Strengthening the Mindset & Skills for Leading a Collaborative

Effective collaboration demands a unique mindset and specific skills

Join leaders of community-based collaboratives for a half-day virtual workshop that will help you strengthen and share the mindsets and skills of collaborative leadership.

This virtual workshop is designed for leaders of multi-sector collaboratives, backbone staff of collective impact efforts, funders and other leaders who are working together to pursue shared goals. The workshop will provide you with essential mindsets, skillsets and resources to apply what you are learning to advance your day-to-day work.

Mindset

Mindset refers to an individual’s deeply held beliefs and attitudes. Our mindset shapes our behaviors and practices. Together, we’ll dive deep into the beliefs and attitudes that advance collective action and shared responsibility, and explore ways that we can strengthen our mindset, as well as encourage others to adopt a collaborative mindset.

Five Skills

1) Facilitation makes it easier for the members of a collaborative to make decisions, act and learn together. Facilitation helps the players identify, balance and ultimately leverage inherent tensions that drive positive change. We will share tools and tactics to enhance your ability to support the players as they navigate through the collaboration cycle.

2) Evaluation of how well the diverse players interact with each other provides the collaborative with early and consistent insight that can be used to strengthen its outcomes. The workshop will introduce a simple framework for evaluating the health of your collaborative.

3) Understanding Context helps us to translate the diverse priorities and motivations of the players, as well as outside forces, into opportunities for advancing the shared purpose of the collaborative. The workshop will provide tools that help deepen our understanding of the interrelated conditions that are holding the status quo in place and identify leverage points that can be exploited to disrupt that status quo.

4) Inquiry, which is asking new compelling questions and listening deeply to the answers that emerge, empowers the players to frame opportunities differently and allows new solutions and approaches to emerge. In the workshop we will practice asking three types of compelling questions and try different techniques for improving our ability to listen to the answers that emerge.

5) Building Trust is perhaps the most important skill of all because collaboration moves at the speed of trust. In the workshop we’ll break down the elements of trust and provide you with tools and tactics to help you to act and communicate in ways that build trust with and among the members of our collaboratives.