LeadershipIssues: When to Collaborate…

My wife and I were talking about project management last night… In my defense, she brought it up… And she said something very insightful that I thought was worth sharing:

All good leaders have 2 ways they like to lead…

The first is collaborative… Get the team together, brainstorm, find the best solutions.  After all, maturity teaches me that I don’t have ALL of the good ideas…

The second is authoritative… Get the team together, give them instructions and send them off to do their part… After all, I am the leader because I know what I’m doing…

The trick is knowing when to be collaborative and when to be authoritative…

Because I’m a creative and because I generally work with creatives, I tend to lean towards the collaborative style… but sometimes, I have a clear vision and I don’t want to be forced into a creative compromise…

Because sometimes I believe that compromise undermines the objectives and goals of the project…

And (honestly) because sometimes I like to be in charge…

And since creative ventures are intrinsically subjective, there’s almost never a conclusive right or wrong way to implement them…

With a few (occasionally significant) exceptions, I know my team.  I know their strengths and weaknesses. I have come to anticipate the kinds of suggestions and ideas they have…

So sometimes I don’t ask for ideas…

Maybe that’s bad, but sometimes the old adage is true:

Too many chefs DO ruin the soup…

I used to work for a guy that had a blended approach… but it was all wrong… He liked to have “brainstorming” sessions where he flagrantly discarded every idea that didn’t align with his own… At one retreat, the entire staff seemed to have ideas that ran afoul of his… That was particularly frustrating for everybody…

He would have been better off making authoritarian decisions and selling the outcomes rather than asking for our opinions… We might have hated his decisions, but instead we grew to hate him personally…

If we had been volunteers, we would have abandoned that ship at the first opportunity… Some of us did anyway…

If you work with creatives, you’ll already recognize that they like to be heard… They like their ideas to count…

One of our great artists at church approached me with an idea for a project… I like the idea at face value but I have some concerns about the impression that it might leave with a particular group of people that our church is trying to reach. It’s not poorly conceived or poorly motivated, it’s just poorly timed…

But I hate to put people off… I don’t know a single creative that likes to hear the word “wait”…

This is a great opportunity for collaborative leadership: Can we work together to find an outlet for this idea?

Here are the talking points I like to use in a decision about whether to collaborate:

1. Can I do it better by myself? I have a pretty broad artistic capacity, but I wouldn’t claim to be “the best” at much of anything. In many cases, though, my efforts are good enough. When I really want a project to be outstanding, I need collaboration.

2. Will collaboration negatively impact the goals of the project? When I’m putting together a program, I often have a vision for the emotive impact that I want the program to have. When people want to add elements that don’t contribute to that emotive  impact (or worse, distract from it), I want to take a more authoritarian position.

What are your touchpoints for collaboration? What sorts of situations make you want to “take charge”?