Alex's Octonaut birthday cake (courtesy of Grandma) - RSC eat your heart out!

In All Together – an account of culture change at the Royal Shakespeare Company – the story of Cake Friday leaps out. As the name suggests, as part of a wider move towards ‘ensemble’ working throughout the organisation, Cake Friday involved all staff being invited to come together on Friday afternoons and eat cake together. Some people loved this opportunity to meet informally, others saw it as a waste of time or felt frustrated in not being able to join in. Cake Friday was a flash point, underlining deeper cultural differences within the organisation.

As I was writing up the first draft of my report in joint leadership models (which I’ll publish on this blog in March) I tweeted about how I’d managed to get a reference to Cake Friday into the report. ‘For us at Lichfield Festival it was Cake Thursday’ someone replied. When I was Head of a team at NCVO we had ‘greasy spoon Fridays’ when we would dine together in the finest cafes Caledonian Rd could offer and talk about everything but work. That’s why Cake Friday resonated for me – those informal get togethers with no clear purpose other than to get to know your colleagues better and catch up with one another’s news can be incredibly valuable. And MMM’s recent report into collaboration confirms the importance of both formal and informal communication.

This made me wonder what other formal and informal ways people had to foster collaboration within (and beyond) their organisations?

For my report I’ve started drafting a table of what collaborative leadership looks like within an organisation which covers structural issues like how roles are defined and who takes decisions – but also some ‘softer’ meausres around how things are done and what it feels like to work in this kind of organisation.

What does good collaborative leadership look like in an organisation?

In my research I’ve identified examples of organisations already displaying these characteristics include the following:

• Use of cross-cutting project teams for project development and delivery at British Museum (where they are never chaired by the exhibition curator), Bluecoat, Turner Contemporary, Battersea Arts Centre and Arnolfini.
• Securing high levels of discretionary effort and volunteering by virtue of their leadership approach e.g. Ryedale Folk Museum and Museum of East Anglian Life.
• Encouraging innovation by developing a learning organisation approach among its team e.g. Tate’s new Learning Strategy.
• Delegated authority for managing budgets: Battersea Arts Centre has introduced core finance training for all staff to encourage them to take on more financial responsibility for their activities. Similarly SAGE Gateshead has found shifting aspects of income generation responsibility (e.g. venue hire) from the business development team to artistic teams to produce less internal conflict and better financial returns.
• Succession planning. Several leaders interviewed saw ensuring that the organisation was resilient and able to operate without them as among their key priorities: including for one Director who was only recently arrived in post.
• Encouraging understanding of the audience through all staff ‘walking the shop floor’ at Turner Contemporary where all staff are encouraged to give gallery tours to the public.
• Promoting understanding of one another’s roles through job shadowing e.g. at Northern Stage.

In and of themselves these might sound like small steps, but they amount to something larger. And if the small details aren’t in tune with the bigger picture then discord soon sets in.

I’d be interested to hear whether people recognise these features within their own organisations – and what other indicators you might suggest are missing? Do you have an equivalent of Cake Friday?