If you are a leader it can be all too easy to get into the habit of thinking through all the possible solutions to complex business challenges ahead of your team meetings. 

The risk is that you become attached to your own ideas or rush into solutions before exploring the thoughts of your team and benefitting from a shared perspective on how they see the challenge or opportunity.

Through our work with senior teams we have discovered that one of the most critical leadership skills is to know how to inspire thinking together with your teams.

The impact of working this way as team can be significant. More positive team energy, more creativity, more engagement, more trust and more ownership. As one participant in a recent leadership programme said to us, “We don’t want our leaders to think for us, we want them to think with us!”

Thinking together sounds such a simple idea, but so few teams find the time and space to practice doing this effectively. 

Thinking together as a team is not just about role model collaborative behaviours. It’s also about reinforcing a positive mindset and creating the right conditions for collaboration to flourish in your team conversations.

Increasingly, leadership is about unleashing collective potential. When you actively promote thinking together in a team - the quality of the listening, the clarity of the sharing and the benefit of listening to the different perspectives in the room - new solutions to problems appear.

Are you and your team thinking together long enough and differently enough about some of the major challenges facing your business right now and in the near future?