The Art of Co-Leading: How to Thrive When Leaders Differ
Last week, I wrote about the potential for collaborating teams to diverge and how to avoid it. This week, I want to get more specific about what happens when two leaders with different priorities, values, capabilities and/or personalities attempt to bring their teams together to achieve a shared outcome.
Ideally, the 2 leaders would kick off their work together by talking openly about questions such as:
What are the most important things to know about each other as we commence this work?
Given the differences in our leadership styles, what will it be like for our people to work with us? How can we make things easier for them to navigate us?
Given our relative strengths, what roles should we each play in leading this work? How can we make sure our teams understand our division of labour?
When should we work together, and when will it be best to work independently?
How will we keep ourselves accountable to each other and to our teams?
How will we make decisions throughout the project?
What will we do when we disagree? How can we ensure our teams have clear direction on our resolution?
Of course, we can't always rely on the ideal.
Sometimes, the leaders will diverge, taking their teams with them.
When that happens, here are some steps to take to bring them back together:
Encourage the leaders to stop and (together) reflect on how their current actions serve their shared objectives. It may be helpful to facilitate the conversation for them to produce a deeper reflection. Giving them some questions to ponder before the meeting makes this easier. (I have some resources I will happily share to help with this.)
Provide feedback to each leader that explicitly identifies the behaviours you observe leading to the divergence. They may be unaware of the impact of their behaviour. This step is significant if the shared reflection is less effective than you hoped.
Talk to each leader independently and reinforce the importance of a united front. Emphasise the impact on the broader team if they appear divided. Confusion may result in unnecessary work, duplication or even work that is in direct conflict. If this happens, there are also significant effects on team harmony, individual engagement, and motivation.
Attempt to identify potential underlying sources of conflict or competition hindering their collaborative efforts. These may not be obvious. They may be grounded in what seems like long-forgotten history or anticipation of competing prospects. The more light you can shed on these potential issues, the more likely you can reduce their impact.
Seek explicit commitment from both leaders (together) about how they intend to manage the current and future divergence. Your goal is to create a shared sense of accountability for keeping the collaborative efforts on track.
Diverse collaborative leadership can yield incredible results. When leaders join forces, their unique strengths can drive unparalleled innovation and growth - but that will only happen with careful consideration and ongoing commitment to working together to serve the collective goals.