Those who practice and research collaborative governance have long observed the critical role of leadership in initiating, designing, managing and participating in collaborative governance arrangements. Effective public leadership can also be considered an outgrowth of functional collaborations. Indeed one can look at collaborative governance as “leadership factories.” Elected officials and appointed public decision makers possess many valuable political skills and capacities that can enhance cross-boundary collaborative endeavors as well as other attributes and inclinations that can prove to be liabilities. Further handicapping their potential collaborative contributions is their unfamiliarity with the conditions and challenges of interactive political leadership and collaborative governance.
Scholars of collaborative leadership have explored the competencies of such leaders (e.g., O’Leary, Choi and Gerard 2012) and contributions of leadership training programs (e.g., Getha-Taylor and Morse 2013). But less attention have been given, as Bryson and Crosby contend, to the special challenges of advising, mentoring, and instructing elected officials. This becomes particularly important when political polarization and incivility are on the rise in many countries and leaders are pulled to extremes while measured bipartisanship and cooperative deliberation are discouraged after rough and tumble elections are won by negative campaigning and divisive social media techniques.
I propose to develop these observations in a panel presentation that builds on both my practice and research experience. I have over two decades of professional experience in training public officials, federal managers, state legislators, and collaboration participants in the U.S. in civil discourse, conflict management and collaborative governance, primarily through my association with the National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD) and the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution. One program in particular, Next Generation, hosted by NICD will be highlighted as an intentional strategy to build a network of elected politicians equipped with facilitative skills and a more collaborative mindset. This program is a peer-to-peer adult learning model. My role has been to train core legislators in collaborative (interactive leadership) skills so that they in turn can facilitate workshops with other state legislators.
I will further connect these reflections to extensions of my work with my co-author, Tina Nabatchi, on Collaborative Governance Regimes (2015), underscoring where political leadership can best serve such deliberative forums and how to manage, when possible, undue influence or obstruction from political leadership on deliberative forums.
References:
Emerson, Kirk and Nabatchi, Tina. Collaborative Governance Regimes. 2015. Georgetown University Press.
Getha-Taylor, Heather, and Ricardo S. Morse. "Collaborative leadership development for local government officials: Exploring competencies and program impact."Public Administration Quarterly (2013): 71-102.
Next Generation, National Institute for Civil Discourse, http://nicd.arizona.edu/next-generation
O'Leary, Rosemary, Yujin Choi, and Catherine M. Gerard. "The skill set of the successful collaborator." Public Administration Review 72.s1 (2012).
