Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 2
Summary of Key Points
Leadership is important but great leadership is about enabling others.
When individuals change, collaboration is likely to continue where a clear, shared purpose has been created across organisations and has become part of the culture and where good relationships at all levels have already been forged. Language should be simple and shared, so that everyone understands the vision.
Relationship-building and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.
People must stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’. Lasting change only happens through distributive leadership.
The focus must be on ensuring the system matches the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, and they need to be engaged and their voices heard.
Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.
Next time, we’ll be looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice.
In more detail
Steve Wyler introduced the meeting by summarising some of the key messages from the previous discussion:
Relationship building is critical to good collaboration
This relies on openness, trust and honesty
Collaboration had been speeded up under Covid-19 and one of the reasons is that there is a clear common cause
One question was how to build on this as circumstances changed
Steve explained that the focus of today’s discussion was what happens when key individuals move on? He said that the thought leader for this cell, Cate Newnes-Smith, the CEO of Surrey Youth Focus, was now experiencing this challenge in the most tragic of circumstances. The Director of Children’s Services in Surrey, with whom she and others had been working across sectors to transform opportunities and services for children and young people (known as Time for Kids), had suddenly died. He invited her to speak about Dave Hill, the lessons she had learnt from him and about the future. A blog she has written in tribute to Dave Hill and his work can be read here.
Cate said that great leaders are about enabling others: Dave had created space in the system for others to do things. He had also brought in a really good team of people and had established a network of relationships between people in Surrey which meant that hopefully the reforms he had initiated would continue after his death. Since Dave’s death, for example, she had recently presented about Time for Kids to the SEND partnership board and pledges had since flooded in to take it forward.
Nonetheless his successor would be important, and Cate is hopeful that a successor to Dave will be chosen who wants to carry on taking the work in the same direction. Another plus factor is that as the political control of the council in Surrey tends to remain stable, the councillors and other senior leaders are unlikely to change in the next few years.
In conclusion, Dave had been a driving force, but she also thought that Dave had created such impressive momentum in the system and had put the right people in place to make it happen without him.
Points made in the subsequent discussion included:
Relationship-building is essential and takes a long time and we need to find ways of getting this funded as part of the business model. Individuals at all levels in the collaborating organisations need to see relationship-building as part of their job. Voluntary organisations were sometimes performing what a Better Way is now calling the ‘connector role’ but this is often not recognised or rewarded. Indeed, contracts or grants tend to be awarded for specific purposes which do not include relationship-building. Surrey Youth Focus was fortunate in that it was now being funded to do that connecting role by the council; and the Community Foundation for Surrey was increasingly seeing part of its role as convening. A national example of government funding organisations to work together was DCMS’ place-based giving initiative which had given core funding to finance posts to facilitate collaboration for local-funding-raising.
The role of systems leadership must also be promoted but funding mechanisms can get in the way, encouraging competitive behaviours. Surrey Youth Focus see ‘systems stewardship’ as part of their role, and what that meant for them was to ensure that ‘voice of the child is in the room when they are there’. This needs to be built into commissioning and procurement, as was being done in Surrey in a co-operative bid for CAMS work. With systems leadership also comes distributive leadership at all levels, which also helps to embed change and ensure it does not rely on any one individual.
A shared purpose inside and across organisations which helps people to focus beyond their organisational agendas is crucial to good collaboration and it also helps to sustain collaboration when individuals move on. Changeover of staff in local authorities could be a serious problem. One person had worked with a council where three different CEOs were put in place over 5 years, with restructurings as well. A lesson based on experience from the Wigan Deal is that two things are crucial a) a culture linked to a clear bigger purpose and b) ownership of the agenda outside of the council of that purpose, as well as within. If a bigger purpose is ingrained in the culture of the organisation, it naturally encourages people to work in a different way, including new people coming into the organisation. A clear culture based on purpose ensures recruitment of new staff will result in a continuity of vision. Different parts of the local authority also work more seamlessly together where this is the case because staff share that bigger picture. Language matters and needs to be clear, simple and shared across organisations.
This purpose must be based on the needs of those served and it is important that their voices are built in through participative processes and through organisations who see it as part of their purpose to facilitate and represent those voices.
Succession planning could also help ensure continuity but was neglected, and it was important to get governance and systems right, for example through co-chairing where there were formal partnerships, for example, where funds were jointly managed. That said, some collaboration could be driven by less formal mechanisms. Time for Kids had no structure or governance and would only be effective if it influenced the agenda of existing bodies and partnerships such as Health and Well-Being Boards. In that case, clear principles and vision were important.
The group finished by identifying this issue for discussion at its next meeting on 9th September at 3.00-4.30pm:
What does collaboration look like? How does it differ from other similar practices such as partnership or consultation?
What does systems leadership look like? How do we know it when we see it, how do we know when we don’t?
What does distributive leadership look like? What does it require in the way of leadership and followership?