How to Drive Collaboration & Unity on Your Team: Strategies from the Geneva Leadership Alliance

Memorize this line:

“I am not alone anymore.”

That is your mantra for this bright new year of 2025. As we learned in this week’s podcast, the leadership paradigm has changed. Effective leaders no longer lead solo; rather, the most effective leadership is now collective, focusing on shared practices within teams instead of fixating on individual roles and competencies.

We’ve really known this for a long, long time. Our cultures abound with adages reflecting various aspects of it, from “It’s lonely at the top” to “Two heads are better than one.”

It’s just taking management a few millennia to catch up, but as our podcast guests – Peter Cunningham and Patrick Sweet of the Geneva Leadership Alliance – point out, our modern era of information overload, war, climate crises, and rapid change presents too much for any one person to process alone…much less to make clear decisions through.

The solution runs along two broad paths: shared responsibility with your team (internal) and collaboration with other leaders (external). But first, you must prepare yourself (individual)!

The leadership mindsets we teach at the Innovative Leadership Institute remain critical. Focus first on three essentials: empathy, communication, and alignment. They help you understand the people on your team, share your vision and goals, and ensure their vision and direction align with yours. Then, prepare your mind. We must all grow our cognitive capacities to handle the increasing complexity around us, so stretch your neuroplasticity: read, master new skills, take a class, learn a new language, and generally expose yourself to newness. Of course, keeping abreast of the latest in your industry and specialty remains vital, but growing outside of your narrower experiences helps you see far bigger pictures and solutions which may have been hidden before in what you thought was unrelated knowledge.

As for the path with your team, the single most critical step remains building a shared vision and aligning everyone’s efforts behind it. You must forge a common purpose. People tend to self-police when they know the common goal the team works toward. Formalize this with shared accountability; groups begin to monitor themselves and their progress when they know success is collective. In these regards, you’re sharing leadership, although the ultimate responsibility remains yours as the titular leader.

Looking outside your team, watch for opportunities to collaborate. It might be a one-on-one collaboration with another leader in your organization, having your team work deeply with a business partner’s team, or even allying with your competition to solve an industry-wide issue. (525 different businesses signing on to Amazon’s climate pledge, as heard in last week’s podcast, is an excellent example of this.) Sharing leadership in this way introduces you to knowledge and experience you would never have been able to access before, reduces stress as workloads spread out, and helps your own morale because others help carry the weight of responsibility.

In short, with these routes of collective leadership, success becomes more and more likely. And that will make for a very happy new year indeed.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our remastered podcast episode Geneva Experts Share Why Leadership is a Group Effort.

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