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Collaborative Leadership:
 The Top 10 Traits of Collaborative Leaders

May 2015

by Bob Giacometti, Managing Partner, Practice Leader-Human Resources, The Insight Group

Today, many product oriented companies are providing more fee-based services and solutions offerings to their customers to help grow revenue and profit as their product margins shrink. To develop and deliver these new offerings requires a number “expert” practice teams working with customers and others to solve client problems. This requires a highly collaborative leadership style and The INSIGHT Group has identified those key leadership traits found in the most successful services leaders who achieve higher results through others by: Collaborative Leadership:Top 10 Traits

1. Partnering

By seeking partners based on mutual interests to accomplish goals, collaborative leaders build enduring partner networks inside and outside of the organization that lead to improved business results and shared success.

2. Influencing

Motivating others and positively influencing their actions in the best interests of the firm, its clients, and its business partners by encouraging others to work together and gaining their understanding and buy-in, helps collaborative leaders build genuine commitment to achieve shared goals and sustain success in services.

3. Trusting

Earning trust and building valued relationships based on mutual respect and integrity both inside and outside of the organization, helps collaborative leaders balance internal and external priorities and helps them to become trusted “C” level strategic advisors within the firm - and with clients.

4. Enabling

Collaborative leaders are change agents that help remove obstacles that impede individual and organizational high performance, success, and growth. They provide strategic focus for actions that improve systems, tools, and processes enabling others to contribute more effectively.

5. Inspiring

By creating and sharing their vision and modeling the way, collaborative leaders inspire others to embrace complex and challenging situations in order to achieve higher returns for themselves and the organization.

6. Developing

Fostering a learning environment by investing time and resources for developing customer valued skills for themselves, others, and the firm encourages individual and cross-team development, helps builds vital and diverse teams, anticipates client needs, and builds future thought leaders.

7. Risk Taking

Seeking new opportunities and pursuing them vigorously and encouraging others to do the same within the firm’s strategic vision, operational framework, and evolving markets allows the firm to learn from both success and failure and helps to secure strategic growth.

8. Creating

By seeking and integrating the ideas, perspectives, and concepts of others with actions focused on market views and long term impacts, collaborative leaders encourage leading edge offerings and solutions development linked with client needs to help grow the business.

9. Decision Making

By engaging all stakeholders and using broad research considering both traditional and new approaches, and their tactical and strategic impacts, collaborative leaders are able to make tough fact-based decisions quickly in order to capture rapidly evolving opportunities. They also empower others to do the same using their expertise, experience, and accountability.

10. Executing

Collaborative leaders are adept at leveraging the firm’s strategy, collective talent, and resources to achieve excellence and win in the market place. They execute with urgency, align risks and rewards, anticipate and adapt to the unexpected, set expectations for collaboration and excellence, and let the strategy drive actions and structure.

Assessing these capabilities through Self/360 Collaborative Leadership Assessment tools, such as those developed by The Insight Group, can help identify specific areas needing development. This can greatly improve the effectiveness of services leaders and help to improve client and firm success.


If you would like more information on developing Collaborative Leaders, contact Bob Giacometti (giaco@insight-group.com )

Bob Giacometti - The Insight Group Email Bob Giacometti View Bob Giacometti's LinkedIn profile

Bob Giacometti helps INSIGHT clients align and improve key HR initiatives with evolving services business strategies and processes through best practices and collaborative leadership. As IBM’s Global Services HR executive he developed new global HR partnerships and the IBM Global Solutions Institute framework for global skills and leadership development. Bob has been a collaborative leadership educator and mentor throughout his career and led executive and management development groups at IBM, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, The Rockefeller Foundation, and with clients.

More on Bob at INSIGHT



The INSIGHT Group is a management consulting firm dedicated to assisting product-based companies implement high growth services and solutions business plans and strategies. We help clients design and execute broad transformational initiatives including go to market strategies as they extend their product portfolio to include delivering capabilities as a service. Our partners are experienced line executives with a proven track record of helping our clients transform from a product-focused company to services and solutions led company.

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