COLLABORATION IS MORE THAN JUST A WORD

Over the last twenty years, there has been an increasing recognition that collaboration is an important component in leadership. Many training programs have added a collaboration component. A few years ago, the Robert Wood Johnson Public Health Turning Point Initiative released a training program on collaborative leadership. Over the last couple of years, I have written a couple of postings on meta-leadership which has a component stressing the need for leaders to work across organizations during emergency events. At a community level, successful change generally involves leaders from neighborhoods as well as community organizations working together. Collaboration between leaders has a synergistic effect in that the sum total of activity of these leaders tends to lead to change greater than any one leader can create. Synergistic leadership is about both short term and long term change needed to lead to improvements in the health of community members. Synergistic leaders move beyond limited collaborative activities at a local level to expanded collaborative activities using all sorts of social networking tools. True collaboration must be built on trust and a full commitment to the collaborative enterprise. Collaborators who view community from a wide angle lens have a systems view of community that aid in seeing all of the factors that impact on health and improved health outcomes.

With the importance of collaboration in mind, it is important to recognize that collaboration must be real and not just a promise without a foundation in reality. I have seen trainers and collaboration proponents who do not practice what they preach. One individual I know has built a reputation on proposing a collaboration model that many people find useful. Yet, he is so wedded to his model that he makes his approach so inaccessible to others who wish to apply his approach without his approval. He appears threatened by others who want to modify the model to better fit their reality. He preaches collaboration but is not a collaborator himself. I have also observed professional organizations who argue that the organization should promote collaboration and also speak in a unified manner to other groups and organizations. Individuals who belong to these organizations then push individual agendas which undermine the unified approach that has been proposed. I have seen academics who go into communities for research and argue that they are there to collaborate with the community and then the academic leaves when the study is over. So much for collaboration.

Collaboration has to be more than just a word. It is the essence of how we should work . As leaders, we must practice what we preach. Leadership cannot exist in a vacuum. Collaboration creates models and allows us to build on each other’s work. Collaboration then allows us to turn ideas into action. We must not diminish the work of others. Collaboration can be energizing. It can also be fun.