Effective Collaboration: What Does It Take

1
Effective Collaboration What Does It Take?

• Charlene A. Allred, PhD
• Director, Learning from Research and Clinical
  Practice Core
• National Center for Child Traumatic Stress

2
Why Collaborate?

• System fragmentation
• Barriers to service
• Service redundancy
• Incomplete treatment plans
• Unmet needs
• Excessive costs
• Cultural incompetence

3
Definition

• An interdependent problem solving process
• A means to reach goals that cannot be achieved by
  acting alone improving services for children and
  families
• A style of work characterized by a sense of
  community among individuals with complementary
  skills

4
The Collaboration Dilemma

• Cooperation versus Competition
• The payoff is higher for a party not to cooperate
  than to cooperate no matter what other parties do
  BUT. . .
• All parties are better off if they do cooperate
  rather than not cooperate

5
Barriers to Collaboration

• Transactional costs
• Lost identity and/or autonomy
• Incompetence
• Disruption of
• standard procedures
• established incentives
• division and coordination of work
• power distributions
• communication channels
• Culture
• Distrust

6
Levels of Collaboration

• Administrative (contractual)
• Inter-agency over-site committees
• Strategic alliances
• Joint ventures
• Memorandum of agreement
• Service (operational)
• Standardization of work, skills, products
• Communication and feedback

7
Strategies for Effective Collaboration

• Structure
• Resources
• Trust and Reciprocity
• Implementation

8
Structural Strategies

• Focus on the structural issues of collaboration
• Inter-agency committee, alliance, MOA?
• Tangible pay-off for collaboration?
• Accountable to whom?
• Decision making procedures?
• Group size?
• Roles and responsibilities?

9
Resources

• Create a pool of new resources that can be used
  flexibly
• Create interdependencies by clarifying the
  interrelatedness of agencies goals and how the
  goals of individual agencies can be facilitated
  by partner agencies
• Benefits need to offset transactional costs
• Create win-win situations

10
Trust and Reciprocity

• Minimize fear and greed
• Increase face to face communication
• Cooperation-competitive dilemma revealed
• Establishes a normative influence
• Trust development
• Group identity
• Perceived impact
• Tit-for-tat (TFT strategy)

11
Implementation

• Consider front-line service providers
• Shadow system ultimately determines the success
  of the collaboration
• Partial implementation of the service due to
  overwhelming client demands and limited resources
• Design the collaboration from the bottom-up
  rather than the top-down