How to harness cultural differences for positive cross-sector collaborations | Article
A cross-sector collaboration should only be attempted when the goal cannot be achieved by one sector alone. But when different sectors bring different ‘institutional logics’, how do you mitigate the culture shock and harness the value of diverse perspectives?
1. Understand the accountabilities of collaborating partners
Organisations have different accountabilities to different groups of people. It’s unsurprising that this can influence an organisation’s behaviour and decision-making. The Collaboration Playbook outlines a simple accountability framework with eight accountability types, highlighting the corresponding strengths and weaknesses that may come into play.
For example, the private sector is influenced by regulation, obligation to lenders, consumer preference and shareholder expectations. This creates an environment of pressure which drives performance, and often means private sector leaders have a less rigid approach to process, offering a comparative advantage in areas such as responsiveness and innovation.
In a collaboration, understanding the differing accountabilities of partners offers insight into the pressures and priorities that can dictate an organisation’s behaviour. Leaders should seek to understand this early on as it can help to establish accountability processes at the level of the collaboration, and manage negative aspects of culture clashes, like feelings of superiority. The accountability of individual partners also informs how a collaboration can hold its members to account in pursuit of its objective.
2. Deal with clashing values
The anthropologist Mary Douglas has delivered influential work around values systems, suggesting that cultures can be understood by how much they value social cohesion and following rules. Mapping these value systems onto the different sectors and contributing partners in a collaboration, helps identify synergies and potential clashes.
While limited, research suggests that values are broadly similar across the public and private sectors, diverging only on a few topics. Where there are value conflicts to manage in a collaboration, leaders may prefer to use methods of ‘Incrementalism’ (softening conflicts through a series of small adjustments) or ‘Integration’ (reframing an issue so that conflicts are seen to complement) to resolve the conflict, as these approaches can incorporate multiple values simultaneously. WIG’s Collaboration Playbook outlines the different cultural types a collaborative leader may face and highlights other methods for managing any identified value conflicts.
3. Leverage ‘boundary spanners’
Boundary spanning is the ability to act as an honest broker in situations with contested power, due to a personal understanding of both sides. Individuals who play this role are sometimes called ‘boundary spanners’ and they can help bridge cultural differences in a collaboration where there is disparate technical and professional knowledge.
Boundary spanning capacity is an asset for leaders, where they need to manage the interdependency of the partners. Accumulated on-the-job experience is the main source of insight for boundary spanning, giving them the interdisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the partners’ viewpoints, working practices and constraints.
Secondments have been seen as a valuable way of introducing boundary spanning. In one example of a collaboration between local government and civil society, the partners arranged job swaps, outreach visits and peer mentoring between senior staff. This helped them to overcome ‘…a general lack of understanding about the respective roles… often made worse by there being no common understanding or language; stereotypes, negative assumptions, and prejudice about “the other”’.
Selecting leaders with boundary spanning experience should go alongside developing boundary spanning capacity at other levels of the collaboration. If you’re interested in how WIG can support your top talent to gain valuable cross-sector experience, through initiatives like secondments or mentoring, please visit What we offer | WIG
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