Managing and Leading in Inter-Agency Settings

Dickinson, Helen, Carey, Gemma

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447329848
• eBook ISBN: 9781447329862
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Organismes sans but lucratif et organismes de bienfaisance

Although leadership and management are seen as central to developing effective integrated working, there is relatively little thoughtful work analysing the relationship between the two sets of ideas. Until now. This updated edition of this essential textbook provides a robust guide to the leadership and management of inter-agency collaborative endeavours. It summarises recent trends in policy, establishes what we can learn from research and practice, and uses international evidence to set out useful frameworks and approaches to address a range of problems that collaborations face.

1

What are management and leadership, and why do they matter in collaboration?

Over the past century ideas derived from management, and more recently leadership, have become ubiquitous concepts in our everyday lives. There are countless books and articles that deal directly with these issues, and you would struggle to browse in a bookshop for more than a few minutes without finding several books on these topics. Flick through any newspaper, or watch any TV channel, and stories are invariably underpinned by discussions of responsibility and accountability. When an organisation – or groups in society more broadly – encounters difficulty, it almost invariably looks towards some form of individual leadership to guide it through the time of turbulence or to take the blame for failing to do so. Typically, media and public attention focuses on the person at the top who is presumed to have both the authority and the acumen to intervene to make things better. As has been argued elsewhere, ‘the “organisation in our heads” is still heavily influenced by the principles of classical management theory’ (Anderson-Wallace, 2005, p 171), which assumes hierarchical relationships between members of a single organisation. Yet the reality of the modern world is a proliferation of collaborative arrangements, where the important leadership activities are those that take place between a range of different partners. This poses significant challenges for traditional concepts of leadership and management, and is the focus of this book.

The number and range of public sector collaborations has grown considerably since the mid-1990s. Rather than collaborative working being an additional activity for public sector agencies, arguably it is now ‘the new normal’ (Sullivan, 2014). The expectation is that collaborative working will enable public services (and their voluntary and private sector partners) to better address the ‘wicked’ problems of society, and, as suggested in Box 0.1, ‘better’ partnership working has also frequently been suggested as a way of preventing avoidable deaths and improving the quality of lives for vulnerable individuals and their families. These expectations are frequently as much aspirational as plausible. This is understandable. Politicians and policy-makers usually want to persuade the public – and the latter often want to be persuaded – that new innovations in public services will deal with complex, troubling and perhaps irresolvable social problems (for further examination of this important theme, see Dickinson, 2014). Stern and Green (2005) describe what could reasonably be called a spirit of collusive over-optimism that infuses many local agency descriptions of their collaborative arrangements. Sullivan et al (2004, p 1610) suggest that ‘the need to justify their existence to unpredictable national funders means that localities have become adept at laying claim to impacts in all sorts of areas.’

Despite management and leadership being possibly some of the most written about phenomena of the past 50 years, the evidence base is far from conclusive (Peck and Dickinson, 2009), and the evidence relating to management and leadership within inter-agency settings is complex, contradictory at times, under-theorised in some areas and theoretically dense in others. As Chapman et al (2015, pp 15-16) argue, ‘even though there has been an increase in scholarship on multi-sector, collaborative and network environments of public administration … it has not translated to more published articles about leadership in these types of settings.’ This new edition is substantially revised as a reflection of the developments in the broader literature. In addition to updating the policy context and including new publications and evidence, we have incorporated a new set of hot concepts and emerging issues in Chapter 3, and a range of new helpful frameworks and concepts in Chapter 4.

What is clear from the literature that has emerged since the previous edition over the past eight years is that, although leading across boundaries appears to be more important than ever before for public and private organisations alike, there are no easy answers. As we will see in the pages that follow, leading and managing across inter-agency settings involves complex processes that require that close attention be paid not just to individual leaders and managers, but those individuals and groups that are (or might be) followers and the contexts that these activities are performed in. In this revised edition we have scoured the literature to draw out the most useful aspects of the evidence base, and present it in a way that is accessible for manager, practitioner and student audiences alike. At times the concepts explored are challenging, but the intention is that this nuanced account should more accurately reflect the myriad of situations that leaders and managers of collaborative endeavours find themselves encountering.

This chapter starts by considering why management and leadership have gained such prominence within the collaboration literature, before going on to consider a certain set of individuals (commonly known as ‘boundary spanners’) who have become central within these debates. We then outline the many forms that collaborative activities may take, and the implications this has for discussions of management and leadership of inter-agency initiatives. The following section provides a brief overview of the paradigm of new public management (NPM), the influence this has had on public policy over the past 30 years and implications for readers of this book. One consequence of NPM has been increased interest in networks, and the link between collaboration and networks is considered here, along with the emergence of a more recent theory – new public governance (NPG). The final section considers current major theories of management and leadership in order to provide some clarity about the nature of management and leadership in inter-agency settings. Having set out the contours of the conceptual literature in this chapter, we then move on to consider what the research evidence tells us in the following chapter.

Why is collaboration not always successful?

When we wrote the first edition of this book we noted that there was a lack of evidence to demonstrate that attempts at collaboration had clearly illustrated improvements in outcomes for those who use services. Despite significant and ongoing investment in this field, eight years on we find the picture is largely the same (this is explored in more detail in the introductory book in this series by Glasby and Dickinson, 2014b, and also in Evaluating outcomes in health and social care by Dickinson and O’Flynn, 2016). To some extent we should not be entirely surprised by this. It is difficult to find a figure that is agreed on, but general research from the commercial sector suggests that over 40% of alliances fail and more still are plagued by under-performance (Tuch and O’Sullivan, 2007; Zollo and Meier, 2008). The overwhelming message from this literature is that mergers and acquisitions rarely succeed in delivering anywhere near the promised payoffs (Field and Peck, 2003).

Some years ago now Kanter (1989) wrote about her understanding of the North American private sector, suggesting that a failure to adequately manage collaborations might be responsible for the poor outcomes reported in respect to joint initiatives. We would argue that this is a perspective that still holds strong in the literature today. Kanter pointed to research indicating that while managers spend up to 50% of their time initiating collaborative arrangements and a further 23% of their time developing strategic collaboration plans, they spend only 8% of their time actually managing collaborations. Yet, when collaborative attempts do not live up to their lofty expectations, one of the factors often cited as being responsible for their failure is lack of leadership, or inappropriate management. Given this analysis it may well be that leaders and managers are not focusing on the ‘right’ kinds of factors that actually drive collaborative relationships.

As Kanter notes, the challenge of leading and managing inter-agency collaborations is a more difficult task than operating in traditional hierarchical organisations where, she argues, the former may lack a common framework between partners; exhibit asymmetrical power relations (that is, one partner holds more power than the other/s); possess incompatible values; have unclear authority and communication channels; and deploy different professional discourses. Of course, these latter three characteristics, at least, may also be present in well-established and apparently hierarchical public service organisations. Nonetheless, Kanter’s analysis does start to map out the contours of the particular terrain that has to be negotiated by those managing and leading in inter-agency settings and the dilemmas this produces. Herranz (2008, p 2) describes this as a situation where ‘public managers face the quandary of being expected to work more in networks where they have little authority, while at the same time increasingly being held more accountable for performance and improved outcomes.’ This mismatch between authority and accountability is one we will return to a number of times in this chapter and the broader book.

Echoing some of Kanter’s themes, UK health and social care collaboration has tended to bring together organisations characterised by different accountability regimes, priorities, values, institutional rules, roles and rituals, diverse financial cycles and so on. As long ago as the early 1990s, Hardy et al (1992) produced a list of barriers to collaboration between health and social care that still resonate today (see Box 1.1), despite this analysis being based on relationships in place before the introduction of either the purchaser–provider split or extensive private sector involvement in healthcare. Again, this list may contain items that could also characterise individual organisations (for example, fragmentation of responsibilities within agency boundaries and professional self-interest); nonetheless, there are themes here to which we need to return in considering the particular challenges of managing and leading in inter-agency settings.

Box 1.1: Barriers to collaboration in health and social care

Structural

• Fragmentation of service responsibilities across inter-agency boundaries

• Fragmentation of service responsibilities within agency boundaries

• Interorganisational complexity

• Non-coterminosity of boundaries

Procedural

• Differences in planning horizons and cycles

• Differences in budgetary cycles and procedures

Financial

• Differences in funding mechanisms and bases

• Differences in the stocks and flows of resources

Professional

• Differences in ideologies and values

• Professional self-interest

• Threats to job security

• Conflicting views about user interests and roles

Status and legitimacy

• Organisational self-interest

• Concern for threats to autonomy and domain

• Differences in legitimacy between elected and appointed agencies

Source: Hardy et al (1992)

Evidence for the positive impact of collaborative activities, then, is scarce given the significant investments and the plentiful accounts of challenges (see, for example, Cameron et al, 2012; Dickinson, 2014). Some organisations have sought to overcome difficulties in creating inter-agency collaboration by appointing individual managers – network coordinators, integrated service managers, joint commissioning managers – to glue these entities together. It is presumed that these post holders will solve the problems created by these various obstacles where they can (and negotiate a way around them when they cannot). As a result, McCray and Ward (2003, p 362) suggest collaborative working is all too often ‘the action of a few individuals with vision that have created change in service delivery in relation to people’s lives and opportunities. These individuals have managed to work and lead effectively despite the maze of separate service budgets, distinct disciplines and different values.’ In other words, in everyday practice, individual managers – and their leadership skills – are viewed as essential in making collaboration work (to the extent that they can or do work). In the broader organisational literature, these individuals are usually known as ‘boundary spanners’.

Boundary spanners

The literature on collaboration has long focused on individuals who engage in boundary-spanning tasks, processes and activities, although as Williams (2012, p 32) notes, ‘there is a considerable degree of conceptual confusion about the term and an absence of definitional clarity that must be addressed.’ Boundary spanners go by a number of different and often quite strange names within the literature, such as linking pins, boundroid, input transducer (Leifer and Delbecq, 1976), reticulists (Friend et al, 1974), strategic brokers (Craig, 2004) and entrepreneurs of power (Degeling, 1995). In the broad array of individuals who are described as boundary spanners, Williams (2012) argues there are two major categories. The first comprises individuals who have a dedicated role in working in multi-organisational/multi-sector settings. This group is small in number in the context of the overall public service workforce. The second group comprises those managers, leaders and practitioners who undertake boundary-spanning activities as a function of their role. It is this latter group that we most closely focus on in this book.

In the next chapter we provide a more detailed discussion of the research...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and boxes
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• 1: What are management and leadership, and why do they matter in collaboration?
• 2: What does research tell us?
• 3: Hot topics and emerging issues
• 4: Useful frameworks and concepts
• 5: Recommendations for policy and practice
• References