I was just recently part of a discussion with several of the Strive Cradle to Career communities about how they’re working to promote shared accountability within networks that are building collaborative action plans.
It became clear throughout the conversation that this is one of the toughest challenges that partnerships wrestle through. There is no denying it – collaborative action is hard work. It requires a level of collaboration that goes beyond rhetoric, to a place where partners are asked to set aside individual agendas, change behaviors and adopt new practices. It is time-consuming in that being data-driven means being willing to take the time to analyze and make difficult decisions. And in most cases, it requires network partners to do something that is above and beyond their “day jobs.”
As the discussion continued, Dan Ryan of All Hands Raised in Portland stressed that we need to be “writing a new job description,” one which includes collaborative action as one of the core competencies. This will likely require partners to re-evaluate all of their many responsibilities and prioritize authentic collaboration around a shared vision and common measures, with the expectation that this type of action will get to improved outcomes.
Geoff Zimmerman of the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati, Newport and Covington added that we must find a balance between how much support and capacity the backbone provides to the collaborative action work, with how much we expect partners to change how they’ve been operating in order to adapt to the “new job description.” If the backbone provides too much support, partners will not change their behavior and this work cannot be sustained.
So the questions are: how do we write the new job description for this work, making collaborative action a critical competency for our partners’ “day jobs”; and as backbone support organizations, how do we provide the right balance of capacity building and support to catalyze systemic change and make sure our partners don’t want to quit their “day jobs?”
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