Breaking Down Silos: Unlocking True Collaboration in Leadership Teams

Collaboration in leadership teams is a critical element for success, yet many teams struggle to work effectively across disciplinary boundaries. This lack of cohesion often creates friction, slowing progress and limiting innovation. Whether it’s engineers working with IT professionals or finance teams partnering with operations, this challenge is more than just a functional disconnect.

At its core, collaboration in leadership teams is often hindered by an inability to work effectively with colleagues who have different behavioral styles.

The Cost of Silos in Leadership 

When different departments or disciplines fail to collaborate, the leadership team often ends up working in silos. From the outside, this may appear to be a lack of communication or coordination. Leaders might feel that their departments are disconnected, that the team isn’t pulling in the same direction, or that collaboration breaks down too quickly when disagreements arise. 

In reality, the problem isn’t just about communication or alignment of goals — it’s about human behaviour. Leaders often gravitate toward working with people who think like them. When behavioural differences aren’t understood or managed, collaboration is the first casualty, and cliques quickly form. This leads to escalated conflict, office politics, and a toxic team culture where real teamwork becomes impossible. 

Bridging the Behavioural Gap 

Understanding the different ways people approach their work and interactions is essential for breaking down these barriers. Tools like DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) or TMP (Team Management Profile) offer insight into how different people communicate, make decisions, and solve problems. These tools help leaders see why someone with a highly detail-oriented approach may struggle to work with a big-picture thinker, or why a fast-paced leader may clash with a more deliberate team member. 

By using behavioural profiling, leadership teams can move beyond surface-level collaboration and start building trust based on mutual understanding and respect. Once leaders have a clear picture of their own behavioural style and that of their colleagues, they are far more equipped to navigate differences effectively, turning potential conflicts into opportunities for growth and innovation.

Beyond Profiling: Building Essential Collaboration Skills

While behavioural profiling provides an essential foundation, collaboration is more than just understanding differences — it’s a skill that can be taught and developed. Leadership teams need tools to work through their differences constructively. This is where training in problem-solving, facilitation, and conflict management comes in. By investing in these skills, leaders learn how to approach disagreements productively and ensure that collaboration doesn’t fall apart at the first sign of tension. 

In addition, using 360-degree feedback tools such as the LSI (Life Styles Inventory) or the Leadership Circle Profile helps leaders gain a deeper understanding of how their behaviour impacts others. This self-awareness is key to building a cohesive team, as it encourages leaders to take ownership of their contributions to the team dynamic.

Don’t Let Dysfunction Take Root

If collaboration within your leadership team is suffering, it’s important to act sooner rather than later. Without intervention, the dysfunction that arises from poor collaboration will fester. Cliques will solidify, trust will erode, and the ability to work together effectively will continue to diminish. The result is a team that’s stuck in conflict, politics, and inefficiency, unable to drive projects forward or deliver results. 

Supporting your leadership team with the right education and tools is critical. Begin by helping them understand their own and their colleagues’ behavioural profiles, and follow this up by providing training in the core collaboration skills they need. The result will be a more cohesive, innovative, and productive leadership team that’s prepared to tackle challenges head-on.

Ready to Strengthen Collaboration in Your Leadership Team?

Don’t let collaboration struggles undermine your team’s success. Contact me at angela@equenti.com to explore how behavioural profiling, 360-degree feedback, and targeted collaboration skills training can support your leadership team in reaching its full potential. 

Learn more about the Powering Leaders Program here.

 

THE TOP 6 REASONS STRATEGY AND PLANNING PROCESSES FAIL, and how to mitigate risk.

In my observation, facilitating multiple strategy and planning processes with a range of industry clients each year, there are a few places strategic planning processes can (and do) fall over.

Beyond confusing strategy (long-term intent, backed by quantifiable market data) with planning (short-term work execution), here are the top 6 reasons why strategic planning fails.

1. A lack of engagement by diverse, multi-organisation/industry/government/community stakeholders, where the leader produces a strategy in isolation (or with limited input) and then attempts to ‘sell it’ to others.

This leads to a lack of robustness, consideration of complexity, buy-in and ultimately, execution failure.

This can be mitigated in the design thinking, and co-generative process of the Strategic Conversation methodology.

(Ask me about this.)

2. The inability to invite, incorporate, assimilate and reconcile diverse points of view from a range of stakeholders and embrace problem ‘wickedness’ and complexity.

Facilitation skills and experience manage this risk, as does the preparatory work we do together prior to incorporate ‘voices’ of intent, design and change.

3. Lack of data-driven market analytics, modelling and quantifiable inputs to the planning process, which describe the size, merit and risks of market opportunities.

Robust pre-work is essential to strategy and planning – without quantitative data, you’re tilting at windmills.

Hopeful, at best.
Naive, at worst.
Ineffective, at least.

4. Development, communication and maturing the evolution of the strategy blueprint, which I’ve seen take months to write up because everyone is so exhausted from the intensity of the strategy and planning process itself.

My standard offer is to do the write-up for you within 10 business days, ensuring momentum, relevance and tangible materials which help you communicate and execute the forward strategy.

5. Execution fails as the leader ‘runs out of steam’, never actually converting the strategic (longer term) intent into a tangible, practical, operational plan.

I require the inclusion of an operational planning process as part of my strategy and planning offer.

Clients who don’t take this part of the offer don’t tend to work with me – you either engage fully with a solution that transformatively serves the organisation, or not – there are no half-executed approaches.

6. Too many priorities, projects, and unrealistic milestones which don’t account for the capability or capacity of the organisation to deliver alongside the core business.

An experienced facilitator will be able to spot this instantly and ask the tough questions to reconcile priorities within available resources.

What, in your experience, are other sources of failure in strategy and planning?

If you’d like help to avoid these pitfalls and give your strategy and planning process the best chance of success, reach out for a conversation.

This article aims to accelerate the impact of sustainability change leaders by shedding light on the innermost thoughts and fears holding these inspired leaders back from creating the positive changes they are capable of and offers some practical, simple, reflective actions to help overcome them.

Since the majority of my clients leading sustainability change have a typical ‘technical expert’ behavioural profile (highly qualified, industry-experienced, deep disciplinary expertise, published and sometimes awarded), they share common but often unspoken challenges.

These challenges, alongside my suggestions for powerful remedies, are:

1. OVERWHELM CAUSING A LACK OF STRATEGIC CLARITY

The smartest people in the room – and indeed, the country – who are charged with leading change and creating positive sustainability impact can feel overwhelmed with the weight and urgency of sustainability challenges.

Knowing we have the capability to affect change is offset by the magnitude and urgency of the challenges, which creates an exhausting internal tension in the hearts and minds of sustainability leaders.

It’s the sense that there’s so much we can do, but our progress and impact are never big or fast enough. In the words of one of my senior sustainability change leader clients, we’re scared we’ll always be ‘p*ssing into the wind’.

The experience of overwhelm can lead to scattered approaches and a lack of strategic clarity and focus (we’re left wondering: ‘what are we really doing here?’).

Soon enough, we’re lost and spinning our wheels in low-quality problems that reside well beneath the limits of our intellectual and practical capacity to effect change.

The corollary of the lack of strategic clarity and overwhelm is the tendency for leaders to dive inwards into their organisational environments and tinker with the minutiae of low-level operational planning, restructuring staff deployment, financial controls and other ‘solvable’ but low-quality internal quandaries which feel administratively productive in the short term – but of course, prevent us from accelerating our outward impact.

We become busy instead of focused. Urgent instead of clear thinking. Excitable instead of evaluative. Lost instead of leading. Critical instead of visionary. Conservative instead of bold. Administrative instead of impactful.

Remedy: In these moments, we must create some distance from the overwhelm to evaluate our direction, hone our focus, and engage our stakeholders in a strategy and planning reset to create alignment.

Such a ‘strategy reset’ benefits from external facilitation, so the change leader can be a participant in the review (rather than straddling the roles of facilitator and participant, which can railroad and compromise even the most well-intentioned process).

Need facilitation help for sustainability change and strategy conversations? Get in Touch

2. NETWORKING EXHAUSTION

For introverted technical experts leading sustainability change while enjoying broad, collegiate and functional professional collaborations, the idea of ‘networking’ is right up there with poking oneself in the eye with a fork.

As it happens, the technical expert behavioural profile is also most comfortable where a long-term, mutually respectful and deep partnership can be maintained and leveraged in preference to entertaining the perspectives and potential of newer, less familiar players.

Unsupported by targeted connectivity strategies, they can tend to find the ‘work’ of growing professional networks quite like digging for precious metal without a metal detector – unpredictable and infrequent benefits, exhausting, messy and undignified in its commerciality.

Without a strategic and healthy approach to building and maintaining professional networks, critical relationships can weaken and dissolve over time, or worse, we exhaust ourselves maintaining connections that deliver few practical benefits – leaving leaders exposed to a lack of deep, cross-boundary, intra-disciplinary relationships to collaboratively enact systemic change.

Remedy: The first step is to strategically map key stakeholders and make a plan to target the development of only the most powerful, leveraged relationships where we seek to uncover mutual interests, collaborative benefits and convert aligned approaches into action.

This takes time and considered planning, and may even begin with the admission that we don’t know where to start with identifying high-value stakeholders and collaborators.

* NB: This doesn’t mean only connecting only with senior players. It means connecting with the stakeholders with the most capacity to influence, lead transformative action and leverage collaborations for broader benefit. Often, these can be the people ‘on the ground’.

A stakeholder map can be as simple as a mindmap/spider diagram that identifies the key players and their interests, so that relationship development can be prioritised strategically.

This is also a great activity to do with your team. If you need help with this, just say the word – Contact Me Here.

3. POLITICAL ASTUTENESS & SELF REGULATION

It follows that where our professional networks aren’t strategically developed and matured over time, we’ll also have limited ability to identify and incorporate the needs and perspectives of diverse stakeholders across government, industry/business, financial markets, educators and communities.

This leaves sustainability change leaders tripping over competing agendas, communicating the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and experiencing disheartening setbacks or a lack of support in important projects due to deficits of common language, cross-boundary collaboration and aligned action.

We feel buffeted by the crosswinds of competing and misaligned interests, which can be an exhausting and disheartening experience.

It can also manifest in a preference for engaging with ‘friendly’ players in preference to those who can effect the most significant positive change – but whose interests and needs are harder to discover and accommodate.

Remedy: Self-regulation and political maturity are required to ‘play the long game’ and make measured, strategic contributions to advancing sustainability conversations.

Where stakeholders are seeking certainty about the future costs and benefits of sustainability approaches, the ability of leaders to create and facilitate forums with the right people for powerful conversations, and to hold a position of authority with calm steadiness in messaging, is key to becoming increasingly influential.

4. NAVIGATING WICKED PROBLEM COMPLEXITY AND SCALE

Sustainability problems are systemic and wicked. They exist at the global, national, regional, industry, enterprise, community and individual scale, and everywhere in between – all at once.

The ability for leaders to cognitively ‘scale down’ in deductive reasoning and problem solving to embrace and incorporate complexity, then turn on a dime to crystallise and inductively ‘scale up’ to tangible, summarised concepts and practical decisions / actions, is critical to navigating complex discussions and cutting direct pathways to impact.

The key risk for the technical expert, as a sustainability change leader, is usually not in ‘scaling down’ into detail and complexity but in ‘scaling up’ into broader concepts that make aligned understanding and decision-making across diverse stakeholders possible.

Without the ability to scale up and down effectively in conversation, the change leader will be unable to keep pace with important conversations, will be contributing only within a partial, narrow range of the problem space, and as a result, might lose the engagement of critical stakeholders operating at different scales.

Furthermore, it’s simply not the typical behavioural preference of technical experts to think in the grey’ big picture’ and ‘futuristic’ spaces, preferring instead to gravitate toward black-and-white data, fact and documented proof.

This default behaviour can lead the sustainability leader down the ‘technical expert’ rabbit hole, where we can get stuck in the narrowness of intricately technical problems rather than influencing broader systemic change, especially if we’re not supported to grow our ability leadership at scale.

Remedy: Scaling up and down in complexity is a skill set that change leaders can develop through leadership coaching, development and applied practice.

This means we will be able to map stakeholders, identify interests, connect concepts, create and lead conversational forums, facilitate strategic thinking alongside practical problem solving, and align diverse stakeholders across various community, business, industry, regional, state, national and global scales.

A powerful activity to get started with scaling is to:

• Identify the relevant scales at which your sustainability challenge presents – individual, community, enterprise, industry, regional, national, global (hint, every wicked problem is a symptom of a higher level problem);
• Map the critical concepts, challenges and possible solutions evident at each level;
• Identify key stakeholders and their mutual and competing interests;
• Make a plan for how to link concepts around mutual interests to engage more robustly with stakeholders.

Again, this activity benefits from facilitation so that sustainability change leaders can be powerful players in the substantive discussion rather than ‘referees’ of the process and its contributors. Get in touch if I can help you with this conversation.

5. LOSING SIGHT OF OUR IMPACT & WAVERING CONFIDENCE

Another characteristic of wicked problems such as sustainability change is that the ‘problem’ is never fully solved. Rather it continues to evolve organically to new dimensions over time.

In this context, sustainability change leaders can easily lose sight of the value of small wins and forget to reflect upon what we’ve contributed to both on-the-ground solutions and the broader agenda.

We might even forget what it’s like to succeed at all – and worse, perhaps start to believe the cause itself is pointless and, therefore, not worth influencing.

At this moment, we consider our career options, bookmark a ‘Seek’ job search, fantasise about going it alone in consulting or in a business that requires less of our mental and emotional capacity or even consider early retirement.

A loss of faith in our ability to create a positive impact can lead to a dissolution of confidence in the longer term, reducing our certainty about the overall relevance of our work and, worse, a loss of faith in our own capabilities and value.

Remedy: I recently advised a client on a steep development trajectory to actively reflect upon the long list of successes she’s created with her team over the past 12-18 months and to commit this list to paper.

Her results and refreshed perspective were both remarkable and inspiring. She moved from feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and stuck to energised, meaningfully contributing and actively leading and growing.

Better still, conducting a success stocktake with our teams and collaborators will allow us all to experience the refreshing sensation of success that can sustain us during setbacks, shows us the formula for what works, and help us remember and appreciate the cumulative effect of our contributions.

6. PERSONAL SUSTAINABILITY

As you will have gleaned, the work of sustainability change leadership is long-term, complex and can be personally taxing.

Many sustainability change leaders will experience exhaustion, burnout, health crashes and deterioration, may develop addictions or unresourceful coping strategies, suffer disillusionment, crises of confidence and even disengagement from their mission.

This doesn’t just affect the sustainability change leader but their teams as well.

Our people respond to the clarity of our strategic intent, energy, results, and the power of being part of something special – and where we can’t create and communicate those things effectively, engagement and morale suffers.

Leading ourselves well is critical to being able to physically, mentally and emotionally sustain the long-term effort required for impactful sustainability change leadership.

Remedy: This looks like self-propelled leadership and personal development, self-reflection and openness to feedback, emotional regulation (as much to manage excitement as disappointment and setbacks), and learning the skillsets of influencing, executive presence, strategic networking and facilitation.

In summary, six common but undiscussed challenges of sustainability leaders include overwhelm leading to a lack of strategic clarity, the challenge of strategically building and maintaining networks, political astuteness and the self-regulation required to play the long game, navigating the scale and complexity of wicked problems, wavering confidence and losing sight of impact, and personal sustainability and resilience.

These are worthy of our consideration in sustainability program and project development, leadership coaching practice, leadership development programs and the facilitation of strategy, planning and problem-solving / co-creation forums and workshops.

As a leadership coach and facilitator, I help navigate these challenges on a daily basis and intimately understand and leverage the nexus of leadership and personal development.

For now, my encouragement is to reflect upon this article and ask yourself: “What is the one most important action I can take to more powerfully lead sustainability change today?”

If these common fears and challenges of sustainability change leaders resonate with you too, and you’d like to talk more about what successful net zero / sustainability change leadership requires in terms of leadership coaching, leadership development, strategy and planning facilitation, please reach out for a conversation.

Sustainability change leaders across industries such as energy, engineering, agriculture, manufacturing and science/research have, in my observation, some common attributes as senior professionals with specialised and deep disciplinary backgrounds.

1. They are passionately committed to the principles of circularity, net zero and sustainability change leadership and intent on influencing practices, processes and outcomes within and beyond their organisations.
2. Exceptionally clever, they are most often postgraduate qualified disciplinary experts who are accomplished, published and awarded, who also know that despite a tendency for introversion, collaboration, networks, influencing and applied practice with not only experts from other disciplines but with colleagues ‘on the ground’ in businesses and communities, provide pathways to positive impact.
3. As a generalisation, the behavioural profile is somewhat introverted, analytical, loves incorporating complexity while deeply caring and sensitive, perceptive, ethical, humble, honest, modest and shy.
4. They are leading teams of motivated professionals who also feel compelled to positively impact sustainability outcomes and who are seeking strong, enabling, focused and inspiring leadership to help them navigate the long-term, complex, exhausting nature of the challenge.
5. They understand the value of strategic networks and invest significant energy to develop and deepen relationships which help them access and mobilise the resources needed for positive impact.
6. They’re driven by a sense of great urgency to enact positive change, but also feel that their practical progress and impact is never fast or big enough – certainly not at the pace they believe is required – which leads to an uncomfortable, exhausting and sometimes overwhelming sense of internal tension.

They are stereotypically C / S in DISC, blue/green in Insights and HBDI, concluder/producers, upholder/maintainers in TMS.

Such attributes offer both supportive and challenging aspects for the leadership style of the sustainability change leader.

For example, the ‘technical expert profile’ makes them brilliant and deeply knowledgeable in their craft but somewhat reserved and guarded with people they don’t know well – so mobilising change through others can feel especially tiring and challenging.

In fact, this is a typical challenge I help my clients overcome by demystifying influencing, applying targeted strategic networking approaches and helping them sustain the internal energy and drive needed for long-term change.

If you’re a leader of good people doing good things in the world who desires to make a bigger impact with more speed and ease but needs help to influence and mobilise change, reach out for a conversation.

Working with 40-60 leadership clients every year who are primarily senior technical experts (engineers, accountants, mathematicians, analysts and scientists, for example), with many leading sustainability agendas, including environmental, social and governance programs, has allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of the behavioural profiles and operating contexts of this client group.

Further, hosting hundreds of leadership coaching conversations annually, I have a unique perspective on what it requires personally of a sustainability leader to create lasting, positive impact where the following contextual challenges exist:

• The scale of the challenges spans the global, national, regional, industry, community, enterprise and individual levels, and everywhere in between – all at once. Smaller problems are always symptoms of larger ones.
• The challenges are truly ‘wicked problems‘ (Rittel, 1973), in that they’re organic, evolving, multidimensional and can never be definitively solved – and yet for our collective benefit, problems of sustainability remain worth tackling and shifting the needle in a positive direction.
• Multiple, diverse stakeholders hold interests that will usually be, to some extent, misaligned.
• Historically, the conversation has been about what we need to ‘stop’ rather than the creation and familiarisation of a clean, green, sustainable and profitable future.
• The solutions can range from simple to complex, individual to collective, zero cost to prohibitively expensive, typically challenging to implement in terms of mindset and habit change and are at various stages of maturity in efficiency and profitability.
• The financial actors can tend to make investment decisions based on short-term criteria, which drive perverse outcomes and strategic instability in the organisations and initiatives that require longer-term investments.
• Any ‘solutions‘ which are not collaboratively co-designed but are developed in isolation of the stakeholders required to deploy them, no matter how smart or effective, may be rejected or not fully implemented.
• The perceptions, habits and thought patterns of leaders, governments, educators, business/industry, community and financial market actors around sustainability are deeply ingrained in history and can be hard to shift.

Considering these complexities, sustainability change leaders feel a deep sense of purpose and urgency to act. Yet, most feel that progress is insufficient and slow, creating a palpable sense of internal chaos and often outwardly observable frantic activity amongst even the most conscientious change agents.

Sustainability change leaders are a special breed of value and mission-driven professionals operating in a wicked context. They, therefore, require specialised leadership skills that aren’t necessary for organisations selling widgets or services with a primarily commercial agenda.

If you’d like to be more effective in the leadership of sustainability change, the work begins with you and your effectiveness in this particularly ambiguous leadership context.

The solutions involve transforming your experience of sustainability leadership through leadership development, strategy, planning and building effective cross-boundary teams.

If you are a leader of good people doing good things in the world, let’s start a conversation about creating a bigger, more positive impact faster and with more personal satisfaction and ease.

If you’re human, you’ll be running patterns and strategies – however resourceful or unresourceful – to address one or more of The 3 Human Fears in your life and work:

– The fear of not being good enough
– The fear of not being loved
– The fear of not belonging or fitting in

It doesn’t matter what you’re fearing, the root of that fear will fall into one (or more) of these three categories.