Collaboration: The New Default Setting

By Author: emaly su
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What is collaborative governance, and why do we care? In 2004, editors John Ka-mensky and Thomas Burlin quoted public management expert Russ Linden in their book Collaboration: Using Networks and Partnerships: "Collaboration is about co-labor, about joint effort and ownership. The end result is not mine or yours, it is ours,"

In their 2008 The Public Manager article "The Challenge of Managing Across Boundaries," Mark Abramson and Alan Balutis asserted further that the federal government cannot accomplish its program objectives without increased collaboration between departments; across federal, state, and local governments; and across sectors.

Managers at all levels of government increasingly face tough ...
... challenges that defy mastery within the silo, such as the unsustainable expenditures associated with Medicare. For efforts to be sustainable over the long term, they typically require formal written commitments, budget and infrastructure that enable ongoing cooperative effort, and prepared players who have their heads in the game.

Like all who orchestrate networks or work in them—whether they conduct at Carnegie Hall or play on the college all-star team—government employees must practice to play well.

A recent report by the Partnership for Public Service, Unrealized Vision: Reimagining the Senior Executive Service, states that the federal varsity is only partially prepared: "The SES as a whole is stove-piped within agencies and is not providing a corporate or enterprise-wide view of the federal government. Yet the nature of problems today requires collaboration across agencies and other governmental organizations; with the private, nonprofit and academic sectors; and across borders and cultures."

Likewise, the junior varsity became subject to substantial revision of 5 CFR Parts 410 and 412 in a U.S. Office of Personnel Management final rule published in December 2009. The regulations now require initial training of supervisors within one year of appointment and at least every three years following.

A focus on developing employees and improving performance is intended to ensure that agency leadership pipelines not only anticipate supervisory retirements, but respond to the nearly government-wide low scores on the 2008 OPM Federal Human Capital survey question asked of civilian federal employees:" In my work unit, differences in performance are recognized in a meaningful way." Successful collaboration demands competent performance, not just any performance from government.

Not every sport is played in teams of course, but government's duty to its citizens precludes operating in isolation. Increasingly, we will need diverse teams of agile talent drawn from everywhere to fulfill governments mission. These players will need to negotiate and commit to agreements, incentives, rules, conditioning drills, playbooks, budgets, and schedules that work.

Government managers, as well as nonsupervisory experts, may be compelled by circumstances to accept routine collaboration as a given and be required to sustain it as long as necessary.

Fortunately, there are best practices from which to draw lessons learned. Kamensky and Burlin compiled a durable sourcebook of collaboration case studies, assessment tools, and governance frameworks. However, even best-practice arrangements must be reshaped periodically to meet changing conditions. Now is a good time to search for additional models of collaborative excellence and to improve our practice. Asking questions is a good way to begin to raise our game. Good questions this year might include;

Which known instances of large scale collaboration are still producing useful outcomes:1

Do only those that can scale up to country size merit our attention?

Might the governance framework that enabled a successful, private-sector collaboration be adaptable to the requirements of government? For that matter, must a problem-solving partnership always be initiated by government?? What can we learn from wildly successful outcomes obtained by high school students who partner across boundaries? Do we understand enough about the current environment?