Kate Downing Khaled | Founder & CEO
Would you swap strategies with your closest business competitors?
If you feel a bit uneasy about that proposition, I don’t blame you.
But this exact scenario is what the GroundBreak Coalition, which includes leaders from 200+ different private and public agencies — banks, philanthropies, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and local & state government agencies — has embraced… for months!
Under the leadership of Tonya Allen at the McKnight Foundation, we’ve been energized to act as GroundBreak Coalition’s strategy partner to enable their singular goal — building enormous Black wealth across Minnesota and beyond.
This effort is about taking big, rapid action in collaboration at its grandest and most audacious scale.
The real secret to effective collaboration is taking stock of your own unique power to make a change and then partnering with others to make something even bigger happen together.
We can all tap into our unique power every day. We all have the unique power to make sure our calendars get cleared, our travel gets coordinated, and we delegate the day-to-day work we might miss while we dream up a bold vision for the future.
You know… all the really sexy parts of collaboration and leadership!
Yet those small, unsexy actions have added up to the 200+ leaders in the GroundBreak Coalition members working together to prioritize Black wealth building in our community.
For eight months, GroundBreak Coalition work groups (composed of more than 200 leaders!) came together in an equity-focused, user-centered design process to collaboratively and creatively craft solutions that will bridge the wealth gap region-wide.
That didn’t happen by accident. All these leaders followed through and showed up. Each of their organizations bought into the value of collaboration before even pulling up to the ‘table’.
When leaders can put aside competition to embrace collaboration (even imperfect collaboration) in pursuit of a shared vision, we can act on our values and accomplish goals so much more quickly than we could alone.
I love how one of the members of the GroundBreak Coalition recently described our vision:
“We all have to put Black wealth building at the forefront of everything that we do. Every sector needs to think about how we’re impacting the Black community, and how everyone can benefit.”
This means setting aside logos, egos, and brands to prioritize the shared collaboration this member described! In fact, one of the coalition co-chairs from a Fortune 100 bank reminds our team frequently about the fact that collectively, we can create a poka-yoke with the power to raise the tide of the entire financial services sector.
Even one of the biggest banks in the United States couldn’t do that alone.
Justice and innovation require a different type of shared commitment. That sometimes means working closely with competitors to create a different type of collaborative — instead of competitive — advantage.
If you’ve been seeking support to build a bold plan with unlikely collaborators, email me. I’d love to hear from you!
