My postings will slow to a dull roar over the holiday week as I focus on family as well as making progress on my Management Excellence podcast program.  I didn’t want to leave my prior essay on Deming and the Failure of American Management as my last post before the holiday.   While I have no qualms about the message, I would rather break on a positive note.

I had the good fortune to reconnect with a great friend and colleague this morning.  We were brainstorming on a number of items prompted by my recent posts on creating a professional value proposition.  One topic led to another and before you knew it, we had identified a number of exciting ideas for what we perceive are much needed programs to help solve some vexing people and leadership issues in technical environments.

The moral here is not tied to the specific output of our conversation, but rather to the potential power that collaboration brings to any situation.  I’ve long been a believer that 1+1 has the potential to be something greater than 2 when the people and conditions are right for collaborating and brainstorming.

As I look back over my career, my best experiences and most significant accomplishments were the direct output of working with 1 or more people to solve vexing problems.  The outcomes that jump to mind include collaborating on a book, developing new programs that solved critical customer problems and defining strategies and devising approaches to execute that translated into great value creation.  In all of those efforts, someone in the group had the seed of an idea, but it was the collective efforts and ideas of everyone working on the problem that allowed the seed to grow.

While collaboration efforts do not always work and many a brainstorming initiative has failed to generate the “Ah Ha” moments that fuel innovation, it is worth it to try and create the conditions for successful collaboration.

Collaborative efforts bear fruit if the conditions are right.  There must be chemistry between the people involved.  Mutual respect, mutual excitement for solving the problem at hand and a shared sense of adventure are all prerequisites for success.  Learn how to create these conditions, and the world is your oyster as a leader.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The best leaders understand their role in creating the effective working environment, and they understand that part of this is creating the conditions for collaboration to take root and grow.   On the other hand, ineffective leaders find ways to stifle collaboration, often through managing by fear and intimidation.  Negative tactics might drive momentary compliance, but you cannot mandate creativity at the end of a gun barrel.  If you are dependent upon the success of others for your own success, I suggest putting away the metaphorical gun and finding ways to create the collaborative environment that will help you turn iron into gold.