Improving focus and impact in a strategic integrated professionals team

Case study

March 2011

The south Manchester district-wide leadership team (DWLT) wanted to align and clarify their strategic focus and impact, with a particular focus on school non-attendance. This case study follows their progress as they began to work collaboratively, and established distributed leadership to meet their goals.

Key learning

Demonstrating distributed leadership in an integrated services setting.
Establishing the building blocks required to achieve distributed leadership in a strategic children’s services setting.
Ensuring clarity on the strategic and operational focus.
Developing a solution-focused approach to the challenges that arose.
Modelling effective working across different professional agencies.
Developing collaborative behaviours with all involved in the project.
Establishing a clear pathway of escalation for managing school non-attendance.

Background

In Manchester it is the role of the DWLT to ensure that multi-agency teams work collaboratively to deliver a range of children’s services across six districts.

The south Manchester DWLT sought to clarify and align its strategic focus and impact with a specific focus on school non-attendance. The team achieved this through the National College Integrated Leadership Development Programme. Prior to involvement in the programme, the team had not sought the time to focus on internal dynamics and their relationship with the operational district partnership.

Key challenges

The overall challenge for the DWLT was to develop a shared leadership approach, and to clarify its relationship with the operational district partnership. Since its inception, the team had focused on the issues that arose at its regular meetings, but had not had the opportunity to develop a shared strategy or leadership approach. Based on previous experience the chair (and lead headteacher) felt that a distributed leadership approach would be an ideal solution. The key challenges for achieving this included the following factors.

Defining responsibilities

Both operational and strategic responsibilities needed to be defined. Creating a process to do this would in turn focus the impact of the team. The focus of the team was clarifying their role and responsibilities with regard to school non-attendance.

Communicating with stakeholders

Once responsibilities were defined the team needed to communicate their role and aims with key stakeholders. In focusing on one issue (school non-attendance), they sought to communicate with specific stakeholders such as headteachers, education welfare officers and other educational professionals with a role in supporting improved attendance. After developing a strategic plan to support improvement in school non-attendance, the team communicated their role and influence with the appropriate stakeholders.

Realising the advantage of working collaboratively

The DWLT sought to solve strategic challenges that, as a group, were within their influence and that were not being addressed by any other group or individual within the district. In order to achieve this they needed to gain a clear understanding of the contribution and influence of each person in the team.

Modelling effective integrated working

The group sought to understand and show how a diverse team with varying levels of influence could be an effective team from differing professional backgrounds working with a range of services. In order to achieve this they needed to spend time developing a shared understanding of their strategic purpose, and to value one another’s levels of contribution against their strategic objectives.

The team consisted of a headteacher, district manager of children’s services, social care and early years, senior schools effectiveness officer, third sector youth service manager, extended schools re-modelling consultant and others.

Solutions

The DWLT sought to develop a robust leadership approach that would draw on the skills and influence of its members in order to meet its key challenges and issues.

A common purpose

To be able to work better together, the group needed to fully understand the strengths and approaches of each member and the sector that they represented. A two-day residential event gave the opportunity to achieve this. The event helped to develop a common purpose among the group, which in turn fostered trust, and a greater awareness of how each organisation in the group could support one another. This common shared purpose also enabled the team to be clearer about their strategic role, and relationship with the district partnership, which had a more an operational role.

This process also enabled the group to fully understand the collaborative advantage that they could exert on their priority areas (attendance, level of teenage pregnancy and attainment).

Distributed leadership

The DWLT is chaired by a lead headteacher from within the district. The chair brought experience of a distributed leadership approach. Through external facilitation (of the Integrated Leadership Development Programme) and with the experience of the lead headteacher, the DWLT sought to adopt a distributed approach to address their strategic role in relation to school non-attendance.

Developing and maintaining relationships

It was not possible to capitalise on a distributed approach to leadership until the team had developed a fuller understanding of each another’s roles, and of a shared common purpose. Spending enough time on developing these ‘building blocks’ was an essential step towards being able to adopt a distributed model. A key part of maintaining and developing relationships within the team, and of keeping up to date with the pressures and influences on members (and the organisations that they represented), was for the team to communicate regularly with each other. It was decided that they would spend some time at the beginning of each of the three subsequent development days updating one another on the pressures, influences and changes that were affecting their organisation. This discipline kept the team informed and acted as the ‘cement’ around the relationships, fostering ongoing understanding and trust.

This method also enabled the team to develop a shared solution-focused approach to their challenges. This generated a very positive feel to the work of the DWLT, despite changes that were happening outside their control within the district.

Impact on those involved

As a result of the programme the team has developed a clear escalation path for managing non-school attendance within the district. Amongst the team, there is now a greater understanding of each other’s responsibilities and levels of influence, as well as a higher level of resilience amongst the leadership of the team.

“The feel of the group is very different to what it was like at the beginning. There is trust between members. There are consistent and positive messages being provided from the group and this is binding the group together.”

“It has been a worthwhile process. We drifted for two years - a waste of time. Now we are making a difference!”

Next steps

In order to continue their success in working collaboratively the group plan to:

maintain a focus on shared goals
continue to embrace a distributed leadership approach
commit time to address group maintenance as appropriate

Further information

For further information about this project please contact National College providers Brathay at john.bagge@brathay.org.uk.