What Might Baby Welcoming and Covid Recovery Have in Common?
We recently returned from the very great pleasure of meeting and being with our new granddaughter, who lives with her parents some twelve hours away from us. As our first grandparenting experience, the visit set a high bar for the thrill and wonder of new life and the promise of the next generation. Our role for the week of our visit (besides baby-holding and walking) was to offer our “cook and butler” services to relieve the household operations demands on Ellie’s sleep-deprived parents. Amidst the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry activities, I loved seeing my son’s high engagement in his parenting role and my daughter-in-law’s calm, patient demeanor with the baby. I particularly admired the teaming they were doing as parents to meet Ellie’s needs as well as their own.
All of this got me thinking about collaboration and teamwork, the subjects of the curriculum we are developing for Franklin Solutions’ Collaboration Institute. The pandemic lockdown has provided us a window of opportunity to focus internally on developing Franklin Solutions assets during the time that face-to-face contact opportunities have been minimal. One of the aspects of this curriculum development period that I’ve most enjoyed is the excuse to dive into books and articles relevant to the various topics we are addressing.
On my bookshelf I discovered a tome by Hank Rubin on collaborative leadership in the context of communities and schools[1] that is as relevant today as it was when it was published roughly twenty years ago.
Rubin posits that democracies require collaboration, unlike government systems that rely on authoritarian rule or class-based differential legal rights. In a society where each person has an equal opportunity to vote and where power is shared, it is essential that people and organizations figure out how to work together to serve their common interests. Many societal needs, like pandemic recovery, are important but complex. These complex issues can’t be effectively addressed by a single person’s vision or single institution’s effort. Collaboration is required. The individuals and organizations interested in providing leadership to complex public challenges who will be most successful will be those who learn and practice effective collaboration.
Collaboration strategies might be especially worthy approaches to resetting “normal” conditions on the back side of the pandemic. Communities around the globe preparing to recover from Covid impacts would do well to create collaborative relationships spanning the public and private sectors, according to a New York Times article, “Local Alliances Put Some Cities on the Fast Track to Recovery[2].” Citing promising recovery successes in a sampling of mid-size cities across the country, the article’s author concludes that “the cities that have a strong alliance with business development agencies are expected to recuperate faster.” Cities on the fast-track to recovery have engaged a cross-section of government, business, and education entities in planning and implementing pandemic recovery efforts. Focus groups and workshops have been used extensively in several of these cities to gather ideas and invest a broad swath of interests in creating recovery plans
At the most basic level, the most successful collaborations are those that share a common goal, clear roles for all partners, and provide opportunities for each partner to meet their own needs. I’d like to think that our baby welcoming collaboration would be termed “successful” by each of the collaborators. I should mention that our daughter-in-law’s parents played a similar “cook and butler” role during the week before our arrival, thus expanding the pool of collaborators. We all shared the goal of enjoying time together while providing an extra layer of support during the baby’s first month after birth. The parents each had clear roles that they had worked out with each other prior to our arrival, and the grandparents provided temporary leadership on household tasks as agreed to by the parents, in addition to providing supplemental baby-tending as requested. Our daughter-in-law had more cat-napping opportunities, our son could focus time during the weekdays on his work, and we the grandparents could share in this special time welcoming baby Ellie!
[1] Rubin, H. (2002), Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships in Communities and Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., pgs. 4-5.
[2] Schneider, K. (April 7, 2012), Local Alliances Put Some Cities on the Fast Track to Recovery, New York Times. Section B, pg. 6.