Beyond Good Intentions – On the courage and craft of leadership

Kathy Hilyard has encountered some extraordinary collective leadership efforts across health, aged care, community services and the public sector. Here she shares some practical advice for leaders ready to confront the inevitable tensions and deliver real impact.

The challenges facing health, aged care, community services and the broader social good sector have outgrown the organisations designed to solve them. Demand is rising faster than capacity. Resources are scarce. The policy influence required to create real change operates at a scale individual organisations rarely command alone. The duplication of effort across organisations pursuing similar missions – in policy and advocacy, in care and service design, organisational efficiency, sustainability – is a cost the sector can no longer afford.

Increasingly, the leaders who understand this are being called – or calling themselves – into a different and more demanding kind of leadership work.

But here is what makes this challenge unlike almost any other.

For-purpose organisations are defined by their mission. That shared commitment connects leaders across boundaries in ways commercial competitors rarely experience. There is genuine common ground – shared values, purpose and understanding of what it means to lead an organisation that exists to serve.

And yet these are also competitive environments. Organisations compete for contracts, funding, talented staff and political influence. Boards have growth agendas. CEOs and Executive teams have ambitions. Organisational sustainability is a legitimate and pressing concern – you cannot serve the community if you cannot keep the lights on. Scarcity doesn’t soften competition. It sharpens it.

This is not a contradiction to be solved. It is a tension to be navigated. Holding commitment to the common good alongside the pressures of organisational survival and ambition – transparently, without pretending one cancels out the other – is the specific and underappreciated challenge at the heart of sector level collective leadership efforts.

A different kind of leadership challenge

Over many years working alongside senior leaders in these settings, I’ve had a front row seat to some extraordinary collective leadership efforts. And some quietly painful ones.

What strikes me consistently is not the difference in talent, intellect or commitment between those that work and those that don’t. The leaders in both are almost always capable, values-driven and genuinely motivated. What varies widely is their understanding of the work this particular kind of leadership actually requires.

Cross-sector collective leadership (where senior leaders come together across organisational boundaries to pursue a shared ambition) is considerably more complex than leading a team within a single organisation and it doesn’t get nearly enough honest attention.

These leaders bring something into the room that never leaves. Their individual organisational accountability. Answerable to their own board, responsible for their own organisation’s sustainability and mission, operating within governance and legal obligations that shape what they can and cannot do collectively – that accountability doesn’t pause when the cross-sector meeting starts. It sits right there at the table, shaping every contribution, every silence, every carefully worded position.

This is not about character flaws. It is the structural reality of this kind of work. And building collective efforts on the assumption that good intent is enough to transcend it is one of the most common and most costly mistakes these efforts make.

The inertia problem

Chris Huxham, whose empirical research into cross-sector collaboration is among the most grounded in the field, identified a pattern she called collaborative inertia – the tendency of even well-intentioned collective efforts to slow, stall and produce far less than their original ambition. If you have ever embarked on a cross-organisation collaborative endeavour you may have experienced some of these factors in play.

Her research found that inertia wasn’t usually the result of bad faith. It was the result of complexity nobody had adequately prepared for, ambiguous or fluid membership, unacknowledged power dynamics, accountability tensions between home organisation and the collective effort. Trust had to be actively built consciously – it was never simply a given.

The leaders who achieved collaborative advantage were not necessarily the most talented, intelligent, or committed. They were the ones most honest about these dynamics – who named tensions rather than managed around them and did the less glamorous work of building the relational foundations that made genuine collective effort possible.

The cross-sector tables that produce real change are rarely the ones with the best strategic plans. They are the ones with enough trust, candour and shared ownership to have the conversations that matter – including the uncomfortable ones.

The accountability tightrope

Every leader at a cross-sector table is walking a tightrope between two legitimate accountabilities. To their own organisation – its mission, strategy, sustainability, stakeholders including their people. And to the collective effort – its ambition and potential to achieve what none of them can achieve alone.

Patrick Lencioni observed that the most siloed organisations are rarely led by bad people – but by good people who have quietly allowed loyalty to their own patch to take precedence over investment in the collective. A similar pattern plays out at sector level, with even less structural accountability to correct it because nobody has formal authority over anyone else.

The result is a particular kind of theatre. Positions get tabled. Agreements get reached that everyone knows are softer than the situation requires. And the real conversations happen in the corridors rather than in the room. Most cross-sector efforts never explicitly tackle the hard conversations. They assume alignment rather than build it. The slippery slope to collaborative inertia is triggered.

Comfort or contribution – when things are left unsaid

Organisational scholars call it pluralistic ignorance – when the majority privately doubt something but assume they’re the only one who feels that way because nobody else says so. Silence is read as consensus. The undiscussables remain undiscussed.

Cross-sector leadership forums are acutely susceptible to this. The more senior the group, the higher the implicit stakes of naming what others haven’t. The more politically charged the environment, the stronger the pull toward performative alignment rather than naming reservations.

And yet, time and again, if the real conversations finally happen, the most common response is: “I thought it was just me”.

It rarely is. In rooms where no single person has authority to decide, the most strategically relevant contributions anyone can make come from the leaders who ask the genuine question rather than assert the confident position, who name what’s sitting undiscussed, invite the non-contributor to offer a perspective, stay curious about what a pathway forward might look like for everyone – not just their own organisation.

What collaborative advantage actually requires

Grounded research and experience point consistently to a handful of things that distinguish collective efforts that achieve their ambitions (deliver results that exceed those possible from individual organisations) from those that quietly dissolve into inertia (where participation becomes so difficult and trying that members give up, send proxies, or ‘quit and stay’). None of the antidotes to inertia are complicated nor easy:

• Genuine relational investment. Not networking or professional courtesy but knowing enough of each other’s actual context, pressures and constraints that collective decisions are made with real rather than assumed understanding
• Named and navigated tension. The explicit acknowledgement that individual and collective accountabilities will sometimes conflict – and an honest way of working through that when it happens rather than letting it quietly corrode the effort
• Provocation with trust. The willingness to name what isn’t working, surface the undiscussables, call out polite propaganda, ask the question that reframes the conversation – exercised within relationships strong enough to work with the discomfort that honest conversation produces
• A conscious choice about how collective to be. Every cross-sector group sits somewhere on a spectrum from loose coordination to genuine shared leadership. The question is whether where you sit is a conscious design choice or simply a default – and whether it’s serving what you came together to achieve
• A long view. Collaborative advantage is rarely quick. The groups that achieve it treat the collective effort as a sustained practice, not a project with a timeline.

Worth it anyway?

The problems that matter most in health, aged care, community services and public services can rarely now be solved by single organisations acting alone. The complexity, the scale, the systemic nature of efforts to change – these demand collective models and collective leadership. Not as an aspiration but as a practical necessity.

The leaders who do this – who stay at the table, invest in the relationships, name the tensions honestly and keep their eye on what the collective can achieve that none of them can alone – are doing some of the most important and most underappreciated leadership work of our time.

It is challenging. It takes effort and time. It requires a tolerance for discomfort that traditional positional leadership rarely demands.

And it is likely, in the years ahead, to be the leadership work that will matter most.

Kathy Hilyard is Co-Founder of the Centre for Collective Leadership, and Interim CEO Catholic Health Australia