Collaboration. To Michael
Graham, it’s more than just a business buzzword, it’s
the key to developing and
maintaining a culture of
teamwork in any organization.
Employees want and deserve
to be kept in the loop with
regard to what your business is
trying to accomplish, says the
president of Xavier University,
and they need to see how their
jobs fit in to the larger picture.
Graham says the only way you
can accomplish that is through
building a culture that values
collaboration and considers
ideas from everyone.
Smart Business spoke with
Graham, who has been the
president of the $152 million
Jesuit Catholic school since
2001, about how leaders can
involve everyone.
Collaboration is key. I’m increasingly convinced that an older-style, command-and-control
form of leadership does not
work effectively. You get much
more out of people if you capture their hearts and souls
because then they’ll work for
you as hard as they can because
they are as passionate about the
overall objectives as you are.
Having people work across
networks that are formed or
reformed on the basis of the
issue that needs to be
addressed is absolutely key.
Something I’ve also come to
believe is leadership needs to be
inspirational. That relates directly to big-picture-mission kinds
of questions. One of the things I
can provide is a sense of the
direction, the hill we’re going to
take, so to speak. Why we’re
taking this hill and why your
helping us take this hill will help
you feel better about your life
and make you a better person.
In other words, connecting
the individual’s sense of themselves with the larger corporate project is terribly important, and it’s something you
have to do at regular intervals
across your community.
Find people who value teamwork.Make sure you attract people
who believe in a collaborative
approach, and that you reward
collaboration and don’t
encourage, for lack of a better
term, ownership activity when
it starts to pop up.
Having said that, there are
also times when someone has
to make a decision and people
need to feel empowered to
make a decision. Otherwise,
everything devolves into endless talk.
As we look at people, and
we’ve been doing a lot of key
hires in the past several years, that is one of the things we
check on, to see what a person’s
reputation is for collaborative
engagement. To some degree,
it’s how you structure what the
tasks are, who you have come
together on a certain project so
that people get used to working
across boundaries.
Our departmental boundaries
have become blurred in recent
years with regard to that. It’s still
traditional in many ways, but
there are many more dotted
lines now because of the need
for participation across the old
silos and boundaries.
Tasks to be solved, especially
big-picture and really important
ones that have the capacity to
advance our frontiers, can’t be
answered within any one silo.
You need people from a variety of previously sectored-off sections of the organization.
Our world is a much more
complex place. We have an
awakening sense in the private
sector that the kinds of issues
we face are only going to be
addressed collaboratively.
Our business students are a
great case in point. There is no
way we ourselves can educate
our business students for the
world they are going to enter
when they graduate. We need
the expertise of all hands on
deck across the university.
But we also need an engaged
partnership with the business
community so they can give us
feedback on our curriculum,
what they’re looking for in a
business school graduate. That
departs completely from the
older mindset that we know the answer and the solutions,
and we’re going to shape our
students according to what we
think is best. That’s just not the
case anymore, nobody believes
that. Collaboration sets an
example for our students as to
what they’re going to need in
their professional careers.
Tap into people’s passions. You
need to harness people’s passions. When you harness their
passions, they’ll do 100, 120,
160 percent, whatever the
number. They’ll do it in a way
that is much easier than if they
don’t understand.
It’s also the right thing to do. I
come to work, I’m a priest, so I
shouldn’t be doing this work if
someone who isn’t a priest
could be doing it just as well as
me. So I can bring something to this, and it’s this sense that here
are whole people with whole
lives, they go home to a husband or wife or kids and they
have struggles and so on.
Everybody wants to have a
sense of purpose in life, that
somehow living your life
becomes easier, better, more
rewarding and meaningful if
you have a sense of contributing to something that is bigger,
broader and more lasting than
yourself. The university can
offer that because what we’re
about is very big.
People ought to have that
sense of meaning and purpose.
We’re owed that as human
beings, and I’m in the happy
position of being able to supply that because of my position of leadership.
HOW TO REACH: Xavier University, (800) 344-4698 or www.xavier.edu
