Collaboration & Open Leadership - Why Leaders Don’t Need All the Answers
One of the most damaging myths in leadership is the idea that a good leader must have all the answers. It creates pressure on individuals, slows organisations down, and leads to poorer decisions.
In reality, the best leaders know what they don’t know - and they create the conditions for others to contribute their expertise.
At Plotline Consulting, we call this collaboration and open leadership. It is not about indecision or consensus for consensus’ sake. It is about structured openness: a way of making decisions that leverage the experience of your leadership team, strengthens accountability, and accelerates execution.
The Limits of the “Hero Leader”
Organisations are built in departments for a reason: no single team can hold every skill, and no single leader can either. A CEO who claims to have deep expertise in operations, finance, marketing, HR, and technology is fooling no one. But many leaders continue to operate as though they must appear omniscient, making decisions in isolation or in a series of one-to-one conversations that create inconsistency and confusion.
This “hero leader” approach is exhausting for the individual and risky for the business. It silences valuable perspectives, leads to misaligned strategy with unintended consequences, and often slows things down while different stakeholders scrabble to be brought up to speed.
A Better Model: Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership flips the script. Instead of one-to-one decision-making behind closed doors, leaders bring their core team into structured discussions. This might be your executive group, departmental heads, or project leaders - those who bring different skills and perspectives to the table.
The process works like this:
Frame the decision - set out the principles, objectives, and potential solutions you’re considering.
Invite open discussion - allow your team to challenge ideas, raise concerns, and explore alternatives.
Reflect and decide - take time to weigh the input, then make a final call.
Communicate together - present the decision to the group as a whole, with clarity on the reasoning and next steps.
This approach builds ownership. Even if someone’s preferred solution isn’t chosen, they know their voice was heard and their perspective considered. Everyone also understands some objections that will arise elsewhere - and can help in addressing them when they do.
Why Collaboration Speeds Things Up
One of the most common misconceptions about collaboration is that it slows everything down. In fact, it’s often the opposite. A 30-minute discussion with your core team can replace days of one-to-one conversations, misaligned updates, and backtracking later.
Collaboration also clarifies accountability. By assigning responsibilities as part of the group decision, everyone knows what they own, what overlaps exist, and how to escalate issues. This avoids duplication and finger-pointing later.
Finally, collaborative discussions act as a rehearsal for real-world impact. Leaders hear objections and concerns before a decision is rolled out, meaning communication plans and mitigations are created from day one. When the decision goes live, the organisation is ready.
Creating Safety to Challenge
For collaborative leadership to work, people need to feel safe to challenge ideas without fear of being penalised. That requires modelling by the leader themselves - welcoming challenge, acknowledging valid concerns, and reinforcing that dissent is not disloyalty.
Over time, this creates a culture of open dialogue. Leaders get to hear the truth about potential pitfalls before they hit, and employees feel confident that their perspective is valued. This safety is self-reinforcing: the more it is practised, the stronger and more productive the culture becomes.
Collaboration in Action
Take a restructuring decision as an example. A “hero leader” might decide in isolation, then instruct individual departments to execute - their instructions varying over time as their thinking becomes influenced by others. The result? Confusion, mistrust, and resistance.
A collaborative leader instead frames the problem with their core team: why the restructure is needed, what objectives it must achieve, and initial ideas for how it could work. Then they open for feedback. Perhaps the HR lead brings knowledge of process, the operations lead highlights workflow implications, the finance lead models costs, and so on - all contribute, openly, with their functional and experiential knowledge and expertise.
The final decision is still the leader’s - but it is a better one. It is informed by expertise, supported by those who must implement it, and more likely to succeed.
From Myth to Practice
Moving from the myth of the all-knowing leader to a collaborative approach takes intention.
Structures need to be put in place: regular forums for open discussion, clear norms for accountability, and habits of transparent communication.
But once embedded, collaborative leadership becomes second nature.
And here’s the real payoff: collaborative leaders are not weaker, slower, or indecisive. They are stronger, clearer, and faster—because their decisions are grounded in reality, owned by their teams, and executed with precision.
At Plotline Consulting, we help leaders and organisations build collaborative leadership practices that work in the real world. Whether you’re scaling rapidly, navigating change, or simply looking to improve how decisions are made, collaboration is a proven route to stronger outcomes.
If you’d like to explore how collaborative leadership could strengthen your organisation, get in touch with us at Plotline Consulting. Together, we can build decision-making practices that deliver clarity, accountability, and speed.