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Save Multi-agency services: Toolkit for managers
This toolkit is for professionals who have had experience as managers and leaders in their home agencies, and who are now taking on the development and delivery of integrated working, through their role as the manager of a multi-agency panel, a multi-agency team or an integrated service.
Leading and managing a multi-agency panel, team or service is a complex task that goes beyond traditional notions of leadership and management and might be summarised as:
The manager is responsible for bringing together practitioners from a range of different backgrounds to achieve results for children and young people that could not have been achieved by any one of the agencies acting alone.
In the terminology of management, this outcome is known as 'collaborative advantage'. The pitfall to watch out for is 'collaborative inertia', in which the process of integration actually gets in the way of effective service delivery, leading to negligible outputs and slow, often painful, progress.
There are many things that managers can do and skills they can draw on to achieve 'collaborative advantage'. These are described in the document Championing children, which provides detailed information about the shared set of skills, knowledge and behaviours for people leading and managing integrated children's services.
This section of the toolkit has information on some the key activities you are likely to undertake when setting up and managing your panel, team or service. Click on the topics below to find out more.
- Leading and managing change: theory and practice to help people adapt to new multi-agency settings
- Getting strategic partners on board: gaining strategic commitment, putting governance arrangements and partnership agreements in place
- Building the work group: finding the right people, bringing them on board, sorting out workforce issues and developing a sense of team identity
- Systems and processes: workplace policies, performance monitoring and evaluation, information governance
- Frequently asked questions: common dilemmas and suggestions for tackling them.
Case studies
Schools-based multi-disciplinary team
Describes two multi-disciplinary panels established through Camden's children's fund and working in two primary schools in the borough
Multi-agency working: behaviour and education support teams
Describes the multi-agency model established to support 18 schools in Sunderland
Setting up a children's centre
Outlines the development phase of Sutton Hill children's centre in Telford and Wrekin, situated in one of the country's most deprived wards
Useful references
Huxham, C. and Vangen, S., Managing to collaborate: The theory and practice of collaborative advantage (2005), London: Routledge
Huxham, C. and Vangen, S., 'Doing things collaboratively: Realising the advantage or succumbing to inertia', Organizational dynamics, (vol. 33, no 2, 2004), pp. 190-201
Kegan, R., In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life (1994), Boston: Harvard University Press
Paton, R., et al. (eds), The handbook for corporate university leaders (2005), Aldershot: Gower Publishing
Paton, R., et al. 'Corporate universities and leadership development' in Storey, J. (ed.), Current issues in leadership development (2004), London: Taylor and Francis
Download the contents of this page:
as a Word Document
Last updated on 05/05/2009
