Collaborative Working
Few things can be achieved by one person alone. Both internally and externally, collaboration, empowerment and inclusion are essential for success.
A multifaceted approach
Unlocking collaboration through developing capabilities and evolving culture.
Shared aims
aligning agendas to find or create, rather than impose, shared purpose
Safe spaces
building inclusion, trust, confidence, and belonging needed for honesty
Conflict
the language and behaviour to minimise, and resilience and skills to navigate
Power
sharing or transferring, or addressing the structures that create the imbalance
Foundations of collaboration
Every mission-led organisation needs to be able to convene and collaborate with others if it is to achieve its full potential and to bring about the outcomes or the society it envisions. But few have embedded the deeper culture and capabilities required, throughout their organisation, for that to happen.
Whether your ambition is to better include and co-create solutions or services with those you serve, their families and communities.
Whether it’s about working better with others around your cause, building partnerships and collectives, strategic alliances, or much broader movements of organisations and individuals.
Whether it’s about increasing internal collaboration, to improve agility and ownership and drive innovation and efficiency.
Whether it’s about developing leadership at all levels and shifting away from a “top-down” or “learned helplessness” culture.
Or whether it’s about all these things because they are very often interlinked.
The approach we use to bring about behavioural change needs, in itself, to reflect the changes we aim to achieve. Collaborative and distributed leadership styles can’t simply be imposed from above, but the process of change does begin at the top, by building the foundations within your executive and senior team.
Martyn will help you clarify what you want to achieve, and decide how best you can begin the journey through a manageable process of change.
A Developmental Mindset
Effective collaboration comes almost entirely down to behaviours and mindset, and most often develop as habit (or don’t) through cultural learning. That is, through exposure within the cultures and workplaces that have shaped each of us.
That’s why, for some people it feels natural, for others quite alien.
Cultural change is about developing and embedding new norms within an organisation. And it requires a multifaceted approach: environment, expectations, education, accountabilities, incentives; but invariably it has leadership modelling at its core.
Martyn’s collaborative approach means that he will work with you and your team to develop shared aims, definitions, and rationale, to create the spaces and practice the behaviours and skills required, and to help you begin sharing and distributing power towards more collaborative forms of leadership and working practice.
The more these models embed at leadership level, the more they will flow through the organisation and transform your ability to collaborate, internally and externally at all levels.
A collaborative community
Martyn’s belief in a collaborative approach runs through everything we do, from strategy and commercial development projects to individual and group coaching programmes.
It’s evident in Martyn’s ongoing work with a variety of coalitions and groups. Collaborations, like the “Shaping the Future with Volunteering” group, who created what is now the annual Big Help Out, initially formed through events hosted within Martyn’s community.
Martyn hosts a growing community of non-profit leaders and CEOs, many of whom regularly join him as speakers and partners for free public seminars and events. He also hosts learning groups where leaders share their experiences, insights, and ongoing challenges, and build connections with each other.
To join the community, just get in touch.
What clients say
Don’t just take our word for it. This is what clients have said.