Organisational Leadership

Leadership development, conflict resolution and the management of change.

Time To Change – Getting Better Value From Your Consultant

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

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Have you ever commissioned a piece of change consulting for your organisation with a great deal of enthusiasm, but then found yourself utterly frustrated by the relationship with your consultant, and deeply disappointed by the poor results at the end of the contract?  Organisations don’t always get the best value from their consultants, so in the current climate of austerity it is essential to rethink the way organisations contract with consultants to support their programmes of change. 

Among other services, I run consultancy skills master classes, and I provide coaching supervision to other consultants. I also find myself coaching clients who have had bad experiences with other consultants – I support them in analysing what went wrong and to identify how they could work differently with consultants in the future. Based on these experiences, here are my thoughts about how organisations  can invest their limited resources most effectively, so clients and consultants can enjoy a richer, more stimulating, and ultimately more effective working relationship. (Or download and save the full guide here.)

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The Problem

There are two related reasons for consultancy being less effective than it could be. Firstly, clients and consultants can have different unspoken assumptions about which model of consulting they think they are working to. So they have different expectations about how they should relate to each other, pull in opposite directions, and land up frustrating each other’s efforts. This is easily avoided if you clarify the terms of engagement from the start.

Secondly, at a deeper level, consulting programmes don’t always deliver the desired results because clients and consultants haven’t reached agreement about which model of consulting is needed for the programme to be effective. They often default to a classic  “expert consultant” model which assumes that the consultant will produce a perfect solution for the organisation with little input from the client. This is a seductive idea for both parties – because it paints a picture of minimum effort for the client organisation, and superior insight on the part of the consultant. But in this period of dramatic funding cuts, organisational life has become even more turbulent, so the task of achieving sustainable organisational change is more complex than it ever was. It is increasingly unlikely that expert consulting alone will deliver results.

This means it is essential for the client and consultant to negotiate thoroughly at the start so they both have a clear understanding of what outcomes are required, and how the consultancy intervention will deliver these.  They need to establish how they will work together and sustain meaningful dialogue throughout the contract. If consultant and client can line up in equal partnership and set aside time to think creatively together, it’s possible to arrive at solutions that fit the organisational context well and ensure that change is sustainable well beyond the consultant’s involvement. 

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Key Questions To Ask Yourself

1. Can the consultant actually consult well? What skills, knowledge and experience do you need your consultant to have? Often organisations emphasise an expert technical match with the organisation – at the expense of testing a good consulting match. Do they really need to have a detailed understanding of your organisation and sector or would a working knowledge be enough? Have you considered other qualities that are essential: trustworthy, has presence, establishes rapport, able to challenge constructively, able to facilitate dialogue and find common ground, intelligent and analytic, and able to “hold” the organisation through turbulence.

2. What outcomes do you want from the consulting? Rather than prescribe the methods to be used by the consultant, could you specify the outcomes you require and ask the consultant to explain what methods she would use, and how these would deliver the desired outcome?  Use the consultant as a sounding board, a trusted adviser, to check that you have formulated the problem > diagnosis > solution effectively, to make sure that the different stages of the change sequence stack up.

3. What outputs do you require? Organisations frequently commission outputs rather than outcomes, and will request formal written reports or “reviews” from consultants, when what they really want is a cultural change, or to have a conflict resolved. Are you sure you want to spend your scarce resources on outputs like a formal report or a written review? Who will read it? Would a quick “working note” be sufficient to capture the key points?

4. How will you and your consultant line up and think together about the organisation?  It is impossible for a consultant to have full insight about a new client system, so there is great value in you and the consultant reflecting together and pooling your impressions. There will be issues that you take for granted that an external consultant will see with fresh eyes, but equally, the consultant may not understand the full significance of what is seen and will need your insider knowledge to decode it.

5. Who needs to participate in the consultancy process? How would you define the “system” that the consultant needs to work within? Which people in what roles should be engaged in the consulting? Who is most likely to have valuable insights into the best way to introduce the changes you require?  Who should stay out of the consulting process? eg. Organisations sometimes include staff or service users out of general sense of ‘democracy’ without being clear about why they should be involved. There needs to be a clear rationale for each of the participants to be there in their organisational “roles”, and they need to be given the means of participation.

6. How will you engage your stakeholders in the change process? Think through with the consultant to identify what methods of engagement will unlock stuck bits of your system, allow you to access the knowledge already within the system, and enable safe resolution of difficulties.

7. Are you clear yet about the full course of action that you want to commission? Don’t be bounced into commissioning a complete programme of consulting if you don’t know what outcomes you are after. You don’t have to commission your solutions all in one go. Instead you can take the change process one step at a time, using:

  • Coaching sessions for yourself to clarify the issue in your own mind, and to map out your dilemma clearly.
  • An initial consultation with your senior team or governing board to engage them in defining and refining the problem, establish the common ground, and identify what expertise you already have in the organisation that might help to find a solution.
  • A well-facilitated, engaging change process, with specialist expertise bought in where necessary for specific elements of the programme (eg. specialist legal advice).

8. How much time are you prepared to contribute?  If the diagnosis of the problem, the development of the solution and the implementation require a collaborative approach to ensure that the most appropriate course of action is taken, are you prepared to find the time to be available to work with the consultant?   A good consultant will understand how to make best use of your time and to ask for contributions appropriately but will be frustrated if you are not able to be reasonably available.

9. How will you hold your positive authority and stay in role as leader throughout the change process? Can you entrust the consultant with generous access to your trustee board and staff, knowing that she will respect your leadership role? Is the consultant skilled and courageous enough to challenge you constructively when necessary – building rather than undermining you as a leader?

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You can download the full version of this guide with more details of the different consulting models here.

Time To Change – Getting Better Value From Your Consultant

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My grateful thanks to my colleagues for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this blog:

Denise Fellows, Director and CEO of Consultancy & Talent Development, Cass Business School’s Centre for Charity Effectiveness

Anne McKay, Clinical Psychologist

Mark Harrod, consultant and interim CEO

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Holding Your Organisation Together In A Crisis – Why Attachment is Profoundly Important

~ Consult James Barrett ~ 2 Comments


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In a climate where workplaces are under extraordinary pressure to introduce radical changes as rapidly as possible, it is essential for leaders to have a clear understanding of human psychology. They need this knowledge to support their staff in times of great stress, and to mobilise people to adapt effectively to the required changes.

The two main ways in which adults anchor themselves in life are through the structure of work and through loving relationships. So a threat to people’s job security causes a deep disturbance in their core sense of stability – it triggers their survival instincts and hampers their capacity to function effectively. This disturbance will be compounded if they don’t feel secure in their personal relationships.
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Many of the people problems that leaders grapple with in the world of work can be solved by adapting the knowledge available from the world of psychology – but I am constantly surprised that the frameworks that are commonplace to psychotherapists and child development experts don’t seem to be utilised in the workplace.

Of course (despite the dire stories we hear about some organisations!)  staff are not children, and the workplace is not a therapeutic community – staff are employed to fulfil contractual responsibilities, and they are expected to be emotionally robust enough to handle the demands of work.  But we know that parent-child patterns of behaviour play themselves out in the relationships between leaders and their staff – especially when people are stressed and the organisation is under fire.

So here are 3 frameworks that have great significance for holding organisations together in times of radical change: mentalization, containment and attachment.
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1. Mentalization

Mentalization is the capacity:

* To know your own feelings, to interpret those feelings, and to modulate them – to decide whether you wish to act on them, express them, or contain them.

* To reflect on other people’s behaviours, and to be attuned to what their possible underlying thoughts, emotions and intentions might be.

* To reflect on what dynamics might be taking place between yourself and other individuals.
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Mentalization enables us to join up the workings of our own inner worlds with our experiences in the external world: to manage our behaviour and regulate our emotional responses in stressful situations; to establish stable relationships; and to pursue personal goals.

Many staff can mentalize during ordinary work pressures, but the unrelenting rate of change at the moment demands that we have to be able to keep mentalizing when under fire – and have to be robust under pressures that would once have sent us into a melt-down.  eg. to carry out high level negotiation with peers over access to diminishing resources; to engage in complex strategic partnerships with external agencies.
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2. Containment

Our ability to mentalize develops through a sense of containment that we experience as infants from our primary caregiver (usually our mother). It’s that sensation of being emotionally and physically held by a robust individual who affirms our feelings of pleasure, helps us to interpret our bad feelings when they overwhelm us, and soothes away our distress. As we develop emotionally we internalise our own sense of that containment, and develop that capacity to recognise triggers for stress, realise that negative feelings will pass, establish coping strategies, and find safe ways to let off steam. Staff need to feel this same sense of containment in order to cope with major events like redundancies and mergers.
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3. Attachment

In order for adults to be able to feel contained and mentalize effectively, we need a secure sense of ourselves as individuals. We aren’t born with this sense. Instead the foundations of our social and emotional development are established in infancy though our attachment relationship with our primary caregiver. The core sense of who we are emerges out of this sense of connection with another human being – and the security of knowing that we are borne in mind by our adult caregiver.

Attachment theory suggests that this developmental experience in early childhood establishes in us a core internal working model of relationships that: shapes our expectations and choices of sexual and domestic partners; and defines our patterns of behaviour with our lifelong friends, with leaders, peers, and followers, and with the older people or children who are dependent on us.

If a child’s primary caregiver is unable to provide a separate but secure attachment bond, that child can develop a damaged internal working model that it carries into adulthood. It is thought that 65% of adults have secure attachment patterns, but 35% have insecure patterns: classified as either preoccupied,  dismissive, or fearful – where they struggle to hold their personal boundaries.
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What This Means For Organisations

This has profound implications for leadership in the workplace. While people with exceptionally insecure attachment patterns are unlikely to be in employment, there is still a significant proportion of people in the workplace who have a great contribution to make to the organisation, but who also have insecure attachment patterns. They may struggle with their sense of self-worth, or mistrust other people, and this could sabotage their ability to hold their role boundaries at work.

Even for the 65% of individuals who do have secure attachment patterns, the current turbulent climate of organisational change and job-losses can  severely test of their sense of containment too. So leaders need to make the most of their human capital by modelling secure, containing attachment behaviour with their staff.

Attachment theory also explains why employee engagement is so crucial to organisational success. The most robust staff can feel devastated when they aren’t borne in mind by their leaders – when decisions are taken by a faceless bureaucracy, when major changes are introduced without consultation, or when leaders refuse to acknowledge the personal impact of their decisions on their staff.
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How To Handle Staff Reactions To Change
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Here is an illustration of employees’ likely responses to change based on different attachment patterns.

The two diagrams in this blog have been adapted from here. NB They are NOT diagnostic tools! They illustrate positions that many of us slip into when pressured, rather than hard categories by which to pigeonhole individuals. Also, you need to be mindful of cultural differences between your staff because some countries respond differently to these positions.)

When people are in a secure attachment position they might respond initially with: “This is tough, I’m hacked off with our CEO and furious at the government’s cuts! How will our clients cope??” But a few weeks later they might be saying, “it’s the kick up the butt that I’ve been waiting for! I’m going to apply for that leadership position now!”. They will need you to acknowledge that the change is painful and demanding, then help them to recognise their inner resourcefulness. They need practical support to identify other resources, and to plan for the changes.

Those who adopt a preoccupied position at the time will experience change as a personal devastation: “This is the end of my career. My whole life is a mess! There’s nobody to support me.” They require: an opportunity to rebuild their confidence and identify their skills, talents and sources of support; and a sense of you as a robust leader who isn’t repelled by their neurosis or drawn into their combative world.

Those in a dismissive position will be fiercely independent, keep a stiff-upper-lip, and refuse to acknowledge the impact of any changes. They will flatly deny any feelings, but their hostility may be internalised and manifest itself in health problems, or may be projected elsewhere – leading a meltdown over a seemingly irrelevant matter. Again, they need you to be robust if they erupt emotionally, and will benefit from your clear mentalization. (“I feel really disappointed about having to introduce these cuts. I know these changes are likely to cause a great deal of frustration for many of you…”)

Staff in a fearful position will be anticipating trouble and be primed for a fight. They are likely to experience change as a personal attack, and may want to retaliate – through formal grievance or underhand sabotage. The same principles apply: mentalize; work with them on identifying their strengths and options; and be robust despite the intimidation. Where someone is seriously out of order, set limits and be clear about sanctions. People exhibiting fearful attachment positions can be extremely challenging, so be sure to get professional support.
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Repairing Insecure Leadership Patterns
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What about insecure patterns of attachment when it comes to leadership?

Leaders who adopt preoccupied positions feel brittle and find it difficult to stay in role or hold their authority. They will be inconsistently combative, attentive and neglectful, and only responsive to those who really demand attention.  (Staff: “What do we have to do to get noticed round here?!”) They may interpret staff hostility to difficult organisational changes as a personal rejection, and may find constructive criticism too overwhelming to take on board. Their mentalization task is to be more personally robust and to hold their role boundaries.

Leaders who take up dismissive positions are likely to direct change in a top-down, hard, impersonal manner. They may be oblivious to the upset and shock in their employees, and discourage any expressions of emotion. They may have unrealistic expectations of staff resilience – pushing them to be independent. Their mentalization task is to be more compassionate and more attuned to their own feelings.

Leaders who adopt fearful positions will be bullish and authoritarian, and these leaders may use threats to get their way. Their approach may be suspicious, intrusive, and underhand. Their mentalization task is to moderate their fear of attack, and to be more generous about other people’s apparent failings. (This is a difficult approach to change!)
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Modelling Secure Leadership

The key learning from attachment theory, is that leaders need to model a healthy separate-but-secure attachment with their staff, in order for their staff to feel securely attached and contained within their organisations.

Staff may become anxious about a leader’s prolonged absence, breakdowns in communication, emotional unavailability, or signs of rejection. So leaders have to come to work in a robust state. They need to be physically and emotionally grounded in their organisations. They need: to allow staff influence and choice as far as possible; to be sociable, but not trying to be everyone’s friend; to be resilient, kind and accommodating if staff kick off, but firm about boundaries and sanctions if individuals go into complete meltdown.

Leaders have to contain any of their own difficult emotions that may be triggered by their roles – whether these are feelings of brittleness and vulnerability, or feelings of hostility and exasperation at other people’s “neediness”. These need to be discharged separately and safely through executive coaching, external peer support, or therapy.

At a time when your leadership instincts are telling you to be ultra-rational, to focus on the tough stuff, and to shut yourself away to hatch an emergency plan… your staff need you to do the exact opposite! In this period of great uncertainty staff need to know that their leader bears each individual in mind – being thoughtful and considerate about the impact of changes on each person, whilst also safeguarding the organisation as a whole.

That means mentalizing aloud to bring out the difficult feelings that are around for their staff – putting these on the table in an appropriate way so that they can be made safer, even if your staff may be letting you off the hook and avoiding the feelings themselves.

All of these components sit alongside the well-known technical ingredients that we usually associate with change leadership: being clear about what factors are certain and what has to change; sticking to timetables and commitments; and having a well-articulated change strategy. These practical elements provide essential psychological containment for people too.
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Mentalization Capital
When I coach leaders to mentalize, and encourage them to try out a more secure, containing style of leadership, they are sometimes concerned that they may be opening up a pandora’s box of trouble.  So one of the rewards of my work is to get to facilitate organisational events where I see leaders testing this out and taking up their authority in a positive way. It’s striking to notice the positive impact: staff definitely become more engaged and think together more coherently. The challenge for leaders is to keep applying these frameworks back in the workplace when the heat has been turned up to full blast.

In our tight funding environment, I believe that having this “mentalization capital” is a competitive advantage for civil society organisations – because it draws teams back into a space where they are psychologically available for the essential work that has to be done.
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For in-depth reading see Professor Peter Fonagy – a leading advocate of mentalization in clinical treatment.
Grateful thanks to Anne McKay, Clinical Psychologist, for her help with this paper.
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Is The Voluntary Sector The Natural Home Of Liberating Leadership?

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

What charities can learn about leadership from their service users’ experiences.

Last week I went to an inspiring seminar at CASS Business School, hosted by the Centre for Charity Effectiveness (www.cass.city.ac.uk/cce/newsevents/ CharityTalks)  Jon Barrick, CEO of The Stroke Association (www.stroke.org.uk), gave a passionate account of how he had achieved a remarkable turn-around in the organisation by modelling “servant leadership”. His approach squared well with my human relations thinking: that the duty of leaders is to engage staff and enable them to take up the full positive authority of their roles.

Andrew Forrest, Visiting Fellow, then gave a wonderful accessible academic presentation: he put servant leadership into the wider context of other recent leadership models. Andrew suggests that current leadership theory has moved on from the previous framework of “Transformational Leadership”.  A new wave of leadership writing might be grouped under the banner of “Liberating leadership”, to include ideas about:

  • Servant Leadership* – Earn the right to lead.
  • Values-Based Leadership – Encourage ownership of core values, and people will take intelligent decisions based on these.
  • Emotional Intelligence – Develop capacity to experience, recognise and think about feelings, in order to attend to these in the workplace.
  • Complexity – Work with the fluid, dynamic nature of organisational systems.
  • Authenticity – Disclose more of yourself and be seen as a fully rounded individual.
  • Followership – Attend to followers and their needs – they are more important to leaders than vice versa.
  • Storytelling – Make conversations real, share knowledge, reinforce the organisational mission.

The common element of Liberating Leadership is a values-driven, transparent, human (“authentic”) leadership that relinquishes control through extensive delegation and consultation in a flat organisational structure. There is a high degree of direct contact between the leaders and followers – with the leader attentive to the best ways of removing obstacles so as to enable people to excel in their work roles. Liberating leadership aims to unlock talent, share knowledge, and reward learning.

It was exciting to see this presentation in a voluntary sector context, because I think that at its best the voluntary sector is the natural home of liberating leadership. The sector already champions a form of liberating leadership in its delivery of services to its beneficiaries – it places service users at the heart of the organisational experience. Many charities also adopt aspects of liberating leadership in their radical nurturing of volunteers.

The challenge for voluntary organisations is to transplant this existing framework of user and volunteer empowerment, and to extend it into their relationships with staff. If organisational leaders want their staff to go that extra mile – want staff to strive to bring out the best in the service users – then leaders have to model this same approach themselves by bringing out the best in their staff.

The Best and Worst of Service User Experiences

I say that at its best the voluntary sector is the natural home of Liberating Leadership, because, understandably, at its worst, circumstances conspire to make the sector the most unlikely home of such leadership. When voluntary organisations grapple with hand-to-mouth funding, uncertain futures, and client trauma, this can foster a deeply insecure culture in which staff are pressured to stretch themselves beyond sustainable limits, and think they have to sacrifice their wellbeing for the organisational cause. (Similar dynamics happen in over-stretched public sector services too, where leadership can get very bullish.)

There is a deeper reason why I argue so forcefully for Liberating Leadership in the voluntary (and public) sectors:  One of the most fascinating phenomena that occurs when care organisations come under this sort of extreme pressure, is that the staff and volunteers tend to mirror the distressed behaviours of their service users.

For example, in a stressed mental health service, each different team seems to exhibit its distinct forms of distressed behaviour when confronted by change: old age psychiatry seems more confused and forgetful; child and adolescent units can get more rebellious and stroppy; and forensic teams can be full of aggression and hostility. In other sectors I’ve seen senior managers in schools squabble with each other about who is in or out of the social “gang”, behaving as if they were having a playground spat; and I’ve experienced drug and alcohol projects whose working practices are as chaotic as their clients’ lifestyles!

It is essential to understand this extraordinary phenomenon when managing workplace conflict, because it explains why ordinary individuals who are generous and sophisticated with their service users, can sometimes be unexpectedly hostile and immature with their colleagues. If leaders can help staff to recognise that this behaviour may be connected to service users’ distress, they can break the patterns and introduce a healthier culture. The key message here is that the behaviour is understandable, but it is not helpful. Staff need help from their leaders to think about how they will change it for the better.

The Clues to Liberating Leadership Are There

I think Liberating Leadership provides the framework for helping staff to make these changes. I also think that charities need to look to their empowering service user models for inspiration about how to lead their staff effectively. If charities have already designed brilliant services to help their users resolve their crises, then these services will provide a clue about what help staff might need to manage their distress.

For example I worked with a women’s refuge that provided a remarkably safe, containing service to its users, but at great personal cost to the employees: staff could be shockingly aggressive and were deeply untrusting of each other. I asked staff whether their hostile behaviour might mirror the experiences of service users, and the idea seemed to make sense to them. After that whenever tempers flared the CEO became remarkably effective at drawing attention to the “domestic violence” taking place in the office, which tended to nip the aggression in the bud very neatly. She did this with a lightness of touch, and helped staff to devise their “security procedures” for handling interpersonal conflict with colleagues. She also encouraged staff to take up their  autonomy in their roles, based on the organisational values of human dignity and independent choice – values that applied as much to the staff as the service users.

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I found this book really helpful for explaining organisational “mirroring”, though it’s a serious read!:

The Unconscious at Work – individual and organisational stress in the human services, Obholzer and Zagier Roberts (eds), Routledge, London (1994)

Otherwise get in touch – I’m always happy to chat through other interesting books.

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* I’ve adapted these definitions – they may not reflect AF’s descriptions.

The Stargazing Club

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

How a £300 telescope made a big difference in helping patients with insomnia.

One of the most touching organisational changes that I was a part of occurred through the work I was doing with a consulting team, helping to turn around a failing mental health service that had a long-standing history of patient bullying.

One of the many signs of trouble in the organisation, was that the ward staff reported a severe problem with “patient insomnia”. They blamed sleepless patients for causing terrible problems with safety, sanitation and building security. Staff moaned about their endless battles to “force patients to go to bed at the designated time”, and they carried out harsh interventions on the wards. There was also bitter conflict between staff and managers as they fought with each other about the most effective ways to control patients’ sleep patterns.

The consulting team worked intensively with the whole mental health staff group to create an environment where people could be more curious and collaborative in thinking about their work. We pressed staff with key questions: Who is this service for? What is its purpose? What core values should guide what you do? What are your individual roles in delivering these?

A symbolic turning point came when one of the ward nurses requested £300 to buy a night telescope, and started a Stargazing Club for patients. This broke the deadlock: patients and staff no longer had to battle over the night schedule. instead there was an initial rush of patients joining the club, and then gradually as the weeks passed an increasing number skipped stargazing to catch up on their sleep. A few patients with enduring insomnia continued to make use of the club to relax and make the most of their waking hours.

What’s great about the Stargazing story is that it is a perfect illustration of systems thinking:

  • When we tackle complex organisational problems, we often tie ourselves in knots by formulating the problem incorrectly. We tend to mix up the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the solution we want to achieve.  So staff diagnosed their problem inappropriately as “disobedient patients refusing to go to sleep”.
  • The “solution” we pursue is often part of the problem – it often makes matters worse. The nurses’ ward regime just hacked off patients and kept them awake.
  • There is often a paradox built into the core of our “solution”. Anyone who has experienced insomnia knows it is impossible to force people to go to sleep!
  • The intervention often produces the effects that we are looking for. The ward regime set rules that were impossible for patients to stick to – it provoked patients to break the rules.
  • If our solution doesn’t work, we tend to slog away doing the same thing even harder. Staff failed to get patients to go to sleep, but they kept up their crusade anyway.

So…

  • If a solution isn’t working it is far more helpful to stop and try something different. Past failures should give us a clue about what not to do.
  • We need to go back to basics to check that we have formulated the dilemma correctly. Have we differentiated the symptoms and tested our diagnosis before identifying a viable solution?
  • The solution comes from letting go of what we think “should” happen. The nurse stopped treating patients as the problem – as disobedient people who “ought” to go to sleep.
  • We need to examine how things currently are, by asking more “what” questions. What would support patients to make good use of their waking hours? What would relax people so they can fall asleep when they are tired?
  • We need to break the cycle, not go head-to-head with a problem. Ask contradictory questions: “What’s so important about patients going to bed at the designated time? What about giving patients the opportunity to stay awake?”
  • Solutions often appear to be illogical: keeping people awake to manage insomnia!

The Stargazing Club is that it’s a classic example of how clients are able to find much more effective solutions to their problems than anything that we consultants could come up with. What we can do best is create a safe context where clients can think together, and a clear framework that enables clients to see their organisations in an entirely different light.

The best advocate of systems thinking was Paul Watzlawick. He wrote umpteen books, but my favourite introduction to his ideas is: The Situation is Hopeless but not Serious – the pursuit of unhappiness. Norton books, London (1983)