Blog Post #4

Collaboration is the most important thing when it comes to being an effective leader. If you and all your colleagues are not on the same page about a certain idea or topic then it is much harder to actually achieve anything. If you do not collaborate then others who you may be trying to lead will do everything in their power to go against what you say or what idea you have if they do not agree with it. Individuals find it hard to collaborate because often times everyone thinks their answer or solution is the best possible one and are not willing to hear other ideas.

Part of what makes collaboration so difficult is this idea of compromise. In order for a leader to get anything done, people on both sides of the issue need to be willing to compromise a little for the greater good. Many find this hard to do. For a successful collaborative effort everyone needs to be willing to do this. Take this as an example; lets say you are the President and CEO of Ford Motor Company in Detroit and you want to make it company policy that all of your viechles must get 40 MPG or better. 11 of the 14 other board members agree with you but there are 3 who are completely against the idea due to the terrible gas mileage of popular cars like the Mustang and Escape. Due to the fact you can not force them to collaborate with you, everyone in the room has to make some compromises to make anything happen. Without all 14 votes you can not make something company policy, everyone must agree.

Diversity is very important when it comes to collaboration because it enables you to see many different view points on a given issue and should be a highly valued asset for any group or company. Competition is a huge motivator when it comes to collaboration. Take the CEO example I had earlier, if you said "Toyota is doing this now, we have to beat them." then the other board members would be more willing to come up with a collaborative effort in order to remain on top, everyone wants to be number one.

In my chapter our vision is something we always talk about when it comes to making any big decison. I think you can never move forward if you forget where you came from and what you stand for and I make it a big issue when we are trying to make drastic changes. In our chapter we always ask active memebers their opinions on a given issue so that we can get a gauge of how the chapter feels about something and can come up with minor changes that make the entire chapter happy.