Overview

Background

When private sector organizations or local, state and nationalgovernments are experiencing problems, the blame is oftenattributed to failed leadership. In such circumstances, leadersreceive most of the criticism even though economic, political andother factors may be as much as, or more responsible for theseproblems. The truth is that mono-causal explanations of oftendifficult, interdependent problems oversimplify complex realities.Nonetheless, effective leadership is very important to both avoidanceof problems and the solution of those problems when they occur.

This importance is magnified in "Collaborative Organizations".Providing leadership in a collaborative organization is somewhatlike trying to influence the behaviors of all individuals on a raft inwhite water given the noise, turbulent flow of the water and thedifferent vantage points, assets and concerns of the crewmembers.

Leadership is particularly important when two or more organizationsfrom different sectors (Private, Public and Not-for Profit) agree tocollaboratively undertake programs or projects that cannot becarried out by a single sector. As these collaborative efforts areformed, partnerships between organizations lead to collaborativeorganizational activity and in essence, new "organizations" withnotable characteristics are brought into being in often looselystructured arrangements. Mechanisms such as contracts, mutual aidagreements, terms of agreement, memoranda of understanding,public-private partnerships etc. are put into place. Thesearrangements create many leadership challenges. The primarypurpose of this book is to aid leaders working in collaborativeorganizations to meet these challenges.

I had an opportunity to personally experience the dynamics ofa collaborative organization early in my career. I was asked tobecome a temporary member of a project team that was in theformative stage of its project life cycle. The project had as it charge,development of a missile to exploit a novel guidance concept thathad been benched tested. This project team included individualswho worked at various government laboratories scattered aroundthe country and some consultants from the private sector. Only afew of the team's members were direct reports of the Engineerselected to be the project's manager. This Engineer was tasked tocoordinate this ever-growing team's efforts; however he was notempowered with those elements of authority commonly associatedwith individuals occupying positions within a hierarchy.

My assignment on this team was to help develop a time and costplan for the project using the then novel PERT planning technology(Program Evaluation and Review Technique). In the process ofgathering information for this plan I visited the various engineeringgroups that were working separately on their tasks related tothe different missile elements: the guidance and control systems,the airframe and its skin, the missile's power source, its explosivecomponent, the missile's aerodynamic characteristics, studies of itsmanufacturability and reliability, and missile testing and evaluationprocedures.

The centrality of the Project Manager's role quickly becameapparent. These differing groups of Engineers were starting theirwork employing different assumptions about the eventual missile'slength, weight, and center of gravity as well as their time and costassumptions. I was able to provide clear evidence of the importantrole of the project manager as the missile's master architect andfacilitator of team communications to ensure all were on thesame page. Team members readily grasped the importance ofworking from common assumptions and recognized their mutualinterdependence as their work progressed. The project teamunderstood that collaboration was crucial and that the Projectmanager's role was central. In the ensuing months that I was withthis project I observed the emergence of a highly effective team thatexhibited a mission driven, collaborative ethos.

Premises Underlying this Book

This section of the introductory chapter identifies the book's majorpremises. Each of the premises is addressed in some detail in theremaining chapters of the book.

• Collaborative organizations differ from stand-aloneorganizations that have hierarchical structures with a singleperson at their apex. Collaborative organizations are notbureaucratic, top down organizations. In fact, they arebottom up organizations and often have multiple, horizontalrelationships. Readers of this book will come to understandthe characteristics of collaborative organizations and theleadership challenges they pose.

• Research and Development organizations are collaborativeorganizations; they provide useful insights into behaviors andattributes of leaders that are compatible with the requisitesof inter-sectoral collaborative organizations. TechnicalDirectors of Laboratories and managers of their programsand projects lead without relying on bureaucratic authority;yet they are able to carry out their leadership responsibilitieseffectively. These individuals lead by example, earn respectfor their expertise, gain trust by being trustworthy, andare adept at influencing and persuading their followers tocommit their talents and energy to shared goals and values.Chapter 8 goes into more detail on this premise.

• It is useful to revisit quality literature on leadership to gleaninsights from that literature that are particularly well suitedfor use by collaborative leaders.

• Leaders of collaborative organizations need to be wellgrounded in organizational theories and organizationalanalysis. These leaders need to have a "bag of conceptualtools and techniques" to assist them in steering their "fluidorganizations".

• An ability to "frame" and "reframe" situations by viewingthem through differing conceptual frames of reference andthereby guide organizational dynamics will be a particularlyimportant attribute of collaborative leaders.

• "Leadership languages" will be beneficial assets in thecontext of collaborative organizations. These languagesare composed of the many concepts, models, theories,metaphors and analogies leaders may choose to employ.

• Leadership approaches grounded in "systems thinking" willprove particularly useful to collaborative leaders. Systemthinking is grounded in a vast literature about differingfacets of systems and the applications of systems conceptsto challenges leaders face.

• Collaborative leaders need to skillfully nurture new ideasand technologies if they are to be successful in guiding theinventive and innovative efforts of their organizations.

Organization of the Remainder of Book

Today, we are seeing increasing numbers of inter-sectoralcollaborative organizations—those that involve participation byorganizations from at least two of three sectors; that is, the private,public, and not-for-profit. In Chapter 2, the characteristics of thesecollaborative organizations are identified and challenges facingleaders are discussed.

In Chapter 3, I delve into the leadership challenges that flow from thecharacteristics of collaborative organizations identified in Chapter2. I do this by exploring what I consider to be among the best bookson leadership for relevant insights. I mention only a few of the mostrelevant insights of each book and hope that some readers will bestimulated by these insights to obtain and read the entire book.

There are an enormous number of books on leadership. In the onlineclass that, Paul Danczyk and I taught, sixty-five students wereasked to summarize a book of their choice on leadership. There wasvery little overlap in their choices with the exception of The Princeby Machiavelli! The leadership books I have selected have all beenwritten within the last one-hundred years. The Principles of ScientificManagement by Frederick Winslow Taylor was published in the 1916.The most recent, The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, by StevenSample was published in 2002. I believe each of these books makesmajor contributions to our understanding of the art of leadershipand has relevance for leaders of collaborative organizations.

Leadership "tools and techniques" are discussed in Chapter 4. Thischapter focuses upon maps, models, theories and typologies. Theseconceptual tools will be defined and illustrated. The importanceof the analogies and metaphors leaders employ will be discussed.Leaders are challenged to consider "what is in their "tool bag"?There are an enormous number of tools and techniques available toleaders, but which of those tools do they "own" and use in practice?This chapter seeks to assist leaders in reflecting on that question andin considering how they might augment their "tool bags"!

Chapter 5 differentiates preceptive and receptive thinking, andexplores examples of lens and frames that are now part of the"accepted wisdom" that has currency with many leaders. Someof the works of major contributors to that body of wisdom will besingled out and examined in this chapter.

Two specific tools that are often overlooked in writings on leadershipwill be described and illustrated in Chapter 6. The first tool, systemdiagramming, flows out of a rich body of literature on systemthinking. Industrial Engineers refined early efforts at systems andprocedures analysis while constructing a raft of tools associatedwith Management Science and Operations Research. Economists,using a systems frame of reference, developed Systems Analysis asa means of weighing the costs and benefits of alternative systemconfigurations. Systems Diagrams as described in this chapter,provide leaders with a gestalt for thinking of their organizations as"open systems".

Co-alignment analysis is the other system-based tool that can beof great value to leaders as they weigh their options for actionsto keep their organizations in "harmony" with rapidly changingcontextual factors. This tool can assist leaders in identifying theirorganization's "non-alignments" that will need to be resolved, andsuggest possible options for bringing things back into alignment.Both of the above Systems-based models/tools are constructedusing sets of language for analysis that are easily learned and canreadily be added to one's tool bag.

The relationship between language and leadership is explored inChapter 7. A leader's "language" includes the terminology andconcepts he or she employs to think, speak, write and act regardingtheir particular collaborative organization and its people, policies,values etc. Their language shapes how leaders perceive problems andopportunities confronting them and/or their organizations. Muchdepends upon their language; it may clarify, cloud, or simplify therealities of their context. Often, where leaders stand on importantissues, depends on their leadership language. In this chapter I willdiscuss a classic book on Role Theory to introduce readers to avaluable language for Role analysis.

Chapter 8 provides a case study of an exemplary Research andDevelopment leader, Dr. William B. McLean, the inventor/innovatorof the Sidewinder missile. The two Navy Laboratories that Dr.McLean led had hundreds of ongoing projects and project teams thatnormally worked in non-hierarchical settings in collaboration withprivate sector organizations and other government laboratoriesand agencies. This chapter begins with an explanation of threeinterrelated processes: ideation, invention and innovation. It nextdiscusses a typology for classifying organizations based upon theirdegree of innovativeness. This material provides a useful backdropfor telling the story of Dr. McLean and his Sidewinder missile andhow its invention impacted the nation of Taiwan.

A brief concluding chapter is provided at the end of the book; itsummarizes some of the principal ideas contained in the book.

Following the Conclusion is an Appendix which provides guidanceand principles for developing a common form of collaborativeorganization, a public, private partnership. The Appendix reflectsthe rich experience base with this form of collaborative arrangementon the part of its author, John Shirey, who is a nationally renownedCity Manager. John is presently the City Manager of Sacramento,California.

Characteristics and Leadership Challengesof Collaborative Organizations

Background

Collaborative Organizations come in many different forms.For example, they may be temporary organizations that areformed based on mutual aid agreements. When Fire and PoliceDepartments experience critical incidents such as major fires orriots, they receive assistance from many other organizationsbased on these agreements. Once the incident is resolved, thesetemporarily assembled organizations cease to exist until the nextincident. Ongoing joint task forces also are common collaborativearrangements. The Joint Crime Task Force for the Boston regionreflected well on the potential of this form of partnership when theBoston Marathon terrorist incident occurred.

A more enduring collaboration may be a public private partnershipthat is formed to pursue objectives that a single organization isnot able to take on. A current example is the City of Sacramento'spartnering with the new owners of its NBA team to build andoperate a modern sports arena. Other forms of collaborationinclude: contractual arrangements such as used by the DefenseDepartment to engage the services of the Black-Water Corporationin Iraq; market mechanisms such as California has created to buyand sell "pollution rights" and thereby better control air pollution;and networks such as those that have been developed to shareintelligence related to our anti-terrorism efforts within this countryand around the world.

Articles addressing some of these forms of collaborativeorganizations are listed here for readers with an interest in a particulartype of collaborative arrangement. Public Private Partnerships areaddressed in the Appendix of this book by John Shirey, City Managerof Sacramento. For collaborations via contracts, I recommend, "AContractual Framework for New Public Management Theory,"by James Ferris and Elizabeth A. Graddy which appears in theInternational Public Management Journal, vol. 1 no. 2 (1998): pp. 225-240.For market based collaborative arrangements, I recommend,"Los Angeles's Clean Air Saga—Spanning the Three Epochs," byDaniel A. Mazmanian-published in 2008 in Toward SustainableCommunities, D. Mazmanian and M. Kraft, Editors.

In this chapter we address the question, what are some of thecharacteristics of collaborative organizations? We do not claim thatwe have created an exhaustive list of these characteristics but dobelieve we have pointed out some of the more important ones. Then,for each characteristic, we briefly examine some of the leadershipchallenges that these characteristics pose. In Chapter 3 we gointo these challenges in more depth revisiting some of the classicwritings on leadership to discern what insights they contain thatcan assist collaborative leaders in meeting the identified challenges.Subsequent chapters also address some of the major leadershipchallenges in considerable depth.

Characteristics and Leadership Challengesof Collaborative Organizations

In this section some characteristics of collaborative organizationsare identified. The leadership challenges which flow from thesecharacteristics are noted. Many of these insights came into focuswhile I was reading and grading papers written by fifty-five graduatestudents who were taking classes on Inter-Sectoral Leadership fromthe University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy.These students wrote papers on a wide variety of collaborativeorganizations from around the world.

Characteristics of Collaborative organizations and the leadershipchallenges they pose are identified and discussed below:

• Supportive Relationships: Collaborative organizations haveto build and maintain supportive relationships with their"parent" organizations if they are to be successful.

The leadership challenge is to learn how to attain a degree ofautonomy for their collaborative organization while building mutualtrust and respect with their "parent organizations" and acquiringtheir ongoing support?

• Loyalty: Participants in collaborative organizations havemultiple loyalties—to the collaborative organization, totheir parent organizations and to their own careers.

The challenge is to help employees sort through potential conflictingloyalties and assist them in developing a set of "multiple loyalties"between participants and the collaborative and parent organizations.

• Hierarchy: Collaborative organizations are non-hierarchical;power is widely dispersed.

Challenges this characteristic creates for leaders include: In theabsence of a single authority, how do you effectively wield influence?How do decisions get made? How are conflicts resolved? How arerewards and punishments dispensed? And who sets priorities interms of time, cost and performance objectives?