Sometimes they are asking for themselves and the question is really – ‘Am I a good collaborative leader and what do I need to get better at?, and sometimes they are asking on behalf of their organisation – ‘If I’m promoting, or developing people into roles that require lots of collaborative leadership capabilities, what should I be looking for?’

Over the years we’ve used (and created) lots of 360° feedback tools and so when we were writing the book one of the things we were thinking about in parallel was how to measure the attributes and competencies of collaborative leadership. To answer the question we’ve now produced our own 360° questionnaire to help leaders gain new insight into their collaborative strengths and weakness.

At its heart, collaborative leadership is about the dilemma of sharing control. From the research that we undertook in writing the book we based the questionnaire around 6 attributes:

·        Patience

·        Collective decision making

·        Quick thinking

·        Tenacity

·        Building relationships

·        Handling conflict

We can also combine this 360° feedback tool with our MBTI and collaboration profile to give people an additional view point on their leadership style and its impact on others. If you want to know more you can look on tools pages of the Socia website 

We believe that this is a great new tool and we are looking for individuals and organisations who are keen to adopt the ideas in the book to try it out as a useful addition to their leadership development toolkit. Please get in touch via the Socia contact page.

We officially launched the book last night at the Royal Society of Arts in London in front of a great audience. Mike Brown COO of Heathrow airport (and ex COO of London Underground) gave a fascinating keynote speech. I was particularly struck by what he had to say on why customers are right to think of him as the person ultimately responsible for their whole experience of using Heathrow and the complex web of contracted and un contracted relationships with dozens of other organisations that he has to work through in order to deliver that customer experience.

We gave a short presentation of some of the ideas in the book which is summarised in the previous couple of postings.

I caught snippets loads of great conversations in the room and overheard lots of positive stories of partnership success. Elsevier sold out of signed copies of the book on the night. (You can order copies now either direct from Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/716687/description#description), from Amazon or from your local bookshop).

We started this blog because we want your feedback on the book and your own experience of what makes collaborative leadership work. So please comment on this posting or post your own views. We’d love to hear from you.

David Archer 14th Jan 2009

Steven Johnson tells the story of slime mould brilliantly in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. His point is that slime mould displays emergent behaviour – the ‘intelligence’ it demonstrates comes about from aggregating a mass of relatively simple elements. No one element is directing the show: rather, this complex behaviour emerges from the level of individual cells.

The reason we like slime mould so much is rather different. It’s because it has clearly got the hang of how to be a good partner. Slime mould knows when to be independent and when to collaborate. It doesn’t spend all its time as a team – each single cell manages perfectly well on its own for large stretches of time. But when slime mould cells get together, they can do amazing things.