Why is leadership and collaboration so difficult to achieve?

Many PCN’s and Practices are facing challenges on numerous fronts, and in the face of these collaboration and leadership can be tough, but not impossible.

A good deal of our work is with primary care, and a large part of that is helping practices and PCNs who are finding collaboration and leadership difficult. They’re important areas to address if you want to realise the potential opportunities:

• Benefits of sharing key individuals, networks and resources

• Improving costs and efficiency through economies of scale

• Improving services and ways of working

• Income opportunities, that might not be seen or not everything is in place to realise them.

So why is collaboration such a challenge? There are probably a variety of reasons, but the ones frequently seen are:

• Too busy firefighting to collaborate

• Thinking you’re doing ok and have all you need to survive and prosper

• Protecting your own independence

• Can see ‘why’ but not ‘how’

• There is no clear, shared vision of what can be achieved

• No leadership; some one willing to inspire enthusiasm and clearly communicate the benefits.

It’s difficult to have meaningful collaboration without effective leadership so if you’re struggling with collaboration it’s worth developing your leadership. It needs a shift from leadership because of position and with an autocratic style, to leadership built on trust, positive influence, inclusion and emotional intelligence.

Effective collaboration is more important than ever in today’s turbulent primary care. It is probably not an exaggeration to say in some cases sustainability, and indeed survival, may depend on it.

If you are struggling with collaboration or leadership it can be difficult to identify why, and even harder to address. Developing collaboration, leadership and sustainability in primary care is what we do. If this all sounds familiar, get in touch for an informal conversation to find out how we could help contact@vennhealth.co.uk