Leadership in Partnership in England
Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) in England bring together at a local level the different parts of the public sector as well as the private, business, community and voluntary sectors so that different initiatives and services support each other and work together. Local partners working through an LSP are expected to act strategically to deliver decisions and actions which join up partners’ activities across a range of issues, enabling each of them to meet their own targets and goals and tackle cross-cutting issues more effectively. LSPs are regarded as key to improving social cohesion, the relationship between different communities in an area and their relationship with statutory authorities.
Formally, the primary leadership of the LSP lies with the Chair. In a majority of cases the chair is taken by the local authority; and in the great majority of these by an elected member, usually but not by any means always the Council Leader.However, while the predominance of local authority chairs reflects the importance of leadership from the local authority, the fact that nearly half the chairs are from other partners is also a powerful statement about the importance given to avoiding local authority dominance and recognising that leadership can come from many directions.
Leadership is, however, a much more complex issue than the question of who chairs the LSP. A partnership offers no automatic connection between ‘leadership’ and ‘follower-ship’ – in other words when an LSP commands ‘jump’ it is not clear that anyone necessarily jumps. Leadership is therefore necessary to create the linkages between the outcomes agreed by the partners, the strategy adopted to achieve those outcomes, and the delivery systems available through partner organisations. Once those linkages have been created, leadership will be necessary to ‘turn on the current’ so that energy and resources flow sufficiently robustly to make things happen.There are thus three identifiable elements to LSP leadership:
- Dialogue to agree outcomes
- Strategy to identify how these outcomes might be achieved
- Delivery; taking action.
At the same time, leadership is needed in three ‘fields’:
- Political leadership – supplying democratic legitimacy and the resources and power of the local authority
- Leadership from partner organisations – ensuring that partners are able and willing to deliver to partnership aims
- Community leadership – securing the consent and active engagement of the wider community.
All three areas of leadership are unlikely to be carried by the same individual, and perhaps the most successfully led LSPs have a number of key ‘leaders’ working closely together.The case studies emphasise, though, the central role of the local authority. The extent to which an LSP achieves a balance of power between partners appears to depend first and foremost on how willing the local authority is to lead, but to do so in an inclusive manner. Leadership is a crucial element in determining the capacity of LSPs, but the exercise of leadership within strategic partnerships remains extremely challenging.
Sources: ODPM/DfT 2006 National evaluation of LSPs: Formative evaluation and action research programme, 2002-2005.
Warwick Business School/Liverpool John Moores, OPM/UWE, London: ODPM, p37-38
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