Collaborative leadership: 4 key steps to accelerate team performance

Did you know that engaged teams can increase your organization's profitability by 23%? 

This finding from Gallup (2024) shows the extent to which employee engagement (the ability to actively participate in and find meaning in corporate issues and projects) is a key performance lever for organizations. 

It is true that striking the right balance between culture, performance and execution is a complex task when it comes to achieving good engagement. But getting it right can deliver significant competitive and sustainable advantages.

What is certain is that team engagement and effective collaboration are directly related to how teams are managed. In fact, according to Gallup, 70% of the variance in a team's engagement is directly related to its leader!

To improve the engagement of their teams and generate better performance, managers need to transform their collaboration practices. They need to move from top-down management to human-centric and collaborative leadership, while helping their teams achieve greater autonomy and accountability, especially in a hybrid work environment.

This guide presents our 4-step methodology to help your managers achieve this goal and transform their role and practices in an ever-changing context. This methodology harnesses the power of collaboration tools and visual management to deliver fast, tangible results, and enables effective monitoring of engagement performance over time.

1. Simplify the manager's role with the power of collaboration

Reduce interaction complexity

Today's managers have an average of 51% more responsibilities than they can handle (Gartner). These responsibilities are also more complex:

• More projects and people to coordinate;
• Greater cost pressures;
• Difficulty maintaining frequent contact with teams that are not always 100% on-site. 

This is especially true for middle managers. With direct contact to both teams and top management, they are responsible for translating organizational goals into operational issues, creating additional responsibilities for them on both sides.

It is therefore important to start by simplifying the way your managers work and interact with their teams on a daily basis. An effective and easy-to-implement solution is to try using collaboration tools based on visual management. 

Through easy-to-see, easy-to-remember media such as diagrams, online whiteboards, or collaboration platforms, you can free your managers from the burden of ensuring that information is shared and accessible to everyone, anywhere, anytime.

Help managers think like coaches

According to Gartner's previous study, no less than 77% of employees consider their manager's support essential to their work. To reinforce this attitude in the current context, managers must position themselves as collaboration facilitators, and take on a coaching role with their teams. This is what we call collaborative leadership.

The goal is to support teams rather than control their actions, so that collaboration fosters exchange and trust. This paradigm shift is necessary to respond to current management issues and to achieve concrete results, both in terms of performance and employee well-being.

In fact, this has two important benefits: changing the manager’s role in this way can increase your performance, but also improve employee retention. In a global context of talent shortages, teams that benefit from effective management are 15.4 times more likely to perform better, and 3.2 times more likely to stay with their company (Gartner).

2. Develop human-centric and collaborative leadership practices

Once the manager's role has been simplified, they can focus on implementing management practices that facilitate smooth collaboration while respecting the specific needs of each employee.

Create an appropriate collaborative workspace

First, you need to extend the principle of simplifying work and collaboration to the entire team, beyond your managers. Here are a few examples of the roadblocks that a lack of collaborative leadership creates for today's employees:

• Time-consuming searches for information or documents across multiple tools and applications;
• Difficulty moving seamlessly between in-person and remote work when working in hybrid mode;
• Hard to get everyone on the same page,...

To overcome these challenges and improve the performance of your teams, consider creating an innovative, flexible workspace that can adapt to your changing context and simplify your interactions from anywhere.

Klaxoon’s collaboration platform is an example of an effective suite of tools for creating this centralized, visual space. It consists of an online whiteboard called Board, and several interactive activities that can be combined together to instantly facilitate your teamwork:

• Co-edition and centralization of information and files;
• Cloud-based storage with powerful search features;
• Always up-to-date content, ensuring that every team member has the same level of information.

Facilitate skills development and continuous improvement

However, the adoption of new technologies can sometimes be met with reluctance, because of the "techno-stress" they can create. This phenomenon occurs when poorly integrated or explained tools create confusion among employees. 

In fact, according to a Gallup study, 36% of European employees feel that their company's recent technology investments have not improved their work experience, mainly because these tools were imposed on them without proper support.

To avoid this, and to make it easier for your teams to get to grips with your collaborative workspace, your managers need to effectively train and inform them:

• Facilitate knowledge sharing among team members by encouraging them to create their own content and distribute information using their collaboration tools.
• Use these tools to promote a continuous improvement approach, especially through information sharing and ideation workshops. For example, you can test the 5 Whys method to better understand the reasons behind a project, or conduct a post-project retrospective to understand what worked well and define your areas for improvement.

It is not just about mastering the tools, it is also about instilling a growth and innovation mindset in your teams. With this mindset, managers and employees will be constantly motivated to progress and improve together.

Foster a culture of feedback

Regular and constructive feedback is an essential management practice for improving decision-making and fostering better communication between your managers and your teams. Whether it is to optimize day-to-day work or to improve employee experience, feedback shared individually or with the whole team must be a two-way exchange to be fully effective.

While this approach may seem obvious, a study conducted by Workleap shows that only 1 in 4 employees feel they receive enough feedback from their manager to have a clear overview of their progress towards their goals.

Thus, a good feedback exchange with your team should enable you to:

• Create a climate of trust between manager and team members, which is essential for open dialogue.
• Pragmatically address what is working well and what needs improvement.
• Engage stakeholders in a shared and effective action plan.
• Include a diversity of viewpoints to reduce bias in decision-making and achieve faster, higher quality decisions.

Again, Klaxoon's collaboration platform can help you share constructive and effective feedback, so you can move forward as a team with confidence. For example, with Survey and Question tools, your managers can effectively gather feedback from their teams, wherever they are. This gives them a simple, interactive way to build a culture based on feedback exchange that accelerates performance.

3. Proactively engage team members

According to Workleap, 75% of employees feel that their manager doesn't set clear enough goals. This figure illustrates a recurring problem: teams don't always have all the information they need to effectively manage their own collaboration.

The next goal for your managers is to get their teams on board with the practices outlined above, and to give them the tools and autonomy they need to become the driving force behind their own collaborative processes. It is also a matter of understanding their needs, which may vary by work style, generation, and other factors.

Co-create effective team rituals

First and foremost, establishing regular, structured team rituals that focus on your shared goals not only improves efficiency, but also ensures your teams' engagement. Here are just a few examples of the benefits your leaders can reap:

• Create a sense of togetherness: Through rituals like icebreakers or quick daily check-ins, your managers can easily keep their team members connected, even when they are not physically in the same place.
• Clearly define goals: By always referring to concrete goals during team rituals, for example using tools such as the SMART method or OKRs, your managers can make expectations and results clear and accessible to everyone.

Encourage teams to bounce ideas off each other

In a high-performing team, each member needs to feel heard and involved in collective decisions. In addition to instilling a culture of feedback between managers and employees, it is critical to encourage employees to actively respond and share ideas with each other, whether it is through suggestions, comments or voting for their favorite ideas. 

Klaxoon's collaboration platform makes it easy for managers to engage their entire team and get them excited about participating. For example, thanks to poll or rating Questions, the "Like" function or dot voting, your teams can quickly and visually select the best ideas shared during an exchange or brainstorming session.

Speed up decision-making with asynchronous interactions

Today's synchronous collaboration constantly interrupts deep work. 

Whether it is meetings, video conferencing, or instant notifications, this phenomenon drains employees' energy and generates the so-called “Zoom fatigue”. Not to mention the fact that it takes them an average of 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption! (University of California - Irvine).

Faced with this reality, it is essential to increase the autonomy of your teams through asynchronous interactions. They can significantly reduce cognitive load at all hierarchical levels, by providing a flexible work environment that encourages individual responsibility.

To speed up the implementation of asynchronous practices, your managers can use collaborative working methods based on co-development:

• Clearly identify each person's role and responsibilities using a RACI matrix;
• Concretely monitor progress on an individual or collective level with a monthly performance review, without forgetting to recognize success when goals are met.

4. Measure and sustain engagement over time

Finally, for this methodology to have a real impact, it is essential that your managers are able to link their teams' engagement indicators to their performance KPIs, so that they can track their joint evolution over time. 

Being able to concretely measure team engagement will give you the means to maintain or even improve it, and to quickly adapt to changes in context or internal dynamics.

To do this, you can set up a manual tracking system with your analytical tools, which could perfectly work, but would require some time to retrieve the data, enter it into the system, and reconcile it. Alternatively, you can pull your engagement statistics directly from your all-in-one collaboration workspace.

Klaxoon is currently the only collaboration platform that offers such features. For each of your Klaxoon activities (Board, Question, Surveyl,...), your managers can consult a dedicated dashboard with all their engagement-related metrics: 

• Number of participants;
• Engagement rate;
• Activity progress level, etc. 

So you know exactly which activities are generating the most engagement, and your managers have a clear guide to continuously improve their practices, and make their leadership more collaborative.

Conclusion

To turn collaboration into a true performance driver, it is critical to integrate the concept of engagement into your management practices. By adopting a collaborative leadership style that empowers and actively engages your teams, you can not only improve performance, but also attract and retain the best talent.

This shift may seem ambitious, but it has undeniable benefits: by giving your managers and their teams the tools and autonomy they need, you are empowering them to become real drivers of your business.

To support you in this new management approach, collaborative tools and visual management have become essential. Klaxoon’s collaboration platform provides you with a complete workspace that simplifies the interactions between your managers and teams, and increases their daily efficiency.