Are You Easy to Work With?
Organizations place increasingly high expectations on leaders, particularly the ability to collaborate laterally with peers to achieve stronger results. Lateral collaboration is demanding because it requires time, effort, and—most critically—emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence enables leaders to recognize and use emotions as information, supporting thoughtful decisions rather than reactive ones. It consists of four pillars: self‑awareness, self‑management, social awareness, and relationship management. While all are important for collaboration, relationship management is foundational. Leaders collaborate more effectively across functions when they build strong peer relationships. Think about how more willing you are to collaborate when a colleague listens to you, shows respect and helps you get your needs met?
Despite good intentions, leaders often struggle to collaborate due to unclear direction, lack of time, limited self‑awareness or skill, and an underestimation of the flexibility required to work with peers. Effective collaboration requires leaders to manage their emotional responses, persevere through difficult behaviors without taking them personally, and balance advocating for their own expertise while valuing others’. In this way, leaders need to pay much more attention to lateral leadership, which relies on influence—not authority—and titles alone carry little weight.
In practice, effective peer collaboration translates into the following, and to be clear, it also asks you to sacrifice in small ways too:
- Prioritizing relationships by making time for alignment and difficult conversations. This may mean spending time with someone you aren’t sure you like.
- Listening actively and paraphrasing to ensure understanding. You must care about what the other person is saying.
- Creating reciprocity, allowing others to “win” as well. You must care about what the other person wants/needs and help them get it.
- Repairing strained relationships by reaching out, offering help, and listening. Be willing to go first and not necessarily expecting reciprocity (even though you created the conditions for it).
- Inviting feedback by asking, “How do I make it easier to work with me?” and acting on it. You ask because you are eager to learn, knowing what gets shared with you is simply a perspective, and you have a choice for what to do about it.
Bottom line: Strong peer relationships are the foundation of effective collaboration.
Kwela has a number of workshops that address how to build meaningful work/personal relationships, such as Authentic Communication, Leading Self with EQ, and Influencing Skills. Consider looking at these courses, if you are interested in learning more!
Joanne Spalton, Partner
joannes@kwelaleadership.com
