Publications from ODSW Social Insights: Letters by DSW (Vol 1) | Seite 145

Letter to Social Service Leaders #2

The case for promoting team leadership is to help leaders to collaborate
with other sector leaders to solve problems rather than to compete with each
other. Such efforts call for cooperation to occur across the social service sector.
Collaborating to gather multiple stakehol ders and managing to gain quality
improvement is a team effort. And team leadership harnesses diversity. A team
with complementary skills from diverse backgrounds is better able to tackle
a broad range of challenges in the current fast changing environment. Such
a team also provides the opportunity for being a sounding board for ideas
and generating improvements. Without diversity, the tendency is to place
the interest of one’s own organisation ahead of sector-wide collaboration. So
the challenge is for organizations to give priority and more attention to new
solutions and less on claiming profile for individual organisations.

B. Ability to collaborate
The sector by its nature is highly social mission-driven and this poses unique
requirements. Leaders including staff and board members in social service
sector organizations have a passion expressed through their mission. Mission
is often where initiatives start and drive actions. Leaders in this sector
therefore need to know how to harness the mission-driven energy of their
staff, board, and volunteers. No social service sector organization is able to
achieve its mission working alone. A social service sector leader needs to
help the team and board focus on its mission and revisit its mission to avoid
a situation of mission-creep. The mission needs to be refreshed and relevant
to the operating environment. And to be effective, a leader needs to be an
active and dedicated collaborator, ready to reach out to others for advice or
for partnership opportunities. This mission-driven centrality is what makes the
sector different compared with the private sector and should skew it towards
collaboration rather than competition as is usually the case in the private
sector.
Collaboration however, requires unique skills, which social service sector
leaders must cultivate to be successful. They need to, through initiating
collaborations, work with multiple stakeholders to achieve quality outcomes
for those they serve. This calls for working in and through peer networks
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