collaborative management Quotes

Leadership does not mean domination

There are brilliant minds at the University. My job is not to exercise power over them but to free them. By being in charge and not exercising power I actually empower my colleagues.

… leadership is not a one man show.

The one thing that I don't think the Obama administration gets anywhere near enough credit for is the high level of administrators. They meet all the time so they can synergize the federal investments. That's the way any corporation would do it.

Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.

Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.

Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relations with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first-line attention. In this regard we could learn much from the Japanese. We must reinvest in the human side of management.

If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.

Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people.

The new leader is a facilitator, not an order giver.

The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'

I work through teams. It's the only way I know how to work.

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

Many strikes and similar disturbances might be avoided if the employers would cultivate the habit of getting nearer to their employees, of consulting and advising with them, and letting them feel that the interests of the two are the same.

A good director is not an expert in anything in particular. A good director just knows a little bit about everything.

There's a wonderfully cooperative relationship between management and labor right now. Much like the historic partnership between oranges and a juicer.

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. My philosophy is to stay as close as possible to what's happening. If I can't solve something, how the hell can I expect my managers to.

I've always felt that, in the past, there has been a teacher-pupil relationship between the management and the players. But the best teams are run in such a way that the players have a voice.

There's not democracy in the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the people who have to work with whatever it is we're working with have a say in how it's working.

The industrial world would be a more peaceful place if workers were called in as collaborators in the process of establishing standards and defining shop practices, matters which surely affect their interests and well-being fully as much as they affect those of employers and consumers.

To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.

I don't like to boss people around. I don't get motivated by telling people what to do, I don't take any pleasure in it. So I manage with curiosity, by asking questions.

We run the company by questions, not by answers.

A good expedition doesn't need a leader at all. You are deciding day by day, discussing it in a democratic way.