3 skills for collaborative leaders

- I once asked a Silicon Valley CEO why he thought command and control leadership was wrong. He corrected me. There's nothing wrong with command and control, it's simply irrelevant in the 21st century. In this networked world, we need leaders who know how to collaborate. Here are three crucial skills for collaborative leaders. One, empathetic listening. Recent research from Development Dimensions International, with over 15,000 leaders from more than 300 organizations across 20 industries and in 18 countries, looked at leadership communication skills that had the highest impact on overall performance. At the very top of the list was the skill of empathetic listening. The purpose of empathetic listening is to understand the speaker's perspective. That requires you to focus totally on the other person without letting your mind wander to other issues or preparing your response in advance. For many leaders, the most difficult part of empathetic listening is ignoring the urge to prematurely solve the problem. Often, people only want a sounding board, but even if your advice is required, empathetic listening ensures that you are fully informed before you respond. Two, social sensitivity. When Google studied hundreds of their teams, they found two behaviors that all great teams shared. First of all, team members spoke roughly the same amount of time. No one dominated the conversation, and no one withdrew into silence. Second, successful teams all had high social sensitivity, which meant that group members were good at gauging how others felt based on nonverbal signals, their body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. You can test your social sensitivity by looking at photos of people's eyes and seeing if you can describe what they're feeling. Reading the Mind in the Eyes is an online test that you and your team can take. It's a great way to introduce social sensitivity and its impact on collaboration. Three, visual thinking. In essence, visual thinking is the use of simple sketches and pictures to illustrate a concept. To use visual thinking to help your team define collaboration, try this exercise. Divide people into groups of four or five and give each group a large sheet of paper with colored markers. Ask the groups to agree on a definition for collaboration, and display it in a simple drawing. Remind them, it's not about artistic ability, it's only about making their idea visual. As the groups explain their drawings to the rest of the team, you may be surprised at the depth of conversation that follows. These are three collaborative skills that you can put into action immediately. I'd advice starting with empathetic listening because it's one of the most effective skills you can master, and you can practice it in every conversation you have.