A few months ago, I facilitated a senior leadership retreat where the room was divided — literally and emotionally.
Half the group believed the other half “didn’t get it.”
The other half believed they were being “undermined.”
Both were right in parts.

What was really missing wasn’t alignment of goals — it was alignment of perspective.

Everyone was pulling hard, but not together.

That’s the quiet tragedy in so many organizations today: not a lack of talent, vision, or resources — but a lack of collaboration.
The kind of collaboration that demands humility, shared ownership, and the willingness to listen beyond one’s function, department, or ego.

From Cooperation to Collaboration

We often mistake cooperation for collaboration.
Cooperation is polite.
Collaboration is courageous.

Cooperation means, “I’ll help you when I can.”
Collaboration means, “We’ll figure this out together — even when it’s messy.”

The Bilbao Effect is one of my favorite examples of this in action. In the 1990s, the city of Bilbao, Spain, was on the brink of collapse — economically and socially. Instead of competing for credit or control, public and private leaders created a shared vision that transcended sectors. Government, business, and citizens co-owned the transformation. The Guggenheim Museum became a symbol — not just of art — but of collaboration as civic innovation.

As the IESE case study points out, Bilbao didn’t just build a structure — it built trust-based governance. That’s the essence of collaboration: shared power, distributed intelligence, and collective accountability.

The Leadership Mindset for Collaboration

Leadership in a collaborative era is less about command and more about connection.
Research from Harvard Business Review (Gratton & Erickson, 2007) shows that the most effective collaborative organizations share three characteristics:

1. A strong sense of purpose that unites people across boundaries.
2. A culture of psychological safety where diverse ideas can be explored without fear.
3. Disciplined coordination — collaboration anchored in clarity, not chaos.

This demands a mindset shift: from “my team” to “our system.”

A New Competency: Leading Through Influence

In Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems, Eggers and Kettl (2023) call this “leading through influence rather than authority.”
Today’s problems — climate, health, equity, trust — cannot be solved within one agency, one leader, or one department.
The same is true in organizations: silos suffocate creativity.

Leaders who build bridges instead of walls develop what I call relational power — the ability to move ideas, not just mandates.
They understand that collaboration doesn’t dilute leadership; it multiplies it.

The Three Dimensions of Collaborative Leadership

Drawing from Team of Teams (McChrystal, 2015) and The Wisdom of Teams (Katzenbach & Smith, 2005), true collaboration requires leaders to develop three core dimensions:

1. Trust and Transparency

Without trust, collaboration becomes negotiation.
Trust grows when leaders communicate intentions clearly, share context early, and model vulnerability.
As Amy Edmondson (2019) writes in The Fearless Organization, psychological safety — the belief that one can speak up without punishment — is the foundation of all learning and collaboration.

Practice: Begin meetings with a “clarity minute”: each person shares what they most need from the group to succeed that day.

2. Collective Accountability

In collaborative systems, success is shared, but so is ownership.
When results falter, the question isn’t “Who failed?” but “Where did our system fail us?”

This is the principle that powered the HCL “Employee First” model. Vineet Nayar (2010) flipped accountability by making managers answerable to employees. The result was a culture where collaboration wasn’t an initiative — it was identity.

Practice: After every major decision, ask, “Who else needs to own this for it to succeed?”

3. Systems Awareness

Margaret Wheatley (2017) reminds us that organizations are living systems, not machines.
Collaboration thrives when leaders see relationships, not transactions. When they ask, “How does this choice ripple across the whole?” rather than “How does it affect my department?”

Practice: Use the “Ripple Map” — for any strategic decision, identify all stakeholders affected and invite two perspectives from outside your usual circle.

From Competition to Co-Creation

When Best Buy reinvented itself, CEO Hubert Joly realized that excellence couldn’t be mandated — it had to be co-created. He empowered store associates to act on customer insights, broke down barriers between departments, and replaced internal competition with shared purpose.

This mirrors what Otto Scharmer calls “generative collaboration” in his Theory U framework — where people move from defending old positions to co-sensing new possibilities together.

In my own facilitation rooms, I’ve seen this happen in real time.
When people stop protecting their corners and start asking, “What does success look like for us collectively?” something transformative occurs: energy shifts from compliance to creativity.

When Collaboration Fails

Let’s be honest — collaboration can also go wrong.
Too many meetings. Too much consensus. Too little accountability.

Not all voices need to be equal in volume, but all voices must be respected in value.
The best collaborative leaders know when to converge and when to decide.

As General Stanley McChrystal said, “It takes a network to defeat a network.” But networks still need clear direction.

Collaboration without clarity becomes chaos.
Clarity without collaboration becomes control.
Balance both — and you build coherence.

The Collaborative Leadership Framework

Think of collaboration as a triangle with three vertices:

• Purpose – Why are we doing this together?
• Process – How will we communicate, decide, and align?
• People – Who needs to be in the room and who needs to be heard?

When any side weakens, collaboration collapses into confusion or fatigue.
When all three align, you create momentum — the kind that sustains innovation and belonging.

In Closing

The leaders who will define the future won’t be those who control the most resources, but those who cultivate the most relationships.
They will lead not from certainty, but from connection.

Collaboration is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s the operating system of excellence.
Because no leader, no department, no sector succeeds alone anymore.

We rise — or stagnate — together.

References (APA 7th Edition)

• Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.
• Eggers, W. D., & Kettl, D. F. (2023). Bridgebuilders: How government can transcend boundaries to solve big problems. Harvard Business Review Press.
• Gratton, L., & Erickson, T. J. (2007). Eight ways to build collaborative teams. Harvard Business Review.
• Gulati, R. (2007). Silo busting: How to execute on the promise of customer focus. Harvard Business Review.
• IESE Business School. (2016). The Bilbao effect: Transformation through collaboration and shared vision.
• Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2005). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. HarperBusiness.
• McChrystal, S. (2015). Team of teams: New rules of engagement for a complex world. Penguin Random House.
• Nayar, V. (2010). Employees first, customers second: Turning conventional management upside down. Harvard Business Press.
• Scharmer, O. (2009). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler.
• Wheatley, M. J. (2017). Who do we choose to be? Facing reality, claiming leadership, restoring sanity. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.