Theme 4:
Rebalance
Roles

Rebalance and renew roles of the front line (direct contact with families) and back end (support, management and program development functions) to build the agency, and align with the priorities, of local communities and stakeholders (at the front end), and to strengthen a culture of ‘collaborative leadership’ (at the back end).

• Whole child development programs typically depend critically on human relationships within and across the families and communities being served. Accordingly, building the agency, dignity and respect of all stakeholders is vital to success.
• The local success of these initiatives also typically depends on the changing local context and relationships of the front-line leader; some adaptation to reflect this is also vital to resilience and scaling.
• Scaling these programs, for understandable reasons, has often been organized around a ‘replication and compliance model’ driven from the back end. While maintaining the active ingredients of a program is important, focus on replication should be complemented by explicit work to build the agency and human dignity of stakeholders, and to respond to the need for local adaptation.
• An enhanced model for scaling involves rebalancing programs to privilege the agency and priorities of the front line, while renewing the roles of both front line and back end. 
• Front-line leaders should be empowered to innovate, take on balancing accountability for outcomes, and engage and energize people in the community who have not typically been involved with the traditional model or whose involvement has had a routine flavour.
• Avoid seeing a program introduced from outside as the ‘solution’ to a local or family ‘problem,’ and avoid limiting family engagement to ‘needs assessment.’ Rather, see everyone involved – including families – as contributors both to understanding challenges and to creating, co-owning, and delivering solutions. Start with families, and keep them at the centre.
• Use technology to expand the options available at the front line, so that ‘high touch’ relationships are supported and complemented by ‘light touch’ technical tools, e.g., interactive apps.
• Back-end leaders should be encouraged to strengthen their culture of ‘collaborative leadership’. This entails:
  • Deep and empathetic listening to the priorities of stakeholders, including families, and commitment to serving front-line leaders and stakeholders to address these priorities
  • Adopting an on-going discovery mind-set, and become learning partners with front-line leaders
  • Steering the program in a flexible and adaptive way based on emerging discovery and cumulative learning
  • Targeting essential investments judiciously to accelerate the pace and build the quality of scaling
  • Integrating local wisdom, e.g. (from African contexts), an ubuntu approach to leadership

• Through collaborative leadership, the back end can support a framework of shared goals and outcome assessment strategies than enables front-line initiative and accountability.