Q Why is collaborative leadership important in reducing crime in Greater Manchester?
A It has long been accepted that the police alone cannot combat crime. Wherever you have high levels of crime you wlll also find poor health, low educational attainment, poor housing, fewer employed people and all of the other "wicked issues" that are often spoken about. By working together a range of public agencies can tackle these problems that blight communities.
The key is to align each agencies priorities and then develop joint responses to tackle the underlying problems and causes. A good example is anti social behaviour and violent crime. We asked those who attended the programme to develop some ideas about how they could work together more effectively to tackle these issues.
For example, how the police and local authorities work together in tackling anti- social behaviour is now one of the government's measures for confidence in policing. In relation to violent crime, another example is how hospital and police staff can work together in tackling underlying causes such as alcohol-induced violence with the potential benefit also of reducing assaults on A&E staff by those who are also under the influence of alcohol.
Q Which partners have been brought together in the Manchester crime and disorder reduction partnership?
A The police work with local authorities, the fire and rescue service, health authorities and the probation service as well as community and voluntary groups within crime and disorder partnerships. Representatives from most of these organisations took part in our programme and considered how they can work better together as a partnership.
Q How can you get senior managers from different services to think differently about their leadership styles?
A When you talk about leadership most people think about it as something that individuals do. Although the leadership style of individuals is important it is even more important to look at how leadership is shared between the different agencies as well as how it is distributed within each of the organisations. This is what we call collective leadership.
Where public agencies work together in a partnership no one individual has an overall leadership role. Very often, they are senior people who work together and who need to agree some shared priorities and actions and be able to take that back to their own organisation and make sure that their shared aims are supported through their own organisations and that their own staff also work with other agencies. The essence of collective leadership is that the leadership is shared across public agencies at the executive levels but also right the way through each of the organisations to the beat officer, the local authority area officers, community nurses etc who also work together in making communities safer and stronger.
There is always a need for quick and decisive leadership in some situations that demand quick but well reasoned decisions. Policing is a good example of this and there are times when police officers are dealing with a critical problem where this style of leadership is needed and this can be considered within what is described as "command and control" - the policing of a football match, public order situations and indeed firearms incidents are good examples of this.
There are also some problems which may be very critical but in which there are set responses but in most cases involving wicked issues there are no ready answers and the role of the leader is not necessarily to come up with the right answer (which most people think leaders should do) but it is to ask intelligent questions and acknowledge that there are other people who collectively can solve that problem in unique ways.
Q What's new about the techniques you're using in this programme?
A As people think about leadership as an individual style, so people think about developing leaders as individuals and within individual organisations. We are asking people to think differently. First, to think differently about shared leadership development across organisations and also to think differently about how they lead in tacking wicked issues.
Stephen Brookes
Those who attended the programme completed what we have called a collective leadership inventory. This looks at different aspects of leadership and compares the style of leadership for their organisation as a whole, their own team and the wider partnership. In keeping with similar profiles conducted elsewhere, the analysis showed that individuals were more positive about the leadership of their own organisation than they were about the wider partnerships which supports the need for this form of leadership development. In terms of collective leadership styles most were positive about consultation and engagment but less positive about working together in a problem solving way and sharing resources and information to tackle the problems.
We wanted participants to think differently about how they tackle the problems and underlying causes. We introduced people to the idea of aligning strategies at the executive level with a view to putting the needs of communities first while also supporting the aims that each agency is measured on by government. An interesting example is the link between crimes recorded by the police and the impact that crime has on carbon waste.
Professor Ken Pease (an internationally acclaimed criminologist) highlighted the substantial carbon cost of crime. A simple example of this is the act of burglary. Some victims are more prone to burglary than others. If a person is burgled repeatedly they may move home. Every time a person moves house this has a carbon cost. This resulted in police officers, local authority and fire and rescue officers realising that they can support sustainability as well as reducing crime. With the increasing reliance on insurance when an item of property is stolen, another one is purchased in replacement thus adding to carbon costs.
We also profiled the way in which individuals think. We each have a different way of thinking. Some people are visionary and creative but do not like detail. Others like detail but find it difficult to innovate. Still others are judgmental and need to be convinced of rational arguments. No one way of thinking is the best way. We used profling techniques that identify the different way in which people think and then illustrated how recognising different thinking styles improves decision making particularly in a partnership setting. Those who attended the programme found the profiles to be very accurate and used this knowledge in discussing how public agencies can work better togther within increasingly complex networks
At the end of the programme all those who attended were very postive and agreed that it had encouraged them to think differently.
Q How would you describe your own leadership style?
A I have a long history of working in partnership from the early 1990s as a police commander alongside other more directive policing command situations. I developed a style of policing in my division that was firmly based on engaging the community and working with other agencies with the aim of achieving a signficant reduction in crime in an area that were beset by crime difficulties. We achieved our two year target - an 18% reduction - in our first year as well as seeing anti social behaviour and nuisance complaints to the city council reduce signficantly. This could not have been achieved without taking a collective leadership role as one leader in an organisation cannot "command" a leader in another organisation - it is about influence, negotiation and brokering. It was also about giving other people in my own teams responsibility and a big factor in the success was the work of a hand picked inspector and his beat officers who took our shared aims to the community and worked with the community and housing officers to improve the community. My style therefore was a collaborative style and one that sought to acknowledge differences in individuals and make the most of those differences in getting the results that we wanted to get.
Q How much has your own leadership background contributed to developing this programme?
A The development of this programme was also achieved through collective leadership. I worked closely with my colleague Nick Clifford who has as much experience of working with leaders in local government as I have with police and wider partnerships. We worked closely with the government office for the North West and the Greater Manchester Against Crime Partnership (a cross public sector partnership across Greater Manchester) in developing a programme that met all of our objectives and which put the importance of collective leadership development at the core. We also brought together some experts in relation to crime prevention and community safety: Professor Pease and Jeremy Hawkins, a civil servant who is an expert in relation to effective thinking and networks, to provide a comprehensive programme across three, two-day programmes.
This is the first time the programme has been delivered and was received very well by those who attended it - who were just as much responsible for its success as we were. People need to want to learn. If they do not, learning is unlikely to take place. Getting people to think differently is the first challenge. Once they are thinking differently, a different leadership style can emerge.
