Cultivate a Collaborative Enterprise Culture

Over the last month we have explored cultivating collaborative leadership by developing individual CQ (Cultural Intelligence – What’s your CQ & Cultural Intelligence – Raise your CQ).  Now we will take a look at developing your organizations CQ in order to cultivate a collaborative enterprise culture.

Mary Stacey, founder and Managing Director of Context Management Consulting Inc. in Toronto held a workshop to explore this topic yesterday December 3, 2009 at MaRS Discovery District.

To offer a summary of the interactive session, Stacey suggests that cultivating a collaborative enterprise culture requires that as a leader you must:

1. Pay attention to the culture of your enterprise at every phase of it’s development
2. Develop your individual leadership capacity
3. Develop CQ through leadership DAC
                                                                      Direction: each individual knows the
                                                                      goals and aims of the collective.
                                                                      Alignment: coordination of knowledge
                                                                      and work in the collective.
                                                                      Commitment: willingness of 
                                                                      individuals to expend effort towards the
                                                                      needs of the collective.
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DAC is directly proportional to CQ, that is to say it is a scale where an organization’s DAC can be anywhere on the spectrum between high and low and generally the higher your organizations DAC the higher its CQ.  Therefore, since higher CQ is an indicator of collaborative culture where you sit on that spectrum defines the type of enterprise culture you have.

 CQ 2.0

Where is your organization on this spectrum?

For more detailed information on cultivating collaborative cultures both “Action Inquiry” by Bill Torbert and “Leadership Agility” by Bill Joiner are excellent resources.