Collaborate facilitated the 2024 cohort of Leading Greater Essex (LGE), building on the success of previous cohorts, but also adding further developments, to enhance and strengthen the Programme.

LGE is designed to grow knowledge, skills and capabilities in systems leadership including collaboration, understanding systems, diagnosing challenges, leading change, and, learning and improving. 

These themes are reflected in 20 indicators that we measure through self-assessments, and manager/peer assessments to understand the progress that participants make over the year.

In the 2024 cohort we saw a consistent and strong positive impact on participants’ systems leadership capabilities – with increases in all 20 self-assessment indicators, backed up by the feedback from managers/peers.

Participants felt they had particularly grown in:

  • Distinguishing between technical and adaptive problems
  • Analysing complex problems and describing the system that produces them
  • Putting sufficient time aside for reflection and learning
  • Investing in building a network of relationships across the various partners in Greater Essex.

Managers/peers identified additional big improvements in:

  • Willingness to accept and observe uncertainty before acting
  • Comfort taking action beyond the boundaries of their role and organisation.

We have also seen increases across all 20 learning outcomes. We asked more general questions which confirmed that 93% agree they have learnt things which they find valuable, including 22% who strongly agree. And 95% agree they have learnt things which they can apply to their practice, including 28% who strongly agree with this statement.

We have developed participants’ confidence and competence, and helped forge and strengthen relationships of trust between people working in different organisations, sectors and, spaces and places. We’ve also seen the wider impact of the programme on the Essex system.

The programme is developing a cohort of people with common frames of reference and a shared language for talking about collaborative work and systems leadership.

The output of the systems challenges participants work on, and the learning they generate, is having a material impact in Essex beyond the participants themselves.

Email [email protected] to find out more or read more about the background to the programme in our previous case study.