Collaborative leadership is an essential skill for social care leaders
January is often the time to look ahead at what will be different over the next 12 months and 2025 is set to be a monumental year in the health and care system.
In the next few months we can expect transformational reform in the upcoming 10-year health plan, a comprehensive spending review, a newly announced social care commission and the implementation of a recently published devolution White Paper. Priorities for this government include shifting more care closer to people’s homes, greater focus on prevention to keep people well and shifting from analogue to digital.
While transformational change is much needed and welcomed by the sector, change often also brings up feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Such feelings may be mitigated if trusting relationships have been established with or between other sector leaders, and a clear shared purpose has been agreed.
Amid a lot of change, one thing that will stay broadly intact is the core structures for planning and commissioning health and care services. The government has rightly committed to sticking with the principle of integrated care systems for planning and delivering more joined-up services across local regions. This means partners within systems – health, social care, public health, wider local government and others – will continue to drive reform and improvement through collaboration with other partners in their area. Leaders have a critical role in role modelling and setting the tone for effective collaborative working across organisations and sectors.
Adopting a more collaborative style of leadership to support more successful partnership working requires thoughtful, considered action, which is not easy when operational pressures and resource constraints can pull different organisations into competing with one another. Collaborations across different sectors and across different organisations face other challenges such as conflicting goals, competing norms and rules, and perceived loss of power and status. Some of these difficulties can be resolved by leaders adopting different ways of working and different leadership practices.
The King’s Fund’s Building Collaborative Leadership programme has been running for more than 12 years, bringing together individuals from social care, the NHS and public health to develop the key leadership practices, skills and behaviours needed for more effective collaborative working. From working with many leaders over that time, we have identified six key areas of practice a leader needs to pay attention to if they are to create conditions for others to collaborate well:
- Creating a safe, inclusive and trusting environment
- Building healthy relationships between all parties involved in the collaboration
- Developing a shared purpose and shared group identity
- Actively managing power dynamics to enable power sharing
- Surfacing and manage any conflict quickly and fairly
- Promoting shared decision-making processes between all parties involved.
Health and care leaders need to successfully shift some of the current power dynamics between organisations if we are truly to see more patient-centered care delivered, this programme explores this issue in a variety of ways.
As we look out at the rest of 2025, it is clear that this will be a year of change but one thing that will stay the same is the need for collaboration between services. This presents huge leadership challenges especially in a resource constrained environment. Our Building Collaborative Leadership programme will support you to navigate many of these challenges.
This piece was written by Nicola Walsh, Assistant Director of L&OD at The King’s Fund, who runs the Building Collaborative Leadership programme.
The programme will help you develop new leadership skills and unlearn some of the unhelpful biases and blockers that can get in the way of effective collaboration. The course also considers health and care policy and the changing landscape of the health care system.
Other features:
Groundhog day: When will care reform advance from talks to action?
Navigating the complexities of social care amid Ofsted’s new rating framework