What is Collaborative Leadership?
Collaborative leadership is a forward-thinking management style in which team members work together across sectors to make decisions and keep their organization advancing. In the police force, this means that chiefs can openly communicate within their agency and neighboring agencies. This communication leadership starts at the top with executive-enabled chat rooms and encourages an open forum for all squad members.
A collaborative police leader regularly seeks out opinions and ideas among their squad to build strategies and solve crimes. This forward-thinking from collaborative leaders enables officers to be more engaged, feel more trusted, and be more likely to take ownership.
Collaborative leadership empowers chiefs and captains to energize teams and diversify leadership across the ranks. This promotes a work culture that is more upbeat and enjoyable. Fortunately, promoting collaborative leadership has never been easier with Evertel’s open communication chat rooms, online collaboration tools, and instantaneous intel sharing.
How Does Evertel Support Collaborative Leadership?
Aligning Goals
The first step in any collaborative leadership practice is creating a vision or goal and uniting your team behind it. Without a compelling vision, your team is sure to flounder. Evertel empowers leadership to collaborate in real-time across agencies–bringing criminals to justice faster. Furthermore, entire squads are empowered in using collaborative task management tools to share intelligence in real-time, keeping goals aligned and teams up to date.
Open Communication
Open communication is essential in fostering a collaborative work environment. Experts suggest that gone are the days where a hierarchical chain of command prevents team members from communicating with other team members because of their level or rank. For true communication and collaboration to thrive in the police force, squad members must cooperate with any rank in an open forum. Evertel is able to deliver just that–an open forum for free intelligence exchange despite rank or station. When we freely collaborate under a unified vision, rest assured justice can be swiftly served.
Building Partnerships
Despite best intentions, collaborative practice often fails because there is a lack of partnership skills. If a police chief wants to work in partnership with the patrol officers, he or she cannot use her power to make the patrol officer’s experience wrong or difficult to bring up. True partnership skills mean acknowledging that while work experiences are different, they are also all valid. The squad must be a place of open communication, and Evertel’s virtual chat rooms make open and safe communication that much more accessible. When open and safe communication is accessible, relationships and collaboration thrive.
Value Time
Experts agree–implementing collaborative practices can be messy, drawn-out, and confusing. Best practice is embracing collaborative tools that don’t add more to your squad’s already busy schedules. Evertel seamlessly fits into the police force’s laundry list of tasks and empowers squad members from within the agency and neighboring agencies to freely collaborate without fear of it being one more item on an already busy schedule.
Encouraging Vulnerability
At its most basic level, the collaborative leader means he admits to not having all the answers and instead seeks his squad’s support. Ironically, this display of vulnerability is a sign of strength and confidence not only in himself but in his squad. When a chief opens collaborative communication to more emergency responders and perspectives, he opens up his squad to more developing solutions and stronger, swifter outcomes.
Let Evertel Take Your Collaborative Practices to the Next Level
Evertel couples forward-thinking with straightforward technology, empowering your agency to work toward a collaborative future. To be the most effective at keeping your community safe, Evertel empowers you to engage with your agency in new ways, thus inspiring advanced solutions in our ever-evolving world.