Chemistry, communication and coalition

After the horse-trading, the cat-herding. Having wrangled for days over policy and glossed over pre-election insults, the Conservatives and Lib Dems last week finally agreed a deal for a coalition government. The battle to keep it together, however, to paraphrase Karen Carpenter, has only just begun. And yet while central government struggles to get to grips with power-sharing, it's worth remembering that parts of the public sector have been managing in this way for some time. Birmingham city council leader Mike Whitby, a Conservative, ascribes the success of his own Lib-Con coalition – in power since 2004 – to chemistry and communication. "The two party leaders need to like each other, and the parties they represent need to trust and respect their leaders to look after their interests," he says. Scrutiny committees Whitby says a key decision was to create a bipartisan productivity and efficiency team to assess the impact of each major council decision, as well as forming scrutiny committees to shadow each cabinet portfolio, led by a politician of the opposite party. "A statutory routine brings us together many times a month and works as a long-range radar, anticipating any disagreement," says Whitby. "We ameliorate differences through constant working together, councillors as well as cabinet. There's no doubt that managing a partnership takes some considerable time, but it's worth it." On a more individual level, the many instances of job sharing in the public sector suggests a practical and workable way to make collective decisions. Judith Killick and Maggy Pigott are joint executive directors of the Judicial Studies Board (JSB). They have been job-sharing together for 21 years and seven posts, the last five in the senior civil service. "We have similar commitment and values, as well as attitudes to work and leadership, but different personalities," says Killick. "We play to our strengths. It's valuable in terms of being able to talk things through, and if you know the other person well you benefit from support, coaching and feedback." The pair meet once a week and share or divide projects according to an agreed overall strategy, but make decisions depending on who is in on the day. Never look back "We resolved early on never to unpick each other's work – we always move forward from decisions, rather than looking back and unravelling those that have already been made. We try to ensure there isn't much of a gap between us and take it as a compliment when people forget which of us they've talked to." Job-sharing promotes a more collaborative style of leadership that benefits the whole team, she adds. It encourages delegation and so presents "empowering" opportunities for those further down the chain. When it comes to partnerships between different parts of the public sector, Paul Williams, reader in public management and collaboration at Cardiff School of Management UWIC, says spending cuts will focus managers' minds on the need to build relationships and seek consensus. The irony is that budgetary issues are likely to undercut the collaborative approach required to resolve them. "The process of collaboration is hugely resource-intensive. The fear during a time of unprecedented financial cuts is that organisations will retreat to their silos, taking responsibility only for carrying out their core and statutory duties, and that the efforts put into working with other organisations may come under threat." There is widespread recognition that untangling intractable, cross-agency issues requires the sharing of resources and expertise, says Williams, but overcoming structural and institutional difficulties, as well as navigating problems associated with statutory duties and financial frameworks, can be time-consuming. "A consistent complaint from people involved across different sectors is partnership fatigue," he adds. "There is a lot of apple-pie rhetoric about working together to solve problems, but achieving this is a much more difficult proposition."