Extending the council’s capacity for community and partnership working

Increasingly the role for all staff required greater community engagement and partnership working. Although this was demanding both on workload and skills it also offered greater learning, and interestingly for some was preferable to internal working.

Most managers when prompted could cite examples of good partnership working that had been developed over the previous few years. This was one of a number of areas that the organization could be justifiably proud of. The challenge was for people to have the confidence to communicate this to all the stakeholders and be able to applaud and celebrate success.

The competencies in this new area of effective partnership were real nuggets of success. These competencies needed to be transferred not only to other areas of partnership working but also to where different parts of the council could work more effectively with each other.