Partners in place

Who It's For

Leaders and managers working across organisational boundaries in councils, the voluntary sector, health and housing

Overview

The problems that matter most to communities rarely sit within one organisation. This course is one strand of the one-day Stronger together and opens with co-production and working across organisations, using Boyle and Harris's ladder and the Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes, then makes partnerships work with the OECD guide and the LGA's principles. A capstone reads Merthyr Tennis Club, Compassionate Frome and Poplar HARCA. It then turns to Huxham and Vangen's collaborative advantage and Adam Kahane's power and love, and to Collective Impact and its critics. It rounds off with negotiation and everyday influence, from the Hollywood writers' strike to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.

Aims

The course exists to develop leaders who can get things done with and through others: setting up partnerships with the machinery they need, building trust across boundaries step by step, asking whose agenda a common agenda serves, and forming coalitions that stay on the right side of the ethical line.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Apply a pre-launch checklist and the four partnership functions to set up a partnership with the machinery it needs.
2. 2Use the trust-building loop and Kahane's power and love to plan how to share power before sharing tasks.
3. 3Assess the critiques of Collective Impact, and plan cross silo alliances that build a coalition ethically before a decision is made.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Explain Boyle and Harris's definition of co-production and what the words equal, reciprocal and relationship each require.
2. 2Apply the four-item checklist of written purpose, named roles, agreed resource and timeline, and a fixed first review date before a partnership launches.
3. 3Identify which frameworks, such as asset-based development, the partnership continuum, co-production and Arnstein's ladder, explain the outcomes in each of the three cases.
4. 4Explain collaborative advantage and collaborative inertia and identify the four themes of aims, power, trust and membership that make collaboration hard.
5. 5Describe the five conditions of Collective Impact and explain what a credible backbone function does.
6. 6Distinguish the distributive and integrative elements of a deal, and create value by trading issues that each side values differently.
7. 7Map stakeholders on a power and interest grid and plan how to engage each quadrant.
8. 8Identify which rung of the co-production ladder your own work genuinely reaches, using four questions about the brief, delivery, duration and service users' own view.