Teaching Collaborative Leadership: Ideas And Lessons For The Field

This paper describes and analyzes a new approach to teaching collaborative leadership to masters of public administration students at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. The three year old course teaches students how to design a collaborative network with the necessary players at the table; structure governance for a collaborative group; negotiate ethically to best leverage resources; facilitate meetings of a network; manage conflict among network members; effectively engage the public, including designing and sequencing civic engagement to make effective use of public knowledge; design useful systems for evaluating the outcomes of collaboration; and operate within the legal constraints on collaborative public agency action.