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Collaborating & Influencing

Collaborative leadership is essential to meet the challenge of greater personalisation of services and integrated working. As pressure grows on resources, working with and influencing others in strategic roles across organisations and sectors is an increasingly important way to achieve optimum outcomes.

As a corporate or strategic leader your role may involve:

  • building trusting relationships and using evidence to influence the thinking, behaviour and practice of colleagues in other organisations
  • managing a range of complex and conflicting perspectives to move towards a shared solution
  • demonstrating how collaborative work across boundaries is leading to improved outcomes.

Collaborating & Influencing Resources

  • Personal Skills A number of resources for personal skills development are hosted on Good Practice for leaders and managers including negotiation and influencing. Registration or an Athens username is needed – but if you work in Social Services and don’t already have one, you can request one from Social Services Knowledge Scotland (SSKS).
  • Public policy-action relationship Understanding about putting public policy into practice.
  • Social Services in Scotland: a shared vision and strategy 2015-2020 The purpose of this strategy is to ensure that social services are able to play their full part as robust and strong partners within the overall landscape of Scotland’s public services and the shared outcomes they are working to achieve.
  • 2015 Frontline Worker and Citizen Leadership Research Report An action research project commissioned by the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) and carried out by an inclusive team of researchers from Diversity Matters, exploring the changing dynamic of frontline and citizen leadership, and what this means for skills development, the workforce and for organisations.
  • Social Work in Scotland A report which talks about the need to work more closely with service providers, people who use social work services and carers to commission services in a way that makes best use of the resources and expertise available locally.

Examples from Practice

What Others Say

Ambassadors for careers in care

"Good intent is not sufficient to bring about change and research participants identified leaders’ ability to influence other people: persuade and influence decisions in places where you have no objective authority."

(Enabling Leadership Research, 2016, p19)

Leadership Capability Indicators
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Additional SSKS Resources
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