Introduction
Synergy is a very common word used by the business world, and it simply means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When salesmen of a company put their efforts to increase sales performance of
the company, it is seen that the total result of their individual efforts (considering each one of them giving their maximum) is always less than what they can achieve when worked cohesively following a plan
formed by the group. However, this collaborative movement will produce the best result only under the guidance of a skilled leader of the group. Without an efficient leadership, the collaborative movement of
the sales team will simply fail to produce the desired synergic effect.
Collaboration and the efficient leadership, to use the collaboration technique,have taken a pivotal position in conducting the affairs of the global business world. According to Frost and Sullivan, the
growing complexities of the business world are continuously putting pressure on the individuals to strike a balance in between the demands of personal life and that of the professional life and, these
complexities have given the birth of the collaboration solution to accomplish the professional responsibilities in the most efficient manner by maintaining the personal front of life. According to them:
“collaboration solutions are tools, culture and processes that allow people to work together.” To judge the effect of collaboration on overall business performance, the decision makers from some prominent
organisations in Europe, Asia and United states were surveyed by Frost and Sullivan and what they have found could be summarised as below:
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Autocratic leadership style: It is very significant style of leadership in which a leader takes all the decision on the basis of his gut feeling and whatever he is thinking towards the situation. The role of
employees and followers is completely negligible in taking the decisions. Before assessing the impact of this style there is a huge requirement of creating certain situations. As here the impact of leadership has
been measured on employees so the situation could be related to the experience or inexperience level of employees. The impact of leadership styles could vary as per the working pattern of employees as well. It is
to acknowledge that if the employees are highly skilled and have a sufficient amount of experience, then using the autocratic leadership style could put negative impact on them. It can prevent them to showcase
their potential and most importantly, they couldn’t be in the position to use their talent freely. The worst impact is that it can stop their growth as they are not able to utilize the talent due to the
autocratic behaviour of a leader. On the contrary, if the employees are indiscipline and inexperienced then the autocratic leadership style can put positive impact at followers. In such situation, the leader can
guide the followers in proper way and can ensure their growth as well. It provides a huge level of learning opportunity to the subordinates. But this element could be successful only if the followers and leaders
share health relationship with each other and follower have trust on leaders. Thus, in this way the autocratic leadership style can put both positive and negative impacts on followers but there is need of
ensuring the accuracy of situation.
Participative leadership style: It is another leadership style which is very common within the organizational settings. It is just opposite to the autocratic leadership style. Here in participative leadership
style, a leader includes employees in the decision making process and it also has both positive and negative impacts at the followers. Again the situations are same as above. First is that if the employees are
highly experienced then they feel motivated and in order to impress the leaders they nurture their potential and try to use their experience so that the innovative ideas could be provided into the decision making
process. It removes the stress and high level of job satisfaction among followers could be noticed. On the contrary, if the leader is supportive or believes in participative leadership style then it just provides
the growth opportunities and most importantly develops the confidence among followers who have less experience. They can apply their mind and followers get a proper chance to showcase their potential. It is
considered as a most ideal leadership style that could be adopted by any leader. The only negative impact of participative leadership style is that decision making could be delayed as discussion is the basis of
this particular style of leadership.
The collaboration has a profound influence in shaping the performance of the organisation. Collaboration, when exercised methodically and under a good collaborative leadership has been found to have a significant
positive impact on sales, profitability etc. of the companies under consideration. The organisations, which use the collaboration solution effectively, have been successful in creating a cohesive force to bind
and interconnect the activities of the internal and external affairs and decision making processes of the organisation to make the organisations behave and act like a single unit and, thus has created significant
internal and external economies of scale and more importantly has improved the efficiency of the employees of the organisation thereby improving its overall performance. Although the companies offering
professional and financial services have been found to be more collaborative by the study of Frost and Sullivan than the manufacturing companies on the global level, it has revealed by their study that, the
organisations adopting the more collaborative approach have been more successful than the organisations where collaboration is yet to be adopted completely as a major management tool to bring about a dynamic
changes in the overall organisational performance.
However, inviting collaboration as a concept is not enough to get the value enhancing effect. To have the most positive impact of collaboration in augmenting the value creating activities, the leadership should
be concerned about the following factors:
Collaboration is most effective when it is applied at the right time, by the right people and for the right problem. Collaboration is not the end of all solutions and if applied in a situation which does not
warrant for a collective effort then, collaboration could produce devastating result. It has been found that collaboration when used extensively in all kinds of business decisions and activities will lead to the
wastage of significant amount of productive time because of numerous fruitless meeting to come to a consensus to make strategic or operational decisions. If the two business units with entirely different target
and products are asked to collaborate then the decision maker will get simply distracted as, the collaboration of the two different business units, to achieve overall objective of the entire organisation will
produce conflict in between the leaders of the two units thereby destroying value.
While implementing collaboration within the organisation the leaders should not forget that collaboration is not a new technology which could be implemented by operating some machines. Rather, collaboration means
creation of cohesiveness in between various units of an organisation having similar operations and same line of goal. This cohesiveness means the cohesiveness in between the employees. The main element of
collaboration is creating belief within the employees of the organisation that, collaboration is required to achieve their objective as well as the overall objective of the organisation and thus, providing them
the feeling that they are the only one to make the collaboration effort a value creator for the company.
If there is collaboration there could be conflict and if there is a conflict that does not mean that collaboration is creating problems. Conflict in between different personnel, if healthy, then it is a welcome
effect of collaboration. In fact in any collaborative decision making process the contrary views are important to decide the most effective decision by judging the pros and cons of different conflicting views.
Thus the above points suggest that in case of addressing the complex issues collaboration, among the decision makers, will produce the best result only when the collaborative effort will be steered by an
efficient leadership.
David Chrislip and Carl Larson, in their book Collaborative Leadership, stated that: “.. if you bring the appropriate people together in constructive ways with good information, they will create authentic
visions and strategies for addressing the shared concerns of the organizations or community ”. A collaborative leadership is the process of bringing together the people with visions and quality and to
encourage the group, by setting the decision making process, to solve a complex organisational problem by discussion and interaction within the members of the group and thereby sharing the responsibility of
making the decision as well asimplementing the sameto enhance the performance of the business.
To get the best value of implementing collaboration, the leader should reflect a collaborative leadership having the following qualities:
The decision making should not be done by the leader, but should be done on the basis of the collaborative discussion amongst the members of the group selected for making the decision. The effort of the
leader is to bring out the best of the members by helping them to focus on the problem.
The leader should be open minded enough to accept the decision of the group in the best interest of the organisation. Being a leader you should not start the group decision making process with a definite
result in your mind. The end result should not be set by the collaborative leader, rather he/she should lead the group to come to the final decision and should steer the group in implementing the decision.
The leadershould conduct the collaborative decision making process in a way to make sure that every member of the decision making group should feel that his/her opinion is important and he/she is an
indispensible part of the process. This will help the leader to have the best possible effort from each member of the group and will also help to influence the members to share the responsibility of
implementing the decision in the most effective and efficient manner.
