A fascinating study was conducted by the US Army Research Institute on the relation between a leader’s self-awareness and their potential to collaborate. Using the well known 360-degree method, officers were assessed first by others, and then by themselves. The rating leaders gave themselves was often inflated, and yet the more congruent the self-rating was with the rating of others, the more likely a leader was to be promoted or even regarded as “successful”.

At Ipsus we have seen the benefits and drawbacks of the 360 degree method, but we very much agree with the derived conclusion, namely: more collaborative leaders are more successful. However, we believe this is incomplete. 

The challenge we now encounter is that such studies often give standard training the easy way out. If you simply teach leaders that collaboration is beneficial, then they will have the incentive to change their behaviour. However, the impact of such training is skin deep.

At the core of a leader’s ability to collaborate is their hardwiring (personality, subconscious biases, their own experiences, their cognitive paradigms). In other words, collaboration isn’t something that you just teach. In my own experience of training leaders I have come across only two who went through fundamental change, but only after deeply adverse experiences, one of those being in their own personal lives.

Standard leadership training is known to have 10%-30% impact. We at Ipsus believe this figure can exceed dramatically increased. Our mission is to identify pre-existing traits and competencies in leaders, in this case the trait of collaboration, and it starts with self-awareness. That is the first stage. The second and more challenging stage is to nurture and encourage these collaborative traits in leaders, which are often unappreciated and inhibited by the negative behaviours of their peers.

The third stage is to use collaborative traits for the nurturing of the leadership team as a whole. Executive teams are often dysfunctional, but the infusion of genuine collaborative attributes will make for a higher impact leadership team. The fourth stage, and most challenging, is to get the peers to give value to those who bring genuine collaborative capabilities to the leadership team.

Our mission at Ipsus is to take leadership teams to the next level of effectiveness. We wish to convert the derivation ‘more collaborative leaders are more successful’, to the outcome ‘more collaborative leaders make more successful leadership teams’, and the collaborators in this journey need to be given credit for their impact.