Overcoming Obstacles to Collaboration: The Role of Emotional Intelligence

<p>Rick Morse is a School of Government faculty member.</p> <p>While cross-sectoral and cross-jurisdictional partnerships are often key to successful community and economic development, the fact remains that there are many real obstacles to collaboration, including time, turf, and trust. People naturally resist changes to the status quo, tend to want to protect their own turf, and are reluctant to share power and control. What can community leaders do, then, to improve the chances of collaborative success? Research on collaboration has underscored the key role of leadership, and here we look what is perhaps the most important aspect of collaborative leadership: the leader’s ability to cultivate and manage relationships. And at the heart of that competency is a cluster of personal attributes that psychologists now call “emotional intelligence.”</p> <p>One of the biggest obstacles to successful collaboration is lack of trust between potential partners. This could be due to experiences in the past that lead to mistrust or it could be due to simply not knowing each other very well. In either case, the root problem is relational. In other words, the concern here is the extent to which potential partners know and trust one another. How successful are you at building and maintaining relationships of trust? Russ Linden, in his excellent book Leading Across Boundaries, highlights the critical important of building relationships of trust in collaborative endeavors. He cites the work of Stephen M.R. Covey, who finds that credibility (the combination of one’s character and competence) lies at the foundation of interpersonal trust.</p> <p>Another body of work that I [...]</p>