From Command-and-Control to Collaborative Leadership: An Interview with Iva Wilson
by Janice Molloy

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Unlike most corporate executives, Iva Wilson is not afraid to say the "f" word-failure, that is. "It may be a cliché," she says, "but there's no success without mistakes. Unfortunately in organizations, we don't spend enough time publicly examining the unexpected results of our decisions—both positive and negative." Without that analysis, we can't learn from experience and are doomed to repeat the same errors time and again.

Wilson is the coauthor of The Power of Collaborative Leadership (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), president of Gyricon Media, Inc., and a partner in the Coaching Collaborative. In the interest of helping other leaders learn from her experiences, she openly discusses her efforts in the mid-1980s to salvage Philips Display Components (PDC), a major consumer electronics company that was bleeding red ink. As part of the process to turn the company around, Wilson sought to move the organization toward a collaborative style of leadership by implementing the principles and practices of organizational learning, originally introduced in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline (Currency/Doubleday, 1990).

Her tenure at PDC was marked by roaring successes—quality improved, sales increased, and the company became profitable for the first time in five years—as well as surprising disappointments—worker satisfaction temporarily dropped, tensions with the parent company rose, and the unionized workforce engaged in a week-long strike during labor negotiations. By reflecting on what went right and wrong during her 10 years as president—especially around her initiative to transform the corporate environment—she has identified some lessons for other organizations interested in including distributed forms of leadership, decision-making, and accountability in their ways of doing business.

More Than the Sum of Its Parts
When Wilson assumed the presidency of PDC in 1986, the organization followed a traditional command-and-control leadership model based on a military structure, "with the general developing strategy, the officers translating that strategy into actions, and the soldiers implementing the actions on the ground." She believes that "in certain situations, applying this metaphor in the business world has created excellent results." But she quickly came to recognize the downside of this approach for PDC: Employees waited for direction from above before acting, and trust between management and the workforce was low. Wilson and her management team became convinced that, for the company to regain its competitive advantage, they would have to adopt a more collaborative management style.

Iva finds it difficult to define collaborative leadership, because it's different for every organization. At PDC, she believed that the company would benefit when employees could act from their own base of knowledge, rather than simply fulfilling mandates from above. To make this shift, the organization needed to change its culture and structures to eliminate any fear or uncertainty that might inhibit workers from assuming responsibility for making decisions, taking risks, and learning from their mistakes. This process of building trust enabled teams to function more effectively and for the organization as a whole to become more than just the sum its parts.

Even though the specifics of collaborative leadership vary from organization to organization, Wilson identifies three conditions that must exist for it to thrive:
1) Individual and organizational learning, as well as stewardship of and support for the learning process by leaders
2) A set of values to guide the company in building a vision, developing strategy, and designing tactics
3) A model for distributing power

This last item has been the biggest—and most unexpected—challenge. Wilson learned the hard way that "as leaders, we need to evaluate the maturity, skill, integrity, and knowledge of those we delegate authority to; otherwise, they might exercise that power in ways that we never intended." For instance, a new manager might use the power of her position to advance a personal agenda or micromanage her direct reports. When this happens, the organizational change process can be derailed.

Part of the solution is to ensure that employees feel safe giving their bosses raw feedback, free from editing and interpretation, so managers can determine if their words and actions are being understood in the ways that they intended. Doing so requires high levels of trust throughout the organization. Another aspect is to give people opportunities to develop their leadership skills, innovate without fear of reprisal for missteps, and learn from experience. "Talk is easy," Wilson states. "But people really learn about the organization's willingness to support risk-taking from what happens after they make a mistake, when they see if their managers are willing to walk the talk in response to failure."

The Link to Personal Transformation
Providing people within the ranks the time and resources they need to "learn their way" through the transition to a new organizational structure requires paradoxical behavior from leaders: the kind of heroism that comes in giving up the role of hero. For most managers, adopting this new way of being is exceedingly difficult. But Iva came to realize that in order to build an organization that was capable of learning, she would have to become a different kind of leader.

Wilson strongly believes in the interconnection between personal transformation and organizational change—that one strengthens the other. To that end, while at PDC and later as president of the Society for Organizational Learning, she took the time to study, reflect, deepen her understanding of herself and others, and learn from her experiences—both good and bad. When pressed for a model for personal development that other leaders might follow, though, she demurs: "It's a very individual process that depends on who we are as human beings, our life experience, our willingness to go deeper into our own self to understand what works for us and why." Nevertheless, she has seen the difference such reflection has made for some leaders, in the depth of self-knowledge they have gained and the positive impact they have subsequently made on their enterprises. This kind of learning can be painful, as Wilson herself can attest, but tremendously productive.

A Long Road
Organizational change efforts take time to produce results; in a recent Harvard Business Review interview, MIT professor Edgar Schein noted that it took Proctor & Gamble 25 years to transform its culture. For this reason, Wilson regards understanding—and engaging the organization in understanding—the nature of such time lags as the most important work in the transformative process. If people don't grasp why the change effort isn't producing immediate results, they'll lose confidence in the initiative. She points out that "without a knowledge of systems thinking—with its emphasis on the cyclical nature of change—you can't even begin to understand the concept of delays." When she was seeking to introduce learning processes into her organization, she herself didn't have a crisp understanding of the impact of delays and only later understood the consequences.

Iva doesn't believe that she has all of the answers about how to foster collaborative leadership within an organization. She does offer "options and an image for other people to build on and contribute to." Wilson also suggests that leaders start the process through self-examination, saying, "I can't change anyone except myself. If I'm not willing or able, through reflection, to find places to rethink my own beliefs, I'm unlikely to be able to get others to do the same." In other words, the ability to lead collaboratively begins with the individual and the confidence that only with others can we build a better future for our organizations.

Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications.