In my company, we've often internally discussed the prime challenges of leadership. The consensus usually comes round to how difficult it is to create an environment where diverse groups of individuals can work together effectively. This challenge can be over-complicated with the abundant, oversimplified literature on Collaboration that you might have read.

Today, new paradigms of organizational hierarchies are emerging, and with it, new styles of leadership are becoming more acceptable. It is up to human capital specialists to confront these new challenges with new thinking. For Example Collective Leadership involves not only the sharing of authority, but also of accountability. However, the latter can often be ignored when there is a crisis situation or results are not achieved.

Dale Carnegie Training India recently released a comprehensive Employee Engagement report, where we discovered that one of the few ways to get a group of people to take collective responsibility is to engage them in their work and in a larger purpose.

A significant 61% of employees were willing to put in extra work hours to complete a task when they were engaged.

When we apply this knowledge to the paradigm of collective leadership, it has the potential to generate remarkable results. Shared goals are by products of employee buy-in, which in turn is the result of engaging people together.

Shared or collective leadership is a great way to ensure business continuity and minimize the risk of unexpected leadership crises created by vacancies at the top. Some of the important tools to attain the same are:

• Establish clearly defined goals at the start with benchmarks for expected performance and allocated tasks among members.
• Invest in developing strong communication people and team engagement skills.
• Assess levels of employee engagement at regular intervals.
• Set up regular coaching and feedback mechanisms.
• Collectively celebrate success.

A word of caution though- although collaborative approaches can help develop engagement among individuals, the need for accountability and clear execution of strategy remains sacrosanct. The two challenges here are inaction due to lack of direct responsibility and stagnation due to lack of consensus. You need to find a way to blend both authority and accountability, so that the organization is networked, yet remains focused on execution and results. A possible alternative would be to start small - many firms prefer to test out collective leadership on a more controlled scale before rolling it out globally.

In our 12 years of working with premier companies in India we have emphasized that, assessing and developing employee engagement is vital for igniting workplace enthusiasm to achieve business results. In the end, successful collective models with engaged stakeholders at the helm will encourage average managers to take charge and blossom into exceptional leaders.