Building Alliances

What about building alliances to carry out your strategic goal, whether it’s selling an idea or some other goal? How would you define alliances and how do they shape your effectiveness as a leader?

To me, alliances are…I go back to teams. To me, alliances are teams or virtual teams that you form to help you with any different aspects of your work, your job and your life.
I think of those as there are areas where I’m not strong at or they’re not my core strengths, so I make sure I have the right team that’s going to help me with that or take ownership of certain areas that I know they’re going to do a fabulous job in. So, there are some alliances that get formed when certain challenges come up and I go, “I need help in this area. You are my sort of alliance or virtual team for this.” So I think of them as that.
And as a leader, it’s very important because I go back to, we don’t always have all the resources that we need to get work done. And you do need to partner with peer groups, with stakeholder teams, with sister organizations to try and get sort of results delivered.
And so as a leader, it’s important to model that behavior of collaboration and building bridges and having those alliances so that together we can take on sort of bigger challenges and celebrate bigger wins together.