Collaboration as a management and leadership strategy for local governments fad or future?

• Author: O'Leary, Rosemary

Collaboration is the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by individual organizations. Collaboration can include the public. (Robert Agranoff and Micahel McGuire, Collaborative Public Management: New Strategies for Local Governments, Georgetown University Press, 2003.)

A survey of local government managers found that 86 percent of respondents said that collaboration was one of their management and leadership strategies, and most were cautiously optimistic about its possibilities. The survey of 1,400 local government administrators across the United States asked them to share their thoughts about their collaboration experiences. This article highlights the most significant findings--that local government officials perceive the advantages of collaboration to include economic benefits, better public services, relationship building, better ideas, and greater buy-in, or employee engagement.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

When asked why they chose collaboration as a management strategy, the answers of local government managers fell into five main groups:

1. Collaboration was implicitly mandated by community values or organizational culture, and was the right thing to do.

2. Collaboration was chosen as a management strategy in order to better serve the public, make better use of resources, and improve outcomes.

3. Collaboration was adopted to build relationships and credibility.

4. Collaboration was adopted to improve problem-solving processes.

5. Collaboration was explicitly mandated either by elected officials, law, or a superior.

Exhibit 1 shows the percentages for the major responses.

Collaboration was Implicitly Mandated. Local government officials said collaboration is the "right thing to do." Collaboration as a management strategy is congruent with community values about how public problems should be solved, how public work should be done, how the public should be served, and how taxpayers' money should be spent.

Equally notable were responses indicating that the collaborative approach is valued across organizations or jurisdictions. Culture is to organizations what character and personality are to the individual; the values and beliefs of an organization drive behaviors. To be a successful and accepted member of an organization, members behave in ways that are consistent with the culture. Further, culture does not change easily, and it is passed on to those who enter an organization through formal and informal socialization. Therefore, this finding--that local government managers described collaboration with other organizations and jurisdictions as part of community culture, in contrast to the stereotype of public bureaucracies being overly hierarchical and turf protecting--is important.

Collaboration to Improve Outcomes. Local government managers see collaboration as a highly effective approach to increasing performance, and some see it as a successful way of solving complex public problems and accomplishing their missions. The need for better outcomes as a reason for collaboration came through loud and clear. Answers included achieving goals and missions, better results, greater effectiveness, increased capacity building, better service delivery, more efficiency, and more sustainable solutions. In this context, local government managers describe the changing nature of public problems as requiring new approaches. In particular, complex problems, intersecting missions, and the need for stakeholder input all encourage collaboration.

Moreover, collaboration is seen as an important mechanism for making better use of or coordinating scarce resources such as funding, time, staff, and expertise, but also knowledge, new perspectives, and networks. The need for more sophisticated, innovative products leads some organizations to collaboration. Developing such products requires multiple actors, shared information, ongoing generation of ideas, and collaborative problem solving.

Collaboration to Improve the Problem-Solving Process. The respondents said collaboration builds a richer process for working together and solving problems. Managers described it as achieving consensus, compromise, integration, and teamwork. Collaborating improves problem solving by bringing in a diversity of ideas, broadening options, creating a catalyst for spanning boundaries, and focusing on needs. The collaborative process builds ownership of ideas and commitment to putting them into action, thus yielding more durable and sustainable results. A significant by-product of the collaborative process is the sharing of knowledge across organizations.

Collaboration to Build Better Relationships and...