In the Second World War a ‘collaborator’ was a negative phrase – it meant someone who was actively working with the occupying forces. As countries were liberated the collaborators faced savage beatings, ostracism and sometimes worse.

Now the message is we need more collaborators. It has always been the case that organisations wanted people to follow their vision and deliver their goals. But there is a deeper demand now – silo mentalities are breaking down and corporate working is becoming increasingly important. We are more dependent on each other for shared information, insights and the effective delivery of outcomes.

So what happens to ‘independent minded people’? There are a lot of them about in all organisations – people who are not team players. They can be likeable people; they can be hard working people; they can bring important perspectives – but in challenging times the questions for leaders has to be,’are they delivering what we need? Are they meeting our expectations?’

Sometimes they are introverted people who find maintaining relationships and exchanging information difficult – they like to be left alone to get on with things. Often it is the departmental maverick who likes to be difficult, questions everything, and is cynical. It can also be some values-driven people who are driving their own agendas – often with good intentions. It can be the aloof person, the technical expert, comfortable in a superior sort of way that they see things differently from the rest of us. They can be competitive, hard working, driven people who are shaping their reputations but put their ego before the need to work with others (who are, after all, the competition!)
The challenge to leaders is ‘what do I do with the non collaborators?’

I’ve been coaching someone recently who is a technically brilliant, capable person leading a specialist department. The individual continually fails to deliver what is asked, some of which is key to the organisations agenda. He is not belligerent or awkward, he is just busy on the agenda he thinks is important. But he is not collaborating with the corporate agenda. It is one of those many times when non collaboration is a significant corporate issue. Another example was a manager in the caring professions who had specialists who were spending hours doing wonderful things that were a long way out from the job’s requirements and not concentrating on what was. They were not collaborating with the main agenda. They thought they knew best – and were emotional in their desire to protect what they were doing – but they were letting the organisation down.

The leadership challenges here are:

• How strong is the level of collaboration in your work group? What are the signs that people are collaborating? What are the signs of lack of collaboration?
• Are we really clear about our purpose and therefore what we expect from each other?
• How can you make the non collaborators more aware of their impact – and help them change
• What are the steps and actions that lead to more collaboration – how do we involve people in this so they become more committed to it?
• Are there some people who cannot change – and are they blocking the organisations ability to succeed?

David Maister in his book ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ writes: “It may be that members of the organisation have insufficient commitment to each other [and the purpose of the organisation] to implement any strategy”. Finding the collaborators can be really vital for success.

Daniel Franklin’s article in the Guardian: ‘Good Company - How will Britain’s economic downturn affect the business community’s ability to commit to corporate social responsibility?’ has become even more relevant this summer as every day another report states the latest hit on businesses due to the economic climate.

As the British and American economies turn down and corporate profits are squeezed, firms are bound to take a closer look at their CSR efforts and ask how much these really contribute to their business.

Leaders will be facing difficult questions regarding their financial responsibility to their stakeholders to ensure they survive. Inevitably they will feel pressure to divert funds away from philanthropy and environmental projects. But let us hope that despite this necessary evil they remember their social responsibility inherent in these increasingly crucial business decisions, not just because they should but because they need to. By keeping true to their values and working to their strengths, leadership teams can avoid the reputational risk of bad business and support their loyal employees in harder times. As Daniel Franklin puts it:

‘So harder economic times may help to sort out CSR… thoughtful companies will keep at it, with a keener understanding that CSR efforts needed to be sharply focused - and require hard work and careful implementation - if businesses are to live up to the increasingly common mantra of “doing well by doing good”.’

The Governments Power of Information Taskforce has created a £20,000 prize fund for people who want to develop new ways to use publicly owned data for public benefit. You submit ideas through the website boldly called showusabetterway. They’ve also made a series of government data sets available for people to work with. This website though is important because its how the government is thinking in fresh ways about collaboration and its relationship with us:

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.Go on, Show Us A Better Way.

The same task force has already looked for ways to make it easier or safer for civil servants to share in the ideas fest which often happens online. Openness generates better ideas. It helps people to innovate faster and work better. Yes it also means people can nick those ideas - but that doesn’t put the thieves ahead of those who habitually collaborate to progress.

(Thanks to Bill Thompson)

This extract on skating over ideas and invest in some deeper thinking comes from a speech to new graduates at The Pacific Northwest College of Art. Susan S Szenasy , editor of the Metropolis Magazine told the students:

As artists and communication designers you can choose to be the
outriders of society. Like the scouts in the old western films, you can
be in the position of surveying the horizon and alerting the rest of us
to the dangers and surprises ahead. But I worry about you. I worry that
while you have evolved the use of your thumbs to work at phenomenal
speeds, you are not as interested in developing the habits you need to
accumulate knowledge, knowledge that can inform your vision as artists.
I mean knowledge of the world—science, literature, and
history—knowledge of the great contributions others are making or have
made to our rich understanding of humanity and the earth which gives us
life.

It is not enough to find information instantly and use it
opportunistically to support your argument. To be able to analyze and
synthesize you need to delve deeply into a subject, build up your
understanding incrementally, and own that knowledge. Own it, so you can
call it up when you need it, without turning to your PDA, and use your
amazing brain-power to interpret what you know when critical analysis
is needed. What I’m asking of you is what I have always asked of
myself: To be endlessly curious about everything, to search for facts
when you need them, but more importantly, to search for ideas and
meaning. Read a book, look at a building or a landscape, drink it all
in—make it your own.

For more read here. Hat tip to Canufluck.

The recent MIT Sloan article ‘Does Being Ethical Pay?’ unintentionally highlights one of the major issues in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) debate: are companies unethically jumping on the ethical bandwagon?
 
The article asks if the billions of dollars spent doing good works pays off by testing consumer responses to ethically and unethically made products. I agree, it is essential to measure and research consumers’ attitudes to ethical products and know the financial implications for your business so that your ethical efforts are sustainable, but not in order to find out how to use the current trend towards ethics for financial gain! “We discovered that companies don’t necessarily need to go all-out with social responsibility to win over consumers. If a company invests in even a small degree of ethical production, buyers will reward it just as much as a company that goes much further in its efforts.”
 
You could argue Trudel and Cotte are simply reflecting consumer attitudes, but I believe by omitting to talk about the bigger picture it’s a point for the cynics’ argument…that companies are moving towards being socially responsible just because it makes them look good and not because it is the right thing to do.
 
Is it naive to think any company is different? Does that actually matter as long as people and the environment gain? It does if you only do as the article implies - just make yourself a little bit ethical and you will get just as much reward! There is danger in this too though; if you state you are ethical then you open yourself up to being scrutinised, and it may well not be long before legislation is passed on ethical standards, or the market changes so much that anything else is unsaleable.
 
The article says the lessons are clear; well yes they are if you only take into account potential profit, “companies should segment their market and make a particular effort to reach out to buyers with high ethical standards, because those are the customers who can deliver the biggest potential profits on ethically produced goods”. The ethical problem with this argument is that by only producing ethical goods for ethical consumers you aren’t considering the social or environmental impact of your company as a whole.
 
Should we not abandon our cynicism just for a moment and applaud companies such as Marks and Spencer for their drive to be more sustainable and kinder to the environment. 

“We’re doing this because it’s what you want us to do. It’s also the right thing to do. We’re calling it Plan A because we believe it’s now the only way to do business. There is no Plan B.”

Following an earlier post about ‘Flip’, here’s an impressive bunch of young ‘flipstars’.

Pupils in South Camden Community School have conducted their own alternative, student-led Ofsted inspection that goes by the name ‘Instead’. The initiative was founded by Edge Learner Forum, an enterprising group of 13 to 21-year-olds, uniting pupils from schools across London - along with 7 other areas around the country - to discuss issues concerning their own education. Samia Meah writes here about the idea and how it came about:

The idea of a ‘Teenage OFSTED‘ surfaced while fellow learner forum member Huda Al Bander and I were brainstorming for our article in VISION. It came from our thought of using young people to solve problems which are about education and an example of this is school and its OFSTED inspections. The idea is simple, to bring young inspectors into a school to interview pupils for their opinions and to find the truth.

Pupil inspectors discuss the results with teachers in face-to-face meetings and submit a report analysing grouped teaching techniques, so no teachers are singled out for attention. Unlike Ofsted, the aim of Edge Instead is “entirely for the good of the school and comes with zero stress” - they work with the school to make things better, rather than merely judging the school’s successes and failures.

How many problems in education could be solved just be giving pupils some control over their own destiny? It puts me in mind of a quote from former Starbucks Executive Howard Behar: “People want to work on ideas that matter to them and make a difference. When they do, they find gold”.

Photo thanks to Qatari Mother.

Some Midlands based research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently looked at ‘Routes and barriers to citizen governance‘. It discovered that many groups feel marginalised from the political process. Maybe no great surprise given the low voting in recent local government elections. But it comes at a time when, nationally, Government want citizens to be more engaged in their communities - to shape the services they receive and to help develop their neighbourhoods.

The research focused on the importance of strong community leadership to raise the level and impact of community governance. I was asked to address the issues of community leadership at the launch of the report and highlighted a few key themes:

1. Community leadership can be a battleground between councillors and local activists with different agendas and values. It has to be a partnership if the community is not to become paralysed.
2. Trust is at the heart of effective community leadership. Trust is about honesty, competence, accessibility, commitment and a good understanding of local needs.
3. Amazingly, many leaders do not know how they come across or how they impact others. The report recognised that many councillors provide excellent leadership, but others haven’t a clue about how to impact young people, different ethnic groups, council officers etc. Leaders without good self awareness will always struggle to make things happen.
4. Community leaders need followers (they can look rather foolish without them!). Followers come when the leader champions the community and champions the different talents within it - engaging people and listening to their ideas. At the heart of this is the leader’s ability to give power to others.
5. I would encourage leaders to reflect on their impact and to be much more deliberate in finding ways to maximise not just the number of followers, but also the quantity of their followers’ contribution.

Community leadership is something you work at with feedback from others, a generous attitude and a commitment to putting the community’s success above your own ego.

The July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review has published the results of a fascinating four year study undertaken by Christian Stadler and his colleagues. They have produced the European equivalent of what have now become commonplace studies into what makes great American companies great. The main findings (which they call the four principles of enduring success) of Stadler and his colleagues’ research took them by surprise.

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There is however, an alternative explanation to that of pointing to luck. A commentator on the TV this afternoon reported, “Hamilton has 14 years of racing experience and he’s only 22”. Another commentator suggested factors like strategy, risk management, and working well with his teams – the team that built the car, the pit stop team etc.

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I was impressed by Jane a Chief Executive with whom I spoke recently. She expressed clear concern that none of the top managers (Directors) in her company could identify a single person who would be able to replace them.

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