Title: Collaborative Leadership: A Tool for Success
Author:
Section/SPIG: Health Administration
Issue Date:
By Jeff Wilson
Jeff Wilson is the Turning Point and Strategic Planning Coordinator at the Virginia Department of Health. In that role he manages the Turning Point Leadership Development National Excellence Collaborative. He currently serves as the Director of the Virginia Center of Healthy Communities. He can be reached at <jeff.wilson@vdh.virginia.gov>.
What are the most pressing problems facing public health today? Lack of resources? Increasing chronic disease rates? Bioterrorism? Access to health care services? Cultural competency? Very likely it is all of them. But how can governmental public health agencies deal effectively with these issues? One answer: collaborate.
Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more organizations. It requires exchanging information, altering activities, and sharing resources to achieve common goals. It takes special skills to shepherd groups through a collaborative process.
Collaborative leadership embraces a process in which people with different views and perspectives come together, set aside narrow self-interests and discuss issues in an open and supportive manner. The purpose is to find ways of helping each other solve a larger problem or achieve broader goals. Collaborative leaders should possess a number of critical skills and capacities. Many of the skills are not necessarily unique to a collaborative form of leadership and have already been described in the literature and developed into training curricula. The Turning Point Leadership Development National Excellence Collaborative, however, has identified six key elements important for leading a collaborative process.
1) Assessing the Environment for Collaboration: Understanding the context for change before you act.
2) Creating Clarity - Visioning and Mobilizing: Defining shared values and engaging people in positive action.
3) Building Trust: Creating safe places for developing shared purpose and action.
4) Sharing Power and Influence: Developing the synergy of people, organizations, and communities to accomplish more.
5) Developing People: Committing to the development of people as your key asset through mentoring and coaching.
6) Self Reflection - Personal Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI): Understanding your own leadership, engaging others.
The Turning Point Leadership Development National Excellence Collaborative has worked to create a series of tools to enhance collaborative leadership skills among public health professionals and their key community partners. The Collaborative Leadership Learning Modules: A Comprehensive Series provide skill-building instruction to shape current and future collaborative leaders. These materials are adaptable for learners with different amounts of experience and time and can be mixed and matched for a learning plan that meets the needs of a specific group.
Each learning module addresses one of the six key elements. The elements are not mutually exclusive but support each other to provide a picture of the essential skills of a collaborative leader. Some organizations use all the modules and present them over four to six full-day sessions (or over the course of a semester). Others customize the material by focusing on a few aspects of collaborative leadership, or by spending less time on each module.
Each module includes a Facilitator’s Guide, a Participant’s Guide, PowerPoint slide sets and Module Activities. The series begins with an introduction to the concept of collaborative leadership, a brief review of the six collaborative leadership practices, and an introduction to the module that reviews the purpose and learning objectives. Next, learners complete a self-assessment to reveal strengths and gaps in leadership capacities related to the collaborative leadership practice that is the focus of the module. A short conceptual overview of the collaborative leadership practice follows.
The bulk of time is spent on three or four interactive activities designed to allow learners to experience the key concepts for themselves. This is accomplished through the use of role plays, games, small group discussions, simulations, and case studies. Each module ends with a list of readings and resources for collaborative leadership in general and for that collaborative leadership practice, specifically. The final activity is the development of a personal learning plan, which incorporates information from the self assessment tool and insights from the workshop.
The learning modules and other collaborative leadership materials developed by the Turning Point Leadership Development National Excellence Collaborative can be accessed free of charge on the Web at <www.collaborativeleadership.org> or <www.turningpointprogram.org>. If you are interested in obtaining a printed version of these materials, contact and ordering information is available on the Web.