Solving the complex problems that confront companies operating in today’s fast-paced, global business environment requires a new kind of leadership. CEOs, COOs and other positions high on the corporate ladder carry both great responsibility and authority. However, the most accomplished and nimble of today’s business leaders understand that true accountability and decision-making power is woven into the fabric of their organizations. Being a leader means being a listener, a fact-checker, a motivator and, in some sense, an artist akin to a film director or orchestra conductor.
Advanced business education programs like the online Master of Business Administration (MBA) program from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) can help professionals gain the complex skill set necessary for successful problem-solving in challenging leadership roles. Professionals can study the nuances of decision analysis, administrative strategy, business analytics, organizational behavior and much more with TAMU-CC’s MBA program.
Underpinning many of these areas of study is the foundational importance of collaboration and its key role in achieving the best possible solutions to complex problems. More and more, business leaders are turning to the principles of what’s known as collaborative problem-solving to address both their immediate and long-term goals. What is collaborative problem-solving? Why does it succeed where other approaches fail? And how are business leaders fostering the practice in their own organizations?
The 9 Stages of Collaborative Problem-solving
The Collaborative Leaders Network (CLN) is a nonprofit that began as a small study group consisting of “community members, business leaders, and policymakers.” This group formed with the intent of addressing entrenched economic and social issues facing all Hawaiians. They identified stakeholders from among a diverse array of demographic segments and instituted policies and procedures to collaborate on innovative solutions that can create sustainable, long-lasting change. This study group then assessed their own work and sought “to mine their respective wisdom and capture their collaborative problem-solving practices with the intention of sharing them broadly.”
The CLN since developed a nine-stage process for facilitating collaborative problem-solving.
- Clarify intentions
- Perform a background inquiry
- Develop a process design
- Launch the group
- Analyze the issues
- Generate a range of options and solutions
- Evaluate those options to create the strategy or plan
- Produce documents that define or describe the chosen plan
- Conduct an executive review
The CLN summarizes this process as one in which “group members engage in clarifying the problem, analyzing potential strategies, crafting recommendations, evaluating draft documents, and delivering a report for which there is a high level of consensus and commitment.”
Collaborative problem-solving is therefore cross-functional and reaches across traditional lines of division drawn across organizational charts. As such, collaborative problem-solving draws upon a number of business skills: statistical and decision analysis, managerial accounting, organizational behavior, operations management, administrative strategy and policy, marketing and more.
Managing the Problem-solving Team
Any given solution arrived at by means of collaborative problem-solving techniques is only as good as the group that generates it. And the group is only as strong as the leadership that takes on the task of determining the group’s composition and facilitating its work. Effective group facilitation results from leaders who encourage dialogue, debate and inquiry while advocating for all stakeholders and making sure all voices are heard and valued.
Ensuring strategies and decisions incorporate and synthesize all worthy ideas through the inquiry-based collaborative problem-solving process enables the realization of the “collective wisdom” aspect of the approach. Clearly, this can take a great deal of diplomacy, empathy and emotional intelligence on the part of the facilitator — essential traits for strong leaders.
What Are the Advantages to Adopting a Collaborative Problem-solving Methodology?
- Staff, executive and otherwise, who may not have been included in previous discussions are more likely to express a fresh perspective on the problem at hand.
- Because collaboration entails the sharing of resources, management can focus on issues of resource abundance rather than resource scarcity.
- Attitudes such as “It’s not my job” and “That’s above my paygrade” have no place in a team environment defined by collective ownership of both problems and solutions (including the implementation of those solutions).
- Collaborative problem-solving can help leaders better identify employees with strong potential — as well as employees who may not be suited to the corporation’s culture.
- Success is shared in a collaborative problem-solving environment. This sharing of success promotes a holistic understanding of the business as well as its mission, values and goals at every level of the organization. Employees who feel they possess a personal stake in the company’s overall advancement are more likely to be happy and highly motivated.
Collaborative problem-solving is one of the core components of leadership training TAMU-CC provides via its online MBA. Through studying the benefits of structured collaboration and integrating collaborative processes with other business functions and decision analysis practices, MBA grads can maximize their impact through helping to create solutions to their organizations’ most challenging problems.
Learn more about the TAMU-CC online MBA program.
