Collaborative leadership

Collaborative leadership is a management practice which is focused on the leadership skills across functional and organizational boundaries.

The term started to appear in the mid-1990s in response to the twin trends of the growth in strategic alliances between private corporations and the formation of long term public private partnership contracts to rebuild public infrastructure.

In her 1994 Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Advantage", Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about leaders who recognize that there are critical business relationships "that cannot be controlled by formal systems but require (a) dense web of interpersonal connections...". And in a book published in that same year Chrislip and Larson looked at the attributes of great civic leaders in communities across the US and found some similar attributes. "Collaboration needs a different kind of leadership; it needs leaders who can safeguard the process, facilitate interaction and patiently deal with high levels of frustration"

In 2013, Harvard Business Review authors Nick Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas (co-founders of The InterSector Project), explore the complex relationship between the business, government and social sectors as it relates to their role in addressing the most pressing challenges facing society – issues like managing resource constraints, controlling health care costs, training the twenty-first-century workforce, developing and implementing smart-grid and intelligent-urbanization technologies, and stabilizing financial systems to foster sustainable economic growth. Their research suggests that the future of collaborative leadership depends on the ability of leaders to engage and collaborate with the business, government and social sectors (see below for the distinguishing characteristics of such leaders).

Hank Rubin author and President of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership has written "A collaboration is a purposeful relationship in which all parties strategically choose to cooperate in order to accomplish a shared outcome." In his book "Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools" Rubin asks "Who is a collaborative leader?" and answers "You are a collaborative leader once you have accepted responsibility for building - or helping to ensure the success of - a heterogeneous team to accomplish a shared purpose . Your tools are (1) the purposeful exercise of your behavior, communication, and organizational resources in order to affect the perspective, beliefs, and behaviors of another person (generally a collaborative partner) to influence that person's relationship with you and your collaborative enterprise and (2) the structure and climate of an environment that supports the collaborative relationship."

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