What are leadership groups?

Leadership groups are a vital pillar of Local Area Coordination. They bring together a wide range of voices, including people with lived experience, local community members, and senior system leaders from councils, health services, voluntary and community organisations, and other sectors.

Their purpose is to oversee and guide the design, development, and ongoing delivery of Local Area Coordination. Crucially, they ensure that local people – the experts in their own lives and communities – are at the centre of shaping services and systems.

However, leadership groups are more than governance structures. They are a space for honest, open dialogue where local citizens can share their experiences of services directly with the people responsible for designing and delivering them. These groups create a bridge between communities and systems, helping services to evolve based on real experiences and real needs, rather than assumptions, targets, or organisational pressures.

At the heart of every leadership group meeting are the personal stories shared by local people. These stories offer more than just individual experiences – they provide valuable insights into how services feel on the ground, what’s working well, and where things could be done differently.

This two-way exchange between citizens and system leaders helps to:

• Identify gaps, barriers, and missed opportunities within services, ensuring they are understood and tackled at the root.
• Offer rich context about the reasons people seek support in the first place, revealing not just the immediate needs, but also the wider life circumstances and systemic issues that contribute.
• Bring personal, human stories into strategic discussions, grounding decisions in real-life experiences rather than abstract data or policy targets.
• Shift the focus from ‘fixing problems’ to building on strengths, recognising the skills, networks, and potential within individuals and communities, and how these can be nurtured through the right support at the right time.
• Build trust and relationships between citizens and system leaders, ensuring that co-production is not a tokenistic gesture but an embedded way of working.

Listening as a leadership skill

For system leaders, being part of a leadership group is an opportunity to practice active listening. Listening to lived experience is not just about gathering feedback – it’s about being prepared to be challenged, to reflect on power dynamics, and to embrace new ways of thinking and working that might emerge when services are designed in true partnership with local people.

When services are co-produced with local people through mechanisms like leadership groups, the benefits ripple out beyond individual services. People feel more confident and capable, as well as more able to speak up and share their ideas, and relationships between citizens and the service system are strengthened. Over time, this helps to shift the culture of public services – moving away from ‘doing to’ people and towards working alongside them, recognising that lasting change happens when people are active partners in shaping the support they need.

Looking ahead

As Local Area Coordination continues to grow and evolve across the UK, leadership groups will remain at the heart of ensuring LAC stays rooted in local strengths, ambitions, and realities.

By embedding lived experience at the centre of decision-making, councils and partners can create services and systems that not only respond more effectively to needs but also harness the full potential, creativity, and resilience of local communities.

The future of Local Area Coordination is not just about delivering services differently – it’s about building a shared culture of listening, learning, and leading together. Leadership groups are, and will continue to be, central to making that happen.

Tom Richards,
Manager of the Local Area Coordination Network