Community Learning Development Resource 302 – 04

PARTNERSHIP WORKING – POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES

SUMMARY

Two checklists of ideas and opinions from workers and managers about what factors (1) support or (2) constrain interagency working. This resource (302-04) could be used to agenda a discussion about co-working proposals or to review arrangements.

 

1. What supports and enables interagency co-working success?

• Shared understandings

• Shared vision

• Equality and lack of prejudice in the interagency relationship

• Trust and honesty in the relationship

• Having common goals and sharing intended outcomes

• Sensitivity to having an open relationship based on shared awareness and empathy

• Having shared, agreed and understood structures and systems

• Sharing relevant information

• Operating on the basis of respecting and valuing each other

• Concern to stay true to vision, purpose and values

• Having appropriate and effective communication skills and systems

• Effective relationship skills

• Supportive agency management participation

• Pooling resources

• Having mechanisms for cross agency/worker training – team-working

• Helpful geography and accessibility

• Efficient information flow – upward, downward and across

• Able to jointly monitor, evaluate, review and plan  the co-working

• Ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in joint working

• Concern for consistency balanced with flexibility

• Able to adapt beyond own agency organisational boundaries

• Making time to get to know each other & understand each other’s organisation.

 

Barriers to effective interagency co-working relationships

• Separate and different systems and organisation

• Lack of a shared language

• Lack of a common understanding

• Lack of interagency trust, honesty and empathy

• Working to own agenda to the exclusion of the partner agenda

• Lack of time, space and resource to develop and maintain the relationship

• Power problems or mismatch in size or resource

• Competition or competitive stance

• Mismatch of professionalism, style, culture, hopes, expectations

• Lack of shared goals or purposes, partnership by edict only

• Lack of shared values

• Individual agency perceptions of own exclusive ‘professionalism’

• History of resistance to relationship building and sharing

• Legislative and organisational barriers – constraining roles

• Barriers and issues about confidentiality and information sharing

• Lack of collaborative systemic thinking

• Mismatch of working practices

• Resistance to rationalisation or adaptation

• Empire-building and power-grabbing by partner agency

• Agency preciousness in ownership of users, clients and customers

• Perceived ownership of market sector, and unwillingness to open-up and share.

 

Some further observations by practitioners

• Successful co-working arrangements between individual workers and within networking in the field are often difficult to duplicate and develop at interagency level.

• Partnership working as a top-down requirement driven at agency level and from above does not always improve practice and experiences at the workface, and can divert resources from the delivery of client-related outcomes.

• It can be just as important to be able to undo co-working arrangements as to develop them.