Joan Roberts Consulting

People sometimes wonder why I am so versatile? Why not just specialize in one aspect of NPO development and then bill myself as a specialist. 

It’s too simple and frankly undermines the breadth of skills that collaboration practitioners need to build effective multi-stakeholder organizations. I wouldn't be modeling what I teach.   Over my wild and wacky career, I have developed the key competencies either through education, training or direct experience. After learning how to train professionally, I translated my knowledge and skills into skills training designed to build skills quickly for the non-profit and government workplace.  As much of my work is focused on collaboratives I market it as such. However I do the same kind of training and consulting with sole organizations. The only real difference is the scale and reduced complexity because of the number of players involved.   

In my first book, Alliances, Coalition and Partnerships, Building Collaborative Organizations,  I presented a model of trans-organizational effectiveness that illustrated that a practitioner had to tend to three streams at the same time- people or trust building processes, power and governance processes and work or management co-ordination processes.  My new book focuses just on one process stream in that model-the power and governance process stream but touches on all the rest because the skillsets are intertwined and interdependent.   You still need to build a good group dynamic and trust if you expect effective governance in a collaborative organization. The same holds true for work or implementation processes.

Recently I attended a session with an American Professor who teaches a program for strategic alliance managers (sort of a private sector counterpart of collaborative practitioner except every partner in the collaborative has an alliance manager) and she reported that the job of strategic alliance manager is now seen as a direct route to the office of CEO.  Managing the complexity of alliances requires a very high level skillset similar to a CEO's task of of managing stakeholders  and shareholders.

I think the same holds true in the non-profit and government sector.  For a practitioner to work in the ambiguous territory outside of their home organization requires all the skills of a manager including project management skills to financial and HR knowledge plus high level change management skills.  And as my new book points out the practitioner needs to hold the skillset for governance too.

So building your collaborative skills is not a waste of time or energy but a direct investment in your career. All the skills and tools needed for collaboration originate from simpler applications in a single organizations.  Getting comfortable with conflict is only going to improve your ability to handle conflict in your workplace as it will in working with a collaborative. Ideally people would not engage in a collaborative unless they were highly comfortable with conflict because much of what a collaborative process does is resolve conflict.  From becoming proficient in managing staff to developing awareness of group dynamics and learning how people adapt to change, to understanding governance and oversight functions, all are necessary to work in the complex territory that demands a collaborative response for effective change to take place.