What is an AMP Health Management Partner?

The Management Partner is at the heart of the AMP Health model. But what exactly is a Management Partner and how do they contribute to making the AMP model a success?

What is a Management Partner?

An AMP Management Partner, typically a mid-career professional with private sector experience, is embedded within a government team, usually for a minimum of two years. They serve as coaches and mentors, aiding the team in identifying critical programmatic priorities and the necessary leadership and management skills to achieve these goals.

How is a Management Partner different to a technical advisor?

It is important to differentiate a Management Partner from a technical advisor. Technical advisors are generally subject matter experts who provide guidance and quality assurance within their fields of expertise. In the health sector, technical advisors are often medical doctors, nurses, or public health specialists. In some cases, they conduct work on behalf of a government team that might not have the capacity to do it themselves. By contrast, Management Partners focus on enhancing team effectiveness and capacity to deliver on their strategic goals and workplans, rather than directly performing tasks for the team.

What does a Management Partner’s day-to-day work look like?

AMP Management Partners are embedded in ministry of health teams. Most are based at national ministries of health and act as coaches and mentors to the teams within which they are embedded. At the beginning of all new partnerships, Management Partners focus on establishing a foundation of trust with their teams and understanding their goals and priorities. Within the first few months of their placement, the team, with the support of the Management Partner, decide what leadership and management skills they need to develop to achieve their goals, and based on that they jointly develop a set of partnership objectives to guide their work together.

Specific focus areas for the Management Partner depend on the goals of the team, but are drawn from the AMP Health Catalog of Competencies, and often include supporting the team to improve strategic planning; prioritisation; the use of data for decision-making; programme design and work planning; financial modeling and investment cases; coalition building (including with the private sector); and guidance on governance and coordination across the MoH.

Management Partners also work closely the AMP Health Learning Team to determine the most context-appropriate approaches based on the latest science of team-based adult experiential learning, for developing the  relevant leadership and management capabilities, and to identify relevant content to help teams on their leadership and management journeys.

What qualifications do Management Partners need to have?

Our Management Partners come from a wide range of backgrounds. While a few have previous public health experience, others have worked in logistics, project management, banking and finance, management consulting, and other professions. We hire individuals with exceptional problem solving and analytical abilities and an ability to cultivate trust with team members ranging from junior staff to executive leaders.

Management Partners do not have any formal authority within the teams they support. They do not issue directives or instructions. Rather, they support the team by building their leadership and management capabilities and offering advice on how to improve ways of working. To be effective, Management Partners must therefore be able to influence these teams without having a formal position of authority. We look for character traits like curiosity, flexibility, humility, patience, gravitas, resilience, and sense of humour that enable individuals to build the trusting relationships needed to succeed in this role. These abilities and character traits are far more important than formal qualifications.

Why does AMP use this approach?

Leadership and management skills are essential for developing and implementing robust and resilient health systems. These skills drive effective planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of health innovation efforts, fostering innovation and continuous learning.

We aim to provide our partner teams with a broad set of management tools and techniques and coach them through adapting these to their own context. We aim to provide our partner teams not with an instruction manual, but with a toolbox that they can draw from to advance their own goals and objectives. AMP Management Partners are well-positioned to work with teams to jointly identify the leadership and management capabilities needed for them to effectively achieve their goals, and to build the skills of the team around them so that they are equipped with the right tools to get the job done.