Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations

Catalyze collaboration, drive innovation, transform your organization--with Boundary Spanning Leadership you can put it ALL together!

We live in a world of vast collaborative potential. Yet all too often, powerful boundaries create barriers that can splinter groups. And this can lead to uninspiring results. To transform borders into frontiers in today's global, multistakeholder organizations, you need Boundary Spanning Leadership.

Powered by a decade of global research and practice by the top-ranked Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), this book takes you from rural towns in the United States to Hong Kong's skyline and from a modernizing South Africa to the bustling streets of India, showing you how to build bridges across boundaries.

Through compelling stories and practical tools and tactics, you’ll learn how to apply the six boundary spanning practices that occur at the nexus where groups collide, intersect, and link:

• Buffering defines boundaries to create safety
• Reflecting creates understanding of boundaries to foster respect
• Connecting suspends boundaries to build trust
• Mobilizing reframes boundaries to develop community
• Weaving interlaces boundaries to advance interdependence
• Transforming cross-cuts boundaries to enable reinvention

Together, these practices combine to create what authors Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason call the Nexus Effect. The Nexus Effect allows groups to be more agile in response to changing markets; be more flexible in devising and deploying cross-functional learning and problem-solving capabilities; work with partners in deeper, more open relationships; empower virtual teams; and create a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive organization that brings out everybody's best.

Boundaries exist. What matters most is how you work to bridge these divides and transform your organization's wide-ranging talents and knowledge to deliver value. With Boundary Spanning Leadership, the possibilities are limitless.

About the Authors

Chris Ernst is a Senior Enterprise faculty member for the Center for Creative Leadership, the leading global nonprofit institution dedicated exclusively to leadership. He is a coauthor of Success for the New Global Manager: How to Work across Distances, Countries, and Cultures. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

Donna Chrobot-Mason is an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Cincinnati and director of the Center for Organizational Leadership. She has presented at nearly 50 conferences and has published numerous journal articles on diversity and leadership topics. She lives near Cincinnati, OH.