The Seven Secrets of Effective Collaborative Leaders

1. Cultivate a shared vision right from the start... even if it's vague

2. Take care to recruit the right mix to reach your stakeholders and decision-makers

3. Become or ensure you've identified the institutionalized worry.
This is the person who will pay unwavering attention to:

sustaining the momentum and attending to the management details of the collaboration and

engaging the perspectives and addressing the process needs of each individual partner in the work of the collaboration

4. To the greatest extent possible, ensure that each partner's individual and institutional self-interests are served by both the process and products of the collaboration.

5. Don't waste time. Meetings must be efficient and productive; management must be lean and driven. Remember: for everyone else this is no more than a second priority.

6. Routinize the structure and the Roster of Participants. Make the collaboration a regular item on participants' schedules.

Develop clear roles and responsibilities for participants (even if these roles and responsibilities regularly shift among partners).

Recognize that it is easier and much more popularly received to cancel a meeting or remove a responsibility than it is to add a meeting or responsibility to participants' lives.

And secure commitments from all participants that every human effort will be made to ensure that the same people come to the table each time the collaboration meets -- scarcely anything stifles creativity, productivity and commitment more than wasting time each meeting bringing a new delegate "up to speed".

7. All collaboration is personal. "Inter-institutional collaboration" is a common misnomer. Effective collaboration happens between people-one person at a time.