Today on World Book Day, I’d like to give you a peek into my upcoming book on how to work with power in the age of collaboration.
For a while, I’ve been exploring leadership patterns that default to command and control when collaboration gets challenging.
While I understand that sometimes urgency demands quick decisions, my experience reveals that the most common collaboration roadblocks slowing projects are surprisingly fundamental: lack of clearly articulated shared purpose and absence of explicitly named behaviours that help teams work together effectively.
Without either purpose or culture, project collaboration almost inevitably fails.
For resource sector leaders, this insight is crucial. When projects falter and stakeholder alignment breaks down, the root cause often isn’t technical complexity but these foundational gaps. When purpose and culture are properly established, they become “the boss” – not individual opinions. Both elements are organic and can evolve, but only through group agreement, preventing individual dominance that fuels competition and collaboration failure.
My upcoming book offers resource sector leaders a comprehensive approach to transforming team dynamics:
“This book is for leaders in government, businesses and communities; for facilitators, teachers, educators and managers. It’s for everyone who wants to improve in leading collaborative, inclusive ways of being with each other in groups. In these pages, you will discover and develop greater self-awareness of your power and access to behaviour change and tools to overcome authoritarian leadership. This book offers a new way to use power in groups by asking what leadership style we need to adopt to enable collective intelligence.
For those seeking to master group facilitation, create genuine team engagement, and drive high performance in complex resource projects, this book offers a proven pathway. Here, you’ll find the insights, tools, exercises and awareness to address the root causes of authoritarian shadow leadership patterns – and learn how to sustain collaboration with authentic power.”