One of the five factors of Connected Leadership is about team working and collaborative achievement to create results. I saw the commercial power of this recently in our own business at Cirrus where we won a major contract following what we call a 'Connect All' meeting.
The contract was a significant new programme with an
existing client who was looking for something very different to what we had
done before. I'd put forward a few ideas but they didn't seem to be getting the
level of enthusiasm I had hoped for.
So we called a 'Connect All' meeting, which is an open
session where anyone can pitch up and contribute. I explained the issue and
then we opened it up for discussion and idea generation. After a while, two
consultants started to probe the nature of the changes the client was seeking
to achieve through this programme. This led them to suggest a much more
disruptive approach, and this developed into quite different idea for the programme to what I had
anticipated, drawing on work we had done with various clients but in different
circumstances.
After further scoping and design we took this idea back
to the client and they loved it. We won the work and the programme is going
well. From a really simple collaborative discussion came fresh thinking, using
knowledge from one part of the business to good effect in another part.
Collaborative achievement in action.