The facilitative leader makes conscious choices about how much collaboration is appropriate for each decision and delegates accordingly.

You are a leader at a great company with the goal of developing a more engaged workforce — one where your people are genuinely connected to their work and passionate about the company. You may have tried various approaches, but few led to lasting change.

Perhaps you're a CEO who knows employees are a vital asset and critical to the company's overall strategy and goals.

You might be a division head challenged with holding on to people, especially given the cost of recruiting and training great talent.

Maybe you lead HR and all those challenges reside with you — requiring smart approaches and effective solutions.

Regardless of company size, industry — or whether your company is global or not — the idea of developing an engaged workforce can seem like a daunting and ambiguous challenge.

Here's the good news: It need not be so challenging — especially if you embrace one of the most effective practices for truly achieving greater engagement. That practice is called collaboration.

A bum rap?

Collaboration, it turns out, has its share of detractors in some business circles. The mere mention of the word causes some people to furrow their brow. They hear "collaboration" and instantly think of "groupthink", impossibly difficult consensus building, ineffective group process, or a total surrender of leadership. And while it's a powerful concept for business, it's also true that collaboration has been saddled with many wrong meanings from the sometimes weak, non-strategic, soft, and ineffective approaches found in many companies.

But a growing number of people have come to know collaboration for the powerful way that it transforms work cultures and impacts bottom line priorities. Often, those people are found working at truly collaborative organizations — where people are empowered and engaged, where they co-labor successfully, reach agreement, resolve differences, produce great products, and meet customer needs in ways that are the envy of their industry and competitors.

Employee engagement and collaboration

It's widely accepted in business that companies excel when their employees are engaged and committed to their work. Highly engaged employees are more passionate and committed on the job — which typically means they are more productive; they create better products and services; they serve customers better; and they stay put.

That last point perhaps is the most significant: Companies with engaged employees have retention rates that that far exceed those of their competitors. People desire and crave connection and empowerment; they do a better job when they get it; and companies hold on to them longer in the process.

Much is made about the benefits of employee engagement, but most analysis stops short of focused, actionable, and practical methods for achieving it. There are plenty of measures and surveys for knowing whether your employees are happy and satisfied. And if they're not, a common option is to undertake an employee communications campaign with the aim of reaching the ranks directly — helping them to align around corporate goals and appealing to them emotionally. But those efforts are all about you engaging them, when the real challenge is getting them engaged with you, their work, and with each other.

So how exactly do you go about growing a culture of engagement? And how does collaboration play a role?

In the simplest terms, there's a powerful 1-2-3 formula for achieving strong results through collaboration:

1. Increased collaboration equals greater employee involvement — a key measure of engagement — which yields greater investment in their work.

2. Greater investment, in turn, fosters a stronger commitment to the outcome.

3. That stronger commitment leads to additional discretionary effort — more effort across more areas — and better results.

Said another way:

Collaboration = Involvement = Commitment = Increased Effort = Better Results.

Why collaboration matters

Developing a collaborative work culture means creating an environment where you get more out of people and they're more satisfied in the process — they invest more in the work and in the outcomes. As many companies know from first-hand experience, a truly engaged workforce is more productive and effective, one capable of achieving stronger results.

What's more, there's a well-established set of drivers behind collaboration — internal and external forces that are stimulating demand for a more collaborative environment at many companies.