Nearly a month ago Elisa, Lisa, and I had the opportunity to sit on a panel for a group focused on collaboration in the workplace. Yes, people find collaboration so important--and so difficult--to achieve at work that they take the time to gather and discuss it. They wanted to know how we'd applied collaboration to build BlogHer. Unfortunately we were told we didn't have all night.

As we entered the room and eyed the chairs, Lisa made a suggestion, "Why don't we put the chairs in a circle? While this wasn't the "normal" way the group's meetings were run, they gladly moved their chairs. We sat at different points of the circle, explaining aspects of BlogHer, and answering to the best of our ability the question on the minds of many in the group, "How can you run a business based solely on collaboration?"

We hear the "C" word thrown around as a corporate ideal. Training and development programs aspire to helping workers interact "cross functionally," which is really a nice way of saying working consciously, with other areas of the business in mind. And yet most companies are run with the an unspoken hierarchical dynamic: I tell you what to do, then you tell the person under you what to do, and so on. No one has any real visibility other than what the person above them wants and what the person beneath them did or didn't do.

Many companies don't achieve collaborative workplaces because they are difficult, and they scare people. They require a loosening of control and the big "T" word: Trust.

In the spirit of the BlogHer Conference taking place this week, I'd like to offer up my thoughts on collaboration--the good, the bad, and the surmountable.

Last year Elizabeth Albrycht of Future Tense blog asked me to do a write up on my experience with BlogHer; it ended up being a four part series on the benefits of feminine leadership. I'd been working with Lisa and Elisa for three months at that point and felt like I was on career Ecstasy and had yet to come down. I sat in front of my computer every morning, amazed at the things that women were making possible--rides, sessions, sponsorships--and all simply because we'd asked for their help. We had no money, no track record, none of the traditional corporate requirements to getting something done. But we valued all inputs, and that ended up being the special sauce.

A light turned on in my head last year that hasn't shut off: It's all about the community and leveraging all opinions, even the ones you don't agree with. I learned to turn off the judgement I placed on ideas and evaluated them based on two key criteria 1) The willingness of the person offering the idea to make it happen and 2) The pertinence of the idea to the community. (Note: Not the pertinence to ME, but to the community. So many subjects that may not have been personally interesting to me were winners at BlogHerCon '05, and some that I thought were not important to me ended up being the most illuminating, such as the MommyBlogging panel.

So now here we are, one year later. I'm not floating on the same cloud of exhilaration. The highly collaborative model which excited me so much last year has become my reality, and like any relationship, I can now experience its ups and downs. I can still say that collaboration is the best and only model from BlogHer, I can also provide qualified feedback on its potential pitfalls.

After showing the collaboration group how much we'd accomplished by leveraging the women's blogging community and co-creating BlogHer with them, we were asked several really good questions:

1) But how can you really get EVERYONE's input? Is that more lip service than a business philosophy?

2) How can you get anything done without a single leader? Where does the buck stop?

These questions had to be answered after last year's conference. We needed to expand the event to include more sessions and more people, but that also meant taking in more input, and taking more time to absorb that input.

I won't lie: It takes longer to make things happen when you go through the exercise of asking a community/your customers/your audience for their opinions and suggestions, and it takes even longer to implement those ideas. But, using BlogHerCon '05 as my example, the breadth and quality of the end product is entirely reliant on this process. You can't shortcut it, and--though many marketing departments think they can get away with this--you can't score points for asking and then not following through.

Of course, there's no way you can follow through on everything, and this is the sort of conundrum we faced in preparation of this year's conference. Many companies who make a sincere effort soliciting the input of its users/customers/audience/community, get stuck in this effort; they get so much input that they are not sure where to start, and they end up following tangents that do not adhere to a sound strategy. They waste resources making people happy, and, of course, you can never make EVERYONE happy.

We answered this question by acknowledging that, in our experience, there is no purely collaborative model. There has to be limits; someone has to say, "Thanks, we value what you said, and here's why we won't be following through with that." I wrote a story in Fast Company about a project called The Widsom of Crowds, that has attempted to build a business by community consensus. While it's admirable, the results have been, well, unexciting. The business that the crowd voted to build was not the one that most people were passionate about, but the one that most could live with. And execution has been a problem--very few people felt empowered to stand up and ask someone to do a task, or do it themselves.

In the end, you have to limit the input, but cast a wide net while asking for it. Before committing to a schedule for BlogHerCon '06, Elisa solicited feedback from our advisory board, experts in different blogging fields, and the community to get the best selection of content options. She provided deadlines for idea submission, and stayed as flexible as possible if an idea came after the deadline, or a speaker appeared that she felt would make a strong addition to a panel. Then, with these parameters in place SHE made the final decisions. Before building the ad network, Lisa spoke with bloggers about how they were already making money from their blogs; what wasn't working for them, what would they like to include? In both cases, not every desire could be manifested, but I believe we got the best collective input possible. Even the most inclusive models cannot always include, if including prolongs/taints the outcome.

There's another step to collaboration that is critical to preventing any loss of morale when you've excluded ideas: Making your culture one that is open to and appreciative of input. If you don't use my idea, thank me for it anyway, and tell me why you couldn't use it. Encourage me to continue providing ideas; keep me informed about how you're doing so that I can continue to think on your behalf. It's not just polite, it's good business. It's keeping the door open to potential key contributors who may help to transform your organization.

And now to the collaboration group's next question. More directly put: Who gets to be the boss?

There seemed to be confusion when Elisa, Lisa, and I said we're all the boss. We all lead. To assume that we need one boss is to assume that one form of leadership is best. But there are so many forms of it, from the leader who is comfortable speaking to and inspiring groups, to the leader who is comfortable effecting change behind the scenes, empowering others to shine.

Still, back to the reality of getting stuff done. SOMEONE has to make a final decision. While it's nice to ask others for their opinion, who decides what to ultimately do?

This is another pitfall that we've come across and sidestepped via a distinction we like to make between being the BOSS, being an ADVOCATE, and being an ADVISOR.

Last fall, when we decided to expand the conference and make BlogHer a business, we understood that we would have to lead differently. For last year's conference, we all played a role in every aspect, but there was no way we could sustain that model if we grew the organization. We would have to divide and conquer.

So we created areas that each of us managed, and we became the resident expert of these areas based on our previous backgrounds and present affinities. Lisa had so much experience in online development and editorial from her experience as a journalist and from heading the editorial at Women.com. She was a natural for running the online community, working with writers, and overseeing production. Elisa, as we like to say, has a memory like a steel trap and took naturally to managing teams and the (seemingly) thousands of myriad details involved with building a conference. And her background as a marketing executive made her a natural to oversee the events and communications. I found myself pulling together sponsor packages and pipelines by instinct--no doubt from my days in media business development. In addition to writing, I loved the challenges of developing revenue and establishing partnerships. Poof, I was now managing business development.

Note that I didn't say anyone was the BOSS of anything; all three of us had experience and competencies that spilled into the others' areas, but we were charged with the implementation of our areas, we had to leverage the best resources--including each others'--in order to make sure that the areas we'd assigned ourselves were functioning. In other words, we were the ADVOCATES of our respective areas and ADVISORS to the others. When Lisa is building something new on the site, she solicits feedback from me and Elisa. We may disagree, but it's Lisa's task to decide, based on all inputs, how to move forward.

Our next challenge will be to scale our collaborative model further. I don't know how it will look, but I can guarantee it will continue to be inclusive. And while we may not always be the ones who execute on ideas, I can assure you, we will always be asking for them, and asking for help.

Jory also blogs at Pause.