negative—will be explored so that its impact is well understood. While in some situations a vote is called for, more often, one leader must make a courageous decision based on all the facts at hand.

Collaborative leadership ensures that a decision is made with the best information available. Collaborative leadership encourages putting passion for the vision above the desires of an individual. Collaborative leaders aren’t interested in credit; they are interested in impact.

But how does that speak to the original question, “Where do you stand between micromanaging and laissez-faire leadership?” Well, when you first start out in leading an organization, you need to work closely with those you are directly leading to help them understand your heart and to make sure they grasp your values. The more time you spend collaborating with a ministry team that you know gets your heart, the easier it is to trust those team members to make the right decisions without your constant input.

But even then, direction is the leader’s ultimate responsibility. So when “releasing” goes south, that usually either means that the leader didn’t communicate the vision and values well enough or that the leader did communicate adequately, but isn’t willing to keep the team member accountable to uphold that visions and those values. Either way, while a collaborative leader always shares the credit, he or she will personally embrace the responsibility for failure, too.