One of the traps in collaborative leadership is thinking that collaboration begins when we put people in the same room.
It doesn’t.
A room full of people can still be a room full of separate silos.
Everyone arrives carrying their own institutional habits, loyalties, scars, private pressures, and little rulebooks about how things are supposed to work. In health and care systems, this becomes even more tangled because the work is already complex, the stakes are high, and the organisations involved often have different histories, incentives, and ideas of what “good” looks like.
This King’s Fund report uses the language of collaborative leadership, but the bit that catches my attention is more basic and more human:
Before people can work together well, they need to agree how they’re going to behave with each other when the work gets difficult.
That sounds simple. But it might be one of the hidden foundations of collaboration.
Because the real test of collaboration is not how people behave when the workshop is warm, the coffee is decent, and everyone agrees with the slide deck.
The real test comes when money is tight, the data is contested, the history is messy, and someone around the table thinks another team is quietly protecting its own patch.