Becoming More Collaborative When Your Impulse Is to Be Territorial

Many leaders prioritize their personal or departmental needs, especially amid disruption like restructuring, layoffs, and budget cuts. While it’s natural to advocate for your success or support your people, it becomes problematic when it comes at the expense of the organization.

A client of ours, “Elena,” came up in a company that had been bought and sold several times over the past 20 years. With each merger and acquisition came a change in leadership structure and ownership. This left Elena feeling vulnerable, as she would often see prior leadership teams — including her managers, mentors, and supporters — impacted. Elena felt deeply bruised if she was layered under a new boss or her team was restructured.

In fact, in times like this, Elena’s territorial instincts would kick in. On this occasion, after being promoted to EVP-Americas of client success, she held on to a key client relationship that needed to be transitioned to one of her new peers. This territorial approach was preventing her from operating at her full potential in her new role. She was preoccupied with what she was “losing” to her sales counterpart by transitioning these client relationships. Consequently, she struggled to capitalize on the opportunity to make a broader impact on the customer experience and gain the seat at the executive table she had long desired.

Elena’s experience is not unique. In our work as consultants and executive coaches, we’ve observed many leaders who become territorial and overprotective of their teams, client relationships, and resources to preserve their ability to succeed. It’s not uncommon for talented leaders to compete internally with their peers for people, investment, and attention; in fact, it’s often that individual drive that made them successful in the first place. However, when you’re looking to scale your leadership and reach the C-suite, this “fend for yourself” mentality will stop you in your tracks. Here are four strategies to help senior leaders redefine “winning” as a shared goal.

1. Enhance your self-awareness.

You must start by uncovering your role in the situation. Examine a given circumstance from all sides to uncover what you may have overlooked that’s contributing to the problem. This includes increasing your self-awareness. Research has shown that only 10% to 15% of people fit the criteria of being self-aware, defined as understanding yourself and your goals and valuing others’ opinions. Conflicts don’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s never too soon to hold yourself accountable for your contribution to a given situation.

In Elena’s case, honest reflection prompted her to take a hard look at the narratives she was telling herself and the biases she had formed about her coworkers. Marliee Adams explains this concept in her book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. It’s easy to mistake being judgmental (i.e., jumping to conclusions) with exercising judgment (i.e., creating space to understand someone else’s actions). Adams explains that you have a choice: to be a “judger” who’s inclined toward fault-finding, or a “learner” who leads with curiosity to understand someone’s actions.

To increase your self-awareness, reflect on the following questions:

What narrative am I telling myself about the situation? What assumptions am I making about the circumstances and people involved?

Exploring the narratives you construct can reveal underlying biases and preconceptions that may contribute to conflict. It also helps you connect the dots between your judgments and your decisions and actions.

Create psychological space and reflect on what you may have inferred about someone else’s intentions, objectives, or anticipated response. Often it’s the stories we tell ourselves that lead us to jump to conclusions that may not be based on reality. For example, if you feel like a victim of the circumstances, then you may craft a story to support that identity.

What would shift if I slowed down to understand my negative feelings?

It’s natural to pay excess attention to the negatives, which are typically driven by our emotions. The next time you have a negative reaction, consider what behavior or event specifically triggered it. This will help you understand the internal or external source of what’s bothering you, which may not be directly related to the current situation, as past experiences and challenges can activate negative emotions. Most importantly, you can delay taking action so that you’re not disproportionately influenced by your feelings. As Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson shared in The One Minute Manager, “We are not just our behavior. We are the person managing our behavior.”

What feedback can I solicit to expand my range of inputs?

Ask yourself, “Did I genuinely value others’ opinions, or did I primarily rely on my own viewpoint?” Embracing diverse perspectives fosters a more comprehensive understanding of the situation and promotes collaboration. Consider speaking with a thought partner such as an executive coach, trusted colleague, or friend who can help you identify misperceptions and oversights in a non-emotional way. Soliciting constructive feedback should be treated as information collection, not gossip or piling on to what you already believe to be true.

2. From win-lose to win-win.

An organization is only as strong as the sum of its parts. Now that you’ve identified how you contribute to a problem, consider how to move from a “me to we” mindset. This means that while stakeholders you depend upon for your success have different or competing priorities, as members of the same organization, you all share an overarching mission.

Elena found it incredibly useful to identify the interdependencies between her team and other departments to fully grasp how hers and her counterparts’ success were intrinsically linked to achieve a particular organizational goal.

A powerful exercise to clarify where to focus your energy to align incentives is a “stakeholder evaluation map.” This will help you identify which stakeholders are critical to your success in the near term. Then you’ll be able to determine the actions you must take to move the relationship forward to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

To create a stakeholder evaluation map, start with a particular goal or objective — for example, in Elena’s case, she was focused on increasing revenue from existing clients year-over-year by 15% and new customer referrals by 12%. Then ask yourself:

• Who are the key stakeholders I must engage in the coming three to six months to be successful?
• What specific resources will I need to meet this objective, and by when?
• Who has the authority to make decisions about this objective?
• What’s the opportunity cost to the customer or organization if I don’t get the resources I need?

Next, determine the concrete actions that will create mutually successful outcomes for each stakeholder along with milestones to hold yourself accountable. Here’s a sample of Elena’s stakeholder evaluation map:

For Elena, this exercise illuminated the importance of her cross-functional partnerships, revealed shared objectives, and enabled her to focus her energy on advancing her strategy in alignment with her colleagues.

3. Reestablish trust.

After a long period of uncertainty, like when the organization is operating in survival mode, it’s important to recognize that a low level of trust has likely developed, and it’s critical to rebuild that trust with your colleagues. You may observe symptoms such as coworkers lacking initiative or struggling to make decisions or engage in healthy debates.

As Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, coauthors of Move Fast and Fix Things and Unleashed propose, there are three pillars of trust. They write, “People tend to trust you when they believe they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they feel that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.”

We asked Elena to reflect on the following coaching questions to identify the root causes of the trust breakdown and devise strategies to regain it:

Authenticity:

• What can I do to demonstrate my values and intentions through my words and behavior?
• In what ways can I build trust by enhancing transparency and openness in my interactions with others?

Logic:

• What strategies do I enlist to communicate my decisions and actions clearly and logically to foster understanding and trust?
• What steps can I take to ensure that my decision-making process is aligned with organizational goals?

Empathy:

• How do I ensure that I’m actively listening to others and demonstrating an understanding of their perspectives and emotions?
• Next time I’m in a meeting with others, what concrete steps can I take to communicate that I value their success, either during or after the meeting?

Regaining trust will require both parties to take accountability for what went wrong as a first step to repairing the relationship. It also won’t happen overnight. For Elena, this involved speaking to each stakeholder individually to acknowledge her missteps and share her desire to improve the working relationship and what that would mean for her and the organization. She also made a conscious effort to build rapport and take action to support others’ priorities to demonstrate that the partnership was not one-sided.

4. Create a shared commitment.

You must forge a collective agreement, including the working norms and processes you and your colleagues will commit to. Creating a shared commitment will increase the probability of success, as people naturally rebel at expectations because they don’t consider the needs of the other person. This can be established with working agreements that define objectives and the commitments that must be upheld by all parties to achieve them.

Here’s some sample language to begin this dialogue:

Given our shared goal of [insert goal], I’d like to achieve [insert milestone] by [deadline]. This is needed because [explain rationale]. What help do you need from me to make this happen?

Once you know what’s needed from each party and an agreement is made to achieve a given goal, it’s time to proactively identify progress milestones along the way, a cadence for communication, and preferred channels. With a commitment to collaborative problem-solving, you’ll not only create a more successful outcome but also foster an execution-as-learning opportunity for continuous improvement.

. . .

For Elena, transitioning from a “fend for yourself” mentality to a shared perspective of  “winning” enabled her to not only achieve her goals as a newly promoted executive but also show up as the leader the organization needed at that moment. While it can be hard to let go of your default “territorial” response to a situation, adopting a collaborative approach will ultimately position you for greater success. As Steve Jobs said, “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”