Building Strategic Capacity and Collaborative Leadership in Blue Light Organisations

It is increasingly considered that an organisation’s ability to form and manage strategic partnerships significantly contributes in enhancing its overall performance. Coordination, communication and ability to develop interpersonal relationships (bonding) are considered as three critical components of collaborative capabilities. The collaborative capabilities develop over a period of time, and they enable the organisation to purposefully create, extend or modify existing organisational routines that underpin the activities pertaining to coordination, communication and relationship building. Development of collaborative capabilities necessitates exploring alternative approaches to leadership in organisations. Emergency services leadership has been characterised as ‘top-down’, hierarchical, ‘heroic’, with a command and control approach prevalent in the organisations. There has been reliance on historical and hierarchical models of ‘heroic’ and ‘top-down’ leadership and absence of a distributive and pluralist approach to leadership. Current thinking and models are often based around individual services without much joined-up approach. Greater collaboration entails an approach different from leadership development, which needs to be facilitated at multiple levels within the organisations. Development of collaborative culture in organisations will necessarily involve cultivating future leaders, who will encourage greater collaboration within and amongst the collaborating organisations.