How Can Collaborative Leadership Deepen Engagement and Impact in Your Organization?

Have you taken the time to discover why and what you are doing and have it understood at every level in your organization? Does everyone have sights on your next point of leverage while taking efficient, forward action? If so, you have momentum propelling your business forward. If you see room for better execution and bigger results, the PLS Management Framework is for you.

Executing the PLS Management Framework

The principles of the PLS Management Framework:

• Transform inefficient interfaces, reclaiming unproductive business elements

• Embed inclusion, diversity of thought, and self-expectation to engage and act

• Enhance individual and group option access

This approach yields a staff with increasing capability and capacity, and step-ahead outcomes. The difficulty with today's business workplace experience is not a new problem; it's just running deeper - it's inefficiency. When thinking is left to organic development, it becomes a significant and costly underutilized resource that can even work against improvements. Since it permeates the entire business because it is prevalent in higher-level, non-task work, thinking influences the impact of all undertakings. Unaddressed, inefficiencies and errors in thinking dampens and dilutes projected outcomes.

The PLS Framework contains the following tenets:

• Micro-to-Macro. Expand or dial-in thinking through Cabrera Lab DSRP using the brain's natural thought structure. DSRP tells us that thinking isn't something we do, it is something we get from applying four simple rules; the Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives Rule.

• Modularization. Transferrable thought structures useful in multiple contexts accelerates learning and information sharing. These are "go-to" structures, cognitive moves, and frameworks that create familiar ground no matter the context or subject matter.

• Pluralism. Value the insight gained from multiple perspectives, inclusion and diversity. Pluralism embraces devolution and power sharing by bringing all stakeholders to the table and ensures a tailored approach based upon blended knowledge, expertise, and methodology. It distributes power and accountability and seeds individual contribution and action.

• Universality. Direction instead of detail empowers employees to think and act. There is also a commitment to a unified and consistent approach to interactions and leadership, and a fractal strategic structure.

How to implement these principles isn't as hard as you might think, nor does it take years to see substantial benefit. But it is a stepwise, layer-upon-layer approach and requires consistency in leadership message. Click on the elements below to learn more.

DSRP

The Theory: Thinking is an outcome of applying four simple rules. Awareness of these rules, and practice in applying them, increases your cognitive capacity. You think deeper, quicker, and smarter. For more information on DSRP click here.

Why it Works: DSRP opens thinking, removes bias, and helps build shared mental models so that there are deeper connections and understanding among employees. If regularly and repeatedly employed, DSRP yields reliably good results. It is the means for dialing in or expanding thinking, micro-to-macro; taking multiple perspectives, pluralism; supports modularization with cognitive structure that is also adaptable to any situation and the basis for universality.

Systems Thinking

The Theory: A transdisciplinary methodology with origins in the 1940s and 1950s that combines a myriad of ideas, science, concepts, and views to understand system behavior, through a holistic examination. There are several methodologies, but all rely heavily on the importance of understanding the relationships that influence system behavior.

Why it Works: Whether improving goal seeking and viability, exploring purpose, ensuring fairness, or promoting diversity, systems thinking is a holistic view of the interconnectivity and webs of causation in overlapping systems that form our business concerns and viability. Systems Thinking involves DSRP rules for micro-to-macro thinking; involves a blend of thinking for pluralism; supports modularization through fractal structure and highlighting structure and lowlighting content; realizing any idea, group, department, problem, business, market, etc. is a system-of-systems helps us see and challenge the system boundaries that are all around us, in support of universality.

Purpose

The Theory: Purpose is the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. Business leaders communicate their own, and organizational purpose. If they cannot articulate this clearly, the message to all is muddled. Worse still, they are probably leading their team in the wrong direction! Furthermore, businesses contain people who also have their own purpose, and these reasons for acting often compete with each other. Your "why" must be clearly defined; your business leaders intentional and purposeful.

Why is works: Creating direction and meaning in purpose and effectively communicating it leads to intentional behavior that supports goals and moves the business in a specific direction, universality. Revealing it should allow for discourse, and sorting through other "whys" that exist and how these ideals can be reconciled with each other, pluralism.

VMCL

The Theory: This is a Cabrera Lab approach to design your organization to align in support of your goals. You create a motivating and binary vision, mission of repeatable actions that supports vision, identify and increase primary capacities, and learning, that includes training, system feedback, and mission moments that give direct customer/consumer impact feedback.

Why it works: You design the organization and the thinking (which drives behavior) to support your intrinsically motivating vision, micro-to-macro. The structure facilitates agility by communicating direction, not detail relying on pluralism in action, and allows for distributed accountability and power-sharing, embedding universality. The structure is fractal, embedding modularization, since it can be implemented in meetings, projects, etc.

Collaboration

The Why: Collaboration is the collective engagement of stakeholders towards forming a shared mental model from which action can be taken. It naturally flows from shared purpose and safety and increases the capacity to get things done. Meetings are productive, and include cognitive moves and thought constructs that when combined with DSRP, accelerate the exchange of ideas and learning. Further, collaboration has the added impact of transforming individual and team capacity. The team you lead, will not be assembled again. Even if it is the same people come together on another initiative or project, they will have had different experiences that will create different perspectives and capabilities. This is such an exciting aspect of learning that most people never understand-and it is so exciting, and you are ahead of the game when you do.

Why it works: Collaboration increases capacity through the collective contributions of more individuals; a micro-to-macro approach of these collective contributions deepens engagement, accelerates learning, and creates more, better quality options. Modularization through thought constructs are "go to" templates for packaging thinking in a coherent and quick way. Collaboration embeds pluralism through multiple perspectives and when it is continually relied upon, supports universality. Employees know there is always someone there to support them in the fashion to which they are accustomed.

Impact

The Theory: Impact is the ultimate goal. We want actions to result in the impact for which we plan. We want efforts to be as efficient as possible since this decreases costs.

Why it works: Positive impact, or success is motivating. You see this in sports all the time, when a team gets momentum on their side to take control, and even win a game. Good results are motiving and have even been the driver of the development of civilization, see a deeper discussion, here. Impact is essential for fostering future action.

When you and your employees realize no matter the context, the management approach and structure is still the same, this becomes familiar ground and creates efficiencies and comfort zones that emancipate participants that might not feel such freedom to take part. Powerful and efficient engagement puts more people on the same footing, and distributes power and accountability. This has the added benefit of reducing burnout of frontline supervisors and managers.

Contentment, success, and happiness at work is an achievable result

Establishing the right principles, structure, and thinking is pivotal in fostering significant positive impact. This approach is about the daily choices and the small steps that collectively lead to significant change.

Lori G. Fisher, PMP

PLS Management Consulting

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