MAD has found that strong leadership, commitment, and support are needed to support successful interagency teams.
Leadership
At least two kinds of leadership are essential for successful interagency work.
- Leadership in each agency must give permission to staff to represent the agency and discuss initiatives for potential interagency coordination. Agency leaders must show enough interest in the group's work to stay informed about its work, and to show up in person on occasion to see first-hand what is going on. At the same time, agency leaders need to delegate some responsibility to staff participating in the group, and ensure that those staff have the time and resources needed to be effective group members.
- Leadership within the group is key to keeping the team on track and making the most of meeting time. Internal group leadership can be a designated staff person from one of the participating agencies, or an executive team with responsibility for planning and convening meetings. They need not have greater influence than anyone else in the group, but their contribution helps everyone to participate fully. If relationships between individuals or organizations make this challenging, the interagency group may choose to clarify and establish who does what, and even draft interagency agreements to formalize roles or allow for sharing of data.
An outside facilitator can provide a third type of leadership—providing a process for developing clear goals, sharing information, and building the group's understanding of the complex system they are a part of. Sometimes group members have the skills to be able to do this, but an outside facilitator can allow all the group's members to participate fully, and also push the group to examine difficult issues, which may be harder for an agency representative perceived to have a vested interest in a particular program to do.
Commitment
Interagency group participants need to have a high commitment to their shared goals in order to overcome the more narrow focus of their home agencies. For every insight participants gain about the benefit to working across agency lines, it may seem that two other obstacles appear in the form of turf, statute conflicts, or lack of resources. Interagency-focused staff may feel out of step with colleagues who are less aware of the wider implications of their work. Or they may feel that their work on interagency committees is unnoticed and unrewarded in their home agencies.
The exciting thing about interagency work is the potential for individual agencies to accomplish more than they can do on their own, which often generates strong commitment by group members who share this vision. The challenge is to translate that commitment outside of the group and convince home agencies to commit what is needed to achieve shared goals.
Relationships
Knowing and trusting one another makes a big difference in groups' ability to work together across agency boundaries. Often these relationships flourish because circumstances throw people together in other settings besides group meetings, such as other projects and community groups. When participants are meeting for the first time, it's helpful to create circumstances where people can become better acquainted with each other. Providing food always helps! Also, it's helpful to allow time to check in on what members have been working on in their day-to-day roles. Often these updates help people to find other ways in which their work intersects, and soon they are identifying new ways their programs might work together.