This appendix is designed for use with students, policy makers, managers and practitioners in group discussion sessions such as workshops and learning sets. It is envisaged as a resource for academics and trainers who are keen to explore and facilitate discussion around the themes and topics considered in this book. The questions can be tailored to the needs of particular audiences, and are organised around the material, arguments and content stemming from individual chapters.

Chapter 2

The following questions primarily concern notions of collaboration; the implications of the prevailing policy context; the nature, role and behaviours of middle managers; the skills and competencies of middle managers; inter-departmental working; understanding power and trust; and the challenges of collaborative working.

• 1. Identify the key features – social, economic, environmental and political – of the prevailing public policy landscape in your area. What are the implications of these for the manner in which public management is approached and organised, and the role that public managers perform?

• 2. What are the benefits of, and enablers and barriers to collaboration?

• 3. Is the notion of ‘collaboration’ clear or are there multiple interpretations of working together with other managers and organisations? Can you devise a typology of relationships, perhaps along a continuum, that characterise different expressions of collaboration?

• 4. What challenges and barriers do middle managers encounter in the course of discharging their roles and duties?

• 5. Catalogue and discuss the tensions, ambiguities and challenges of working both within and between organisations, and explore the strategies involved in managing them.

• 6. Consider the various sources of power you have as a middle manager working within your organisation, and then compare and contrast these with the sources of power you have working between organisations. Think of examples of how you use them and discuss the issues associated with them.

• 7. What shape will collaboration take in the future? What forces will drive it and will it increase in its intensity and scope? What will be the implications for approaches to public management?

• 8. Identify the ‘middle managers’ in your organisation. Do they constitute a clearly defined group of managers, and if so, what characterises them from other managers in your organisation? Alternatively, is the notion of a ‘middle manager’ too broad and captures many different types of manager at this level in the organisation?