2.3. Beyond the Title

Think about your work not in terms of what you do, but in terms of the role you play. Your role is not just your title, but includes sets of behaviors, tools, and approaches to create value for and with your organization. The individual's role in collaborative strategy demands that each of us learn how to make new choices about who we are going to be at work, regardless of our job title or where we happen to be employed at any given moment. Our assignment is to break the systemic issues we discussed in Chapter 1.

Regardless of your formal title, you play various roles at work. Sometimes it involves leading people and sometimes not. Most leadership books tend to emphasize how to use leadership to improve the way people work. Very few books are written about how we as individuals can improve the way we all work together by altering the little choices we make in how we go about creating and adding value. Despite this gap, most of us have little trouble picturing a model collaborator. We may work with someone like that: the kind of person everyone hopes is on their team. Hardworking, high integrity, curious, easy to get along with, but also able to ask the tough questions and challenge everyone to do their best. It's easy to think in terms of playing the role of the great team member, but it's often hard to define the specific actions or behaviors.