Week 8 Weaving the collaborative fabric

Introduction

Congratulations on reaching this final week of our course on collaborative leadership. We hope you have found the ideas you have encountered along the way interesting and thought-provoking. More importantly, we hope that these ideas have challenged you to reflect on your own leadership practice, and enabled you to adapt that practice to reflect the collaboration challenges of your current or future working environment.

In this last week, we will ask you to reflect on collaboration as a long-term endeavour to work across organisational, sector, and professional boundaries, and on the implications of this long-term approach for leadership practice. Although our focus is on organisational boundaries, you will also find that many of the ideas you encounter here also apply to collaboration across departmental or team boundaries.

By the end of this week you will be able to:

• identify reasons for collaborating over the longer-term and the challenges that make long-term collaboration difficult
• reflect critically on the conceptualisation of collaborative fabric as a way of thinking about sustaining collaboration over the longer term
• identify and reflect on the issues that arise for collaborative leadership
• apply these ideas to your own working situation.