AWARENESS.

Leadership awareness is essential to effective collaboration. Renown jazz pianist Thelonious Monk provided the following 'awareness' advice for members of his jazz combo:

• Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

• Stop playing all those weird notes, play the melody!

• Make the drummer sound good.

• Don't play the piano part, I'm playing that.

• Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.

• When you're swinging, swing some more.

• Whatever you think can't be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

As great as Monk was as an individual artist, he understood that leaders can't be everywhere or do everything. Effective collaboration means understanding the cadence of distributed leadership. No one leads everything all the time and, on effective teams, everyone must be dedicated to everyone else's success. Effective leaders aren't intimidated by the brilliance of others, rather, they understand the genius of leadership is cultivating the collective talents of the team to achieve a common goal.

Image by pvproductions on Freepik