About the Book

Catalyze collaboration, drive innovation, transform your organization—with Boundary Spanning Leadership you can turn today’s limiting borders into tomorrow’s limitless frontiers.

We live in a world of vast collaborative potential. Yet, all too often, powerful boundaries create borders that splinter groups into Us and Them, leading to limiting possibilities and uninspiring results. To transform borders into frontiers in today’s global, multi-stakeholder 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 landmark book takes you from rural towns in the United States to luminous skyscrapers in Hong Kong and from a modernizing South Africa to the bustling streets of India, showing you how to build bridges across boundaries.

Through compelling stories, practical tactics, and actionable tools, you’ll learn and apply the six boundary spanning practices that occur at the nexus between groups (each practice is a chapter in the book):

• 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 limitless possibilities and inspiring results that groups can realize together, far exceeding what they can achieve on their own,” including:

• Agility to respond to a dynamic marketplace
• Flexibility in cross-functional learning and problem solving capabilities
• Speed in organizational innovation processes
• Capability to work with partners in deeper, more open relationships
• A welcoming, diverse, and inclusive organization that brings out everybody’s best
• Engaged and empowered global virtual teams

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.

Who Should Read the Book?

The challenges we face in all aspects of business and society span boundaries. So too must leadership. We wrote this book for anyone who seeks to bridge boundaries between groups in pursuit of realizing a higher purpose or goal. You may be a CEO, a middle manager, or a project manager. You may be working in a nonprofit organization or as a community organizer. You may be a human resources professional, educator, or consultant. You could be working in Brazil, China, Germany, or the United States or in all four countries during the course of a year. Regardless, our core message to you is this: Through six boundary spanning practices, you can turn limiting borders into limitless frontiers to solve mission-critical problems, create innovative solutions, and positively change and transform your organization or community. In short, we wrote this book to help you achieve inspiring results at the nexus between groups.

About the Research?

This book is based on the experiences of actual leaders who participated in two Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) research projects: Leadership Across Differences (LAD), which involved researchers from around the world; and Leadership at the Peak, which collected survey data from senior executives participating in leadership programs.

The LAD project transpired across six world regions – Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, North America, South America – leading to a comprehensive database of over 2,800 survey responses, almost 300 interviews and a wide range of secondary data, such as media reports and organizational communications. The goal of the research was to address the following question: What are the leadership processes by which organizations create shared direction, alignment and commitment across groups of people with very different histories, perspectives, values or cultures?

In Stage 1 of the LAD project, the research team collected interview data from 50 individuals located in 11 different countries. Interviewees held a variety of occupations in corporations, social service organizations, hospitals and schools, and they were employed at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. In order to examine from a variety of different perspectives the challenges that groups face in managing boundaries, we included people holding formal leadership positions in the organizations as well as those having no formal leadership authority.

In Stage 2 of the LAD project, the research team collected interview data from 239 individuals located in 11 countries, but with several changes in our sampling strategy. We required a minimum of 10 interviewees per organization, and we made a concerted effort to obtain data from individuals who varied on a number of different factors — such as gender, race and level in the organization. We also attempted to maximize cultural variation in our sample so as to examine whether similar types of events occurred in different cultural contexts.

Participants in the second CCL project, Leadership at the Peak, allowed us to refine the results of the LAD research. These leaders were surveyed on pressing trends and challenges, the role of leadership in spanning boundaries, and the types of boundaries that leaders face in attempting to create direction, alignment and commitment. A total of 128 program participants completed a survey. The majority of respondents (60%) worked at the senior vice president or director level. Chief executive officers or presidents accounted for another 32% of the sample, and the remaining 8% held titles such as vice president and plant manager.

Findings from this study informed our thinking in two primary ways. First, it reinforced our belief that while spanning boundaries is now critical, it remains challenging. Our data showed that 86% of senior executives found it “extremely important” to work effectively across boundaries in their current leadership role. Yet only 7% of these executives believed they were currently “very effective” at doing so — a gap of 79% between the perceived importance of boundary spanning and the ability to achieve it. The other primary finding was the identification of the five types of boundaries—vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic and geographic.