Partnerships

How Do Some Voluntary Organisations Still Thrive Despite Chaotic Government Policies?

~ Consult James Barrett ~ 1 Comment

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It’s just over a year since the Coalition Government took office, and already its impact on civil society is immense. The government’s programme of spending cuts is biting hard. Its key public policies appear poorly conceived and are causing a great deal of confusion. Many voluntary sector organisations in particular are reeling from funding losses, whilst also feeling suspicious of the intentions behind new government policy. As a result many are uncertain about strategies for organisational sustainability, and concerned about how best to maintain support for service users. 

It is undeniably tough, and there are no easy solutions, though occasionally unexpected opportunities crop up when new government policy starts to go pear shaped!  It is worth understanding the dynamics of policy development in order to guard against the risks and take advantage of any relevant opportunities that occur. To do so you need to be very clear about the tactics you are prepared to adopt, and how these relate to your organisational strategy and core values.

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These ideas really hit home to me when I thought about my decade of working in the HIV sector, from the early days of the epidemic. The sector achieved one of the most significant social transformations of the late 20th century, despite a similar economic depression, and the tough public sector reforms being introduced at the time.

Some of the tactics are widely know: that highly articulate people with HIV told compelling personal stories; communities lobbied on human rights; many people became expert in medical matters; and the sector pointed out how current services failed people affected by the virus. 

One smaller contribution that is less well know is that a number of HIV leaders were concerned that the public sector reforms would dismantle the progress that had been made in developing HIV services. They took a smart gamble and decide to engage with the changes – offering to pilot the NHS & Community Care Act reforms across London HIV services. As an HIV sector colleague put it at the time, “You have to go surf the latest policy waves or they will crush you!”

This put HIV squarely on the commissioning map, and gave HIV leaders a new technical advantage – they developed commissioning expertise that was valuable to their public sector organisations, so they had to be listened to. Similarly, leaders of London HIV provider services formed a consortium, developed supplier expertise, and ultimately managed complex service mergers when the funding landscape changed. Several HIV leaders went on to hold influential positions in civil society, and “mainstreamed” HIV as an issue.

Many of the tactics from that painful era can be adapted for these current turbulent financial times. 

 

 

To tease out the implications, I’d like to go back to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I introduced in my previous blog about internal organisational change. This time I’d like to use it as a framework to think about the way public social policy changes are driven by central government:

  • Our governments have an impossible task. To win elections they campaign frantically, hyping themselves senseless with catchy new social policy Triggers like The Big Society and Localism, as well as a few rehashed versions of old policies like reform of the NHS.
  • Once elected, they come to power on a Peak of Inflated Expectations, and have to bust a gut to implement their policies within the 4 year election cycle if they want to be returned to office. Which means they ignore everything that is known about how to implement change successfully. Instead they force top-down changes, way too quickly, without consultation, causing deep resentment in the workforce. Just like the current outrage at NHS reforms.
  • This is when government policy gets severely criticised, civil society organisations try to obstruct it, and it sinks into the Trough of Disillusionment. It is a period of utter confusion and discontinuity when essential batons are dropped.
  • Then governments change gear, ratchet up the pressure, and try to force through their agenda. At this point governments need pioneer projects that show how the policy can work in practice. Through these pilot projects the contradictions in the policy are ironed out, and as it becomes more viable it is taken up the Slope of Enlightenment.
  • Gradually a version of the policy becomes accepted as the norm and is integrated into everyday practice on the Plateau of Productivity. 

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If your organisation is financially secure, your service users are respected in the ‘mainstream’, and you aren’t concerned about how new policy will be interpreted in your sector, then there is little point in getting swept up in the turbulence of the Hype Cycle – it is better to hold fast to your long term organisational strategy. But if you aren’t so lucky, here’s how you can work with the different stages in the cycle:

  • Policy Trigger: If you are aware of a deficit in social policy relating to your organizational mission, be proactive about setting the agenda, and put forward a compelling case for a new policy.
  •  Peak of Inflated Expectations: At the point at which a policy is being hyped and getting a lot of attention, it’s possible to ‘piggy-back’ the hype and to raise the profile of your organizational mission.  If your beneficiaries are likely to be disadvantaged by a new policy, this is a good time to challenge it.
  •  Trough of Despair: When a policy is heading for the doldrums, this is an opportunity to gain greater influence by developing expertise in the issue. Be able to articulate what does and what doesn’t work about the policy, relate this to your organizational mission, and show how your organization can provide solutions to the shortcomings.
  •  Slope of Enlightenment: This change of gear is the most volatile tipping point – it probably presents the most opportunities and the greatest threats. This is the stage where policies have to be seen to be viable, so it may offer the best opportunity to secure special funding if you can showcase innovative services that pilot the policy. You’ll need to demonstrate that how the policies can be operational.
  •  Plateau of Productivity: Here is where the regular service contracts are likely to sit, for policies that are taking hold and becoming normalized. This best suits organizations that are geared up for tendering, who can frame their service activity in the policy jargon of the moment.

 When engaging with these stages it’s worth remembering that it’s difficult to alter the political ideology underpinning a policy, but possible to influence the way in which it is implemented.  

if you are concerned about being compromised by its ideological motives, it may be some consolation to know that this difficult process of taking a new policy all the way through the Hype Cycle – and getting it assimilated into everyday working practice – probably normalises it, and  dilutes some of its original radical ambitions. Still, you need to keep reminding yourself of your organisation’s core values and principles, and the restrictions on charities carrying out political activities. 

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The main reason why governments make such a hash of implementing their policies – and hence how opportunities arise for civil society organizations – is because politicians don’t wield as much direct power as they would like to. They are at one removed from the institutions that they have to change, so they only have blunt instruments to engineer the results that they are after.

1.) Firstly, governments offer financial incentives for specified performance targets. But this takes time to have an impact, and it involves a trade-off: cash-hungry local public services will take the funds but ‘interpret’ the government’s policy agenda more loosely in order to serve local priorities. These local bodies will also commission the voluntary sector to deliver some of these targets – which gives voluntary agencies some room to do a similar trade off: juggling the government policy targets with their own organizational ambitions, service standards, and social ethos. So it really pays for voluntary organizations to be savvy about tendering and contracting.

2.) As we are witnessing at the moment, governments make changes by cutting budgets to rival programmes. This burns up resources, disrupts services, and is carried out too quickly to catch the learning from services that are forced to close. Which makes it essential for civil society organisations to embed their own learning, and to be ready to reframe the successful work that they do in the new rhetoric of the moment. There may be opportunities for voluntary organisations to exploit their independence and to take on controversial programmes that public services have to distance themselves from (as the HIV sector demonstrated with its positive safer sex campaigns).

3.) Governments also resort to restructuring the public sector – often as a tactic to avoid head-on conflict with powerful groups such as doctors. Which means that the restructuring has little strategic logic and limited effectiveness (and is bound to be rehashed again in future). It also means that there is a churn in post-holders which makes it essential for voluntary sector leaders to refresh their networks and identify new allies in the system. One of the fortunate paradoxes is that voluntary organisations may be at the bottom of the economic food chain in civil society, but smart voluntary sector leaders are able to cut through the hierarchies of the public sector and get access to senior movers-and-shakers – sometimes more successfully than people within those organisations.*

4.) Newly elected governments rush to ‘carpet-bomb’ parliament with new policies – presumably to overwhelm the opposition – which can be very confusing. Clearly it is essential to be on the ball and on top of key policies that will have most impact on your area of work.

5.) Given that successive governments have torn up the rule book on effective change leadership, it’s no surprise that they find themselves careering towards their next election with inadequate results to show for their efforts. So they frantically turf new money at quick high-profile schemes to convince the electorate that their policies are working. It can really help to be prepared for these spending sprees, by having a viable funding proposal lined up – with some high profile quick-wins built into the programme.

6.) And of course when a new election comes around, politicians feel compelled to bury policies that aren’t working, and to then trigger a new set of policies for the campaign trail – so the hype cycle continues! It’s essential to line up with the wider issues and that have a sustainable future (eg. the ageing population, climate change and energy security, personal debt and poverty.) 

7.) But it is significant that some of the programmes that have taken hold most effectively are those projects that are adapted from one government to the next. So Thatcher’s internal markets became Blair’s ‘Third Way’, and Labour reaped the rewards of Major’s National Lottery. So it’s worth being mindful of the underlying trends that are likely to be sustained beyond the lifetime of the present parliament.

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Of course the Hype Cycle is just a schematic representation – real life is a lot more messy – but the key message it conveys is that there will always be a frustrating hiatus between the development of high level policy, and its practical implementation. As long as the key government players want a floundering policy to succeed, there could be opportunities out there in the midst of the confusion. 

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Here are some pointers specifically for voluntary organisations:

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  • Poorly developed policies can leave organizations feeling thwarted, so it is essential as a leader to remind yourself of the expertise you already have in your organization. eg. Big Society rhetoric sounds baffling, when it is really just a new spin on old community development – which the voluntary sector has always done best.
  • Don’t assume that you have to press the government for clarity on a hazy policy – you risk getting a restrictive answer. It may be more powerful to exploit the ambiguity, or to shape the agenda by defining the policy on your terms. (Again, the Big Society is a case in point.)
  • Remember that politicians in the same party aren’t homogenous – find allies who understand your offer and beware those who may want to sabotage your work to undermine their party colleagues.
  • Put a compelling case for your mission. Know your community intimately, build your dialogue with your service users, and make sure you know your market inside out. Build a narrative around this and seek out a network of story tellers who can bring it to life.
  •  Find different points of entry in public services  – whether through service users, frontline staff, executive leaders, or elected councillors. Be clear about how your work can help them to meet their objectives. Build a strong evidence base for the effectiveness of your work to support this.
  • Know your organisation’s strategy and values, hold the balance between your core purpose and new funding opportunities – and protect against mission drift.
  •  Avoid insularity at all costs. Cuts, restructuring, redundancy, lack of capacity for long term planning all contribute to isolationism. So guarantee to schedule an horizon scanning discussion for your SMT at least every month – and do it!
  •  Ensure that your business model, systems and personnel structure provide as much flexibility as possible to be able to take advantage of the constantly shifting landscape.
  • Keep the primary focus on meeting the needs of your service users, not the needs of your organization. As the HIV sector has demonstrated, organisations are time-limited, funding cycles end, and service users’ needs change, so be proactive and recognise when it’s time to change, partner up, merge or move on with dignity. But always ensure that the learning and insights are captured.

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My grateful thanks to: Graham Fisher, Chief Executive of Toynbee Hall, Kate Hinds, and to Jim Pett for contributing their ideas.

* Thanks to Dr Jill Mordaunt for pointing this out. 

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A Winning Formula For Organisational Leadership – Thoughts From The Dynamic Sport & Recreation Alliance Leadership Conference

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

The recent SRA leadership conference in Leicester was a dynamic and lively event. It’s no surprise that people involved in high level competitive sports were energetic and results-focused, and keen for their organisations to win! So here’s my winning formula for powerful leadership of civil society organisations.
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10 days ago I attended a dynamic and lively leadership conference hosted by The Sport & Recreation Alliance in Leicester. I was there to run a large workshop for CEOs, and to participate in a plenary session, on building high-level CEO-Chair relationships.
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The SRA covers such a breadth of organisations, from those championing world-class competition, or those promoting professional spectator sports, through to grassroots community engagement projects, as well as those representing a multitude of recreational activities. These organisations are also constituted very differently: there are charities, limited companies, social enterprises, strategic partnerships, organisations hosted by academic institutions or county councils – and various combinations of these. Many board members serve in a voluntary capacity, but a few are paid either directly or indirectly.
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In a gathering with lots of leaders from competitive sports organisations, it’s not surprising that people were energetic, ambitious, and focused on results. Many of the delegates who asked questions from the floor, wanted to know the best and most efficient way to do things. They asked speakers to give their expert opinions about: the best way to  structure an organisation; whether CEOs would be more effective if they had a place on the board; what measures to use to establish whether a board is highly effective; or what techniques to use to fast-track the development of a new CEO-Chair relationship. They were asking high level practical questions, aiming to identify the “winning formula” for their organisations.
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I really enjoyed the challenge of these questions, so here are my 6 key ingredients of a winning formula for powerful organisational leadership which I presented in my workshop presentation to CEOs, and discussed in a subsequent plenary session with governance consultant Linda Laurance (who ran a parallel workshop for Chairs) – and voluntary sector leadership consultant Tesse Akpeki who chaired the session.
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Governance & Generative Leadership
Governance & Generative Leadership
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1. Understand the Systems Operating in Your Organisation
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Whatever their particular differences, most of the SRA member organisations share a basic organisational structure. Each structure has 3 primary interlocking systems in common:
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  • There is an over-arching board of people responsible for Governance and safeguarding the core principles of the organisation. This is led by a Chair who provides inspiration and containment for people’s ideas.
  • Underneath this board is an Executive System of personnel responsible for driving through change on behalf of the board. This is led by the CEO who also provides inspiration and containment.
  • The CEO and Chair connect up these two systems, and mediate the complex boundaries between them.
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When an organisation functions at its best, there is a flow of information upwards from the executive system, which the Board uses to inform crucial governance decisions about the future of the organisation. Once these decisions have been made, they are implemented downwards through the executive body of the organisation.
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(Of course the organisations will be significantly more complex if they are member-led, partnerships, or hosted within larger institutions.)
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2. Understand the Innate Tensions That Must Be Managed
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This 3-system structure carries its own set of  innate tensions which are likely to flare up whenever the organisation comes under pressure:
  • The CEO and Chair interaction can form a bottleneck which obstructs the flow of information upwards flow of decisions downwards.
  • The CEO role can be squeezed from above and below. It can feel very isolated and highly exposed.
  • The Chair and Board can experience the CEO as a barrier to “real” contact with the wider organisation.
  • The CEO and staff can experience the Board as a barrier to efficient and effective decision-making.
  • The CEO “lives and breathes” the organisation 24/7, and can experience the Board as out of touch and removed from operational life.
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These tensions can lead to anxiety and frustration, and can knock people out of their designated roles. (eg. board members may circumvent the Chair and CEO, and issue management instructions directly to staff. Staff may lobby board members to have the CEO’s decisions overturned. CEOs may engineer the board’s decisions.) These tensions cannot be eradicated, they can only be acknowledged and managed. High performing organisations talk about these tensions; they have the talent to quickly recognise when people are out of role, and will move swiftly to rectify this.
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3. Manage The CEO-Chair Dynamic Relationally Not Technically
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In this 3-system structure,  a positive and effective CEO-Chair relationship is essential, not optional. It sets the tone for relationships in the rest of the organisation.
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Although technically speaking the Chair line manages the CEO on behalf of the Board, the relationship cannot be treated just like a classic control-and-command line management arrangement. It has to be handled relationally on a basis of trust and broad consensus.  This is because the CEO has the power to obstruct the implementation of a unilateral decision by the Board. Equally, if the CEO loses the confidence of the Board, the Chair could intervene and micro-manage the organisation.
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Once a CEO-Chair relationship becomes hostile it is extremely difficult to repair it. And if either party opts to formalise the fight (through disciplinary, grievance, competency or equalities procedures), this becomes an end-game, and one or other party will be forced to leave the organisation.
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4. Practice Generative Leadership
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It is common for boards to focus on their fiduciary and technical responsibilities: concentrating separately on legal compliance, finances & resources, performance targets, risk management, organisational structure, business planning and strategy. While each ingredient is essential for organisational survival, just focusing on these items alone is dangerous, and focusing on them together is still insufficient for effective leadership in a C21st context.
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For example, in the current climate of austerity, SRA members face a heady blend of cutbacks, opportunities and radical economic shifts. (The Sport England and public sector budgets have been savaged, which affects funding for civil society organisations. But many SRA agencies could benefit from The Big Society, public health budgets, wellbeing targets, the Olympics, and other international sporting events.) Each of these throws up complex leadership questions, such as:
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  • How do we provide solid leadership in a very uncertain world?
  • How do we take tough decisions and still keep staff engaged?
  • How do we rapidly gain high level entrepreneurial skills?
  • How do we seize business opportunities and still safeguard our values?
  • How do we adapt to the current government’s policies, whilst shaping a future for our organisation beyond the lifetime of this these policies?
  • How do we form productive partnerships with other organisations – balancing collaboration and competition?
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In order to do justice to these complex dilemmas, the CEO, Chair and Board need to line up their roles and practice Generative Leadership: understanding how the various fiduciary and technical responsibilities interact with each other, whilst also integrating these with the organisation’s vision and values, and holding a bigger picture of the long term external landscape.
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5. Stay Tuned To The Fundamental Questions
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The SRA membership represents such a diverse range of organisations and structures that it is impossible to advocate any one-size-fits-all optimum structure for all members agencies. Instead I think there are 5 guiding questions to be mindful of:
  • What structure works best for which type of organisation, under what circumstances?
  • Can we articulate the strengths and weaknesses of our particular structure – then maximise our strengths and mitigate the weaknesses?
  • Are we all clear about each person’s role in the structure?
  • Where we have dual roles, how will we manage our conflicts of interest?
  • How will we evaluate our effectiveness? (What exactly are we evaluating?)
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6. Know When To Compete And When To Collaborate
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The strength of organisational leaders like those I met at the SRA conference is that they are ambitious and really want to succeed. Their ultimate challenge is to be able to manage their competitive instinct, so that this doesn’t jut become a default position adopted for every working relationship. They have to know when to compete and when to collaborate.
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So there was a powerful moment in the workshop on building high-level CEO-Chair relations, when one group of CEOs acknowledged:  “We have to want our Chair and Board to succeed in order for us to succeed, and for the organisation to succeed.”
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How can the CEO and Chair line up and encourage each other to succeed? it needs to be thought of as a ‘coaching’ relationship rather than one of competitors. Together they need to build a shared understanding of the dynamic context in which the organisation operates.  As another group said: “We must hold each other to account, build trust and respect, and act as critical friends.”
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“Building Resilience Through Innovation” – Mind CEOs’ Conference Leads The Way

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment
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The recent Local Mind Association CEO’s Conference set a great example of how federal organisations can respond to the new funding environment. This has huge leadership implications for CEOs and Boards.
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Earlier this month I was at the Local Mind Association CEOs’ Conference in Birmingham, co-facilitating workshops on “Strengthening the CEO-Board Relationship in Tough Times”.  I came away feeling very inspired by the conference. Paul Farmer, the CEO of Mind, used an impressively open style of chairing in the large plenary sessions, which fostered genuine dialogue with Local Mind Associations (LMAs). There was a convivial atmosphere because many CEOs know and respect each other, and are willing to share their knowledge and expertise.
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At the same time there was a sombre tone as delegates got down to business: I had some fascinating conversations about The Big Society and the new funding climate, and heard a few CEOs describe their experiences of winning big new contracts at the same time that funding was unexpectedly pulled on other major programmes of work, making complex demands on their leadership.
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The theme of the conference was “Building Resilience Through Innovation”, and the opening plenary – Critical Issues for the Coming Year – hammered home the tough external environment and the radical pressures that LMAs are facing. Emma Jones, Senior Policy Analyst at The Cabinet Office, gave a very clear presentation, elaborating the 3 pillars of  The Big Society:  Public Service Reform, Social Action, and Community Empowerment.
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Unfortunately it confirmed my concern that the model of social action and community empowerment  isn’t well suited to people with socially stigmatised and sometimes debilitating conditions like mental health problems. So it seems that the main lever for keeping mental health on the agenda will be via the third Big Society pillar of “Public Service Reform”. This means that the drive for mental health has to come via an organisational service delivery model, rather than via community action. This places a powerful burden of responsibility on networks like Mind to get it right, and to co-create innovative services with their users.
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Given this demanding context, it was excellent to see Mind and its LMAs squaring up to the challenge – recognising the importance of shaping the commissioning agenda, exploiting opportunities for new funding, and adapting to the new funding climate.  There is a sense of relationships shifting across the Mind federation: greater respect for what each party brings to the table; recognition of the need for both the national and the local perspectives; desire to forge tight working partnerships; and a growing interest in forming consortia to submit block tenders.
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All this heightens the challenges that will be familiar to federal structures: the need to protect the brand; the need to reconcile collaboration and competition between LMAs; and the need for clear accountability to ensure that each LMA pulls its weight.
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CEO-Trustee Relations Buckle Under Fire
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So what are the implications of all this change for CEO-Trustee relations? Back in our conference workshops, I conducted a straw poll and discovered that most participants rate their current CEO-Board relationships to be middling-to-good. There were only a few exceptions with lower scores, and some exceptional working relationships rated 10/10. Overall the scores were better than in straw polls that I’ve conducted in other workshops recently. (Though of course none of this is scientific!)
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Most of the workshop participants were very experienced senior people. They understand how CEOs, chairs and boards need to relate to each other. They are clear about the respective roles and relationships, and they manage to function effectively in role most of the time. However, in the workshops they explained how pressure and stress can knock everyone out of role – When anxiety kicks in, everything kicks off! This tallies with my research into executives who reached a crisis point in their working relations: When under fire, people lose their focus, they lose their sense of competence, they forget what they know, they fall out of role, and then conflict erupts.
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What I always try to emphasise in workshops, is that my model for lining up CEOs, chairs and boards in their roles and relationships is very simple, but simple isn’t necessarily easy – particularly not when people are stressed.  it is unrealistic to expect CEOs, chairs or board members to be perfectly in role all the time. Rather, they need to learn to recognise when people are out of role – and need to develop the instinct for stepping back into their roles as quickly as possible whilst challenging others to step back into their roles too.
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Fielding The Board
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When working with charities that have rather “middling” CEO-Board relationships, I often see CEOs investing their efforts in political manoeuvres to “field” their trustees, and hold their boards at arms length. As far as the CEOs see it, they have trustees who are there by default rather than by design, and don’t understand their roles clearly. The CEOs express concern that if members get too close to the operational side they will fence around looking for a purpose, and latch onto the latest hot issue.
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Again, my research that I summarised in the workshops echoes some of these concerns. It suggests that triggers for CEO-Board conflict arises when people aren’t solid in their roles, and:
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  • Trustees get swept up in informal staff complaints and rumours about the CEO.
  • Trustees and CEO take difficult decisions together, but when these prove to be unpopular with staff, the board backs out of the decision and drops the CEO in it.
  • Chairs decide on a hunch that the CEO is “incompetent” without following a proper appraisal process.
  • Boards over-react when the CEO makes an error of judgement, and put the CEO through formal disciplinary processes.
  • The CEO and board go head-to-head over the strategic direction of the organisation, and have no mechanism for resolving their strategic differences.
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So it’s not surprising that those CEOs adopt damage limitation strategies to keep their boards at arms length. It’s understandable, but it’s not a helpful state of play. A positive working relationship between CEO and Board is essential for the effectiveness of the organisation because it connects up the governance and the executive leadership, and models appropriate behaviour for the rest of the organisation.
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Fortunately there wasn’t much of this in the conference workshops, though I noticed that the widespread use of damage limitation tactics in the voluntary sector flavours participants’ expectations: whereas trustee participants were more inclined to see themselves as a resource for their CEOs, CEOs were less inclined to presume positive support from their boards – they focused more defensively on keeping the trustees’ governance role water-tight.
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Key Leadership Messages for Tough Times
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With all this in mind, when I was asked to comment on the workshops In the closing plenary of the conference, I brought in two specific themes:
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Tough times ahead could trigger fiercer fights: LMAs and many other voluntary organisations face immense pressures ahead – and we know that pressures of this magnitude precipitate anxieties and knock people out of role – which leads to intense organisational conflict.
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So CEOs, Chairs and Boards need to build resilience into their working relations now, and talk about how they will continue to manage themselves in their roles when the going gets tougher.
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Boards must be a generative resource for their organisations: The conference made it abundantly clear that most of the voluntary sector will have to totally transform the way it does business over the coming years. They need to be more entrepreneurial, explore new markets, consider securing working capital, engage with payment by results, and demonstrate social and economic outcomes. This calls for voluntary sector leaders to develop a very different skill-set from the one that most are accustomed to. And CEOs and Boards will need to develop these together to be sure that they are speaking same language.
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At the very least those trustee boards that have lacked direction and purpose in the past will have to radically up their game, just to keep up with their CEOs and to be able to govern effectively.  But more than this, the best boards will become a powerful generative resource for their organisations – a body of expertise to guide the organisation in its business, whist still stewarding the charity’s mission, values, and clinical excellence, so that these aren’t sacrificed to short term financial gain.

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Why Public Sector Managers Don’t Need Private Sector Boot Camp!

~ Consult James Barrett ~ 2 Comments

Some commentators in the private sector believe that public sector managers need a jolt of anxiety to shake them out of their complacency and reform public services. This is why they are wrong.

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Since the Government’s announcement of the Public Spending Review, I’ve been following online debates about the most effective ways to make savings in the public sector. There have been some great recommendations and observations – particularly here.

But in a number of entries I’ve been struck by a gulf between the private and public sector contributors – particularly their models of service development, and their assumptions about what motivates staff to change.

Occasionally the private sector contributions have been downright persecutory – with envious attacks on public sector staff salaries and pensions. For example, there was a suggestion that every named manager’s budget, performance and spend should be made public on the internet – and that each individual manager should be punished for overspends, or rewarded for savings, through proportional adjustments to their salaries and pensions!

I can understand how in parts of the private sector a finely tuned performance related pay system can spark a creative tension that galvanizes staff to perform well. It suits people with a particular competitive temperament who want to prove themselves. It works where managers are delegated the freedom and resources to make bold decisions within an autonomous area of work. But it’s not so hot for people who are motivated by social values, who work in a culture of thrift where there aren’t the margins to offer motivating reward for high achievement, who make highly complex decisions, and who work in tightly inter-connected services where there isn’t the autonomy to go it alone. And an energizing tension from performance related pay is not the same as a paralyzing anxiety about punitive salary cuts!

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I was spurred to write this in response:

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“I’d like to pick up on a thread that crops up occasionally here: The assumption that public sector staff are intractable individuals who should be packed off to private sector boot-camp to raise their anxiety levels and to jolt them out of their complacency.

I want to suggest the opposite: that public sector staff are often dedicated individuals working within an impossibly restrictive system, and are often forced to adopt defensive positions because they are exposed to too much anxiety, not too little:

1.) Public sector staff – particularly in the NHS – have been subject to the most extraordinary programme of restructuring over the last 20 years. Much of it has been highly disruptive, badly planned, without clear objectives, and with little learning from previous restructuring programmes. See The NHS Confederation assessment:                “The Triumph of Hope Over Experience.”

2.) Public sector staff implement our messy democratic processes, so they operate in a highly political system. All of the leadership literature says that devolution and empowerment are the cornerstones of staff motivation, yet the reality for public sector staff is that decisions are only devolved for as long as no fuss happens. As soon as controversy stirs, empowerment disappears – anxious MPs or councillors wade in, and the “blame-storming” begins.

As an extreme illustration of this, Ed Balls’ handling of the Baby Peter tragedy has probably done untold damage to the motivation of child protection services across Britain. Back-covering behaviour is modelled from the very top, so it isn’t surprising that it is copied all the way down the food chain.

3.) As that example illustrates, public sector care staff carry out highly stressful tasks. They support vulnerable service users with complex needs, some of whom are at extreme risk. As part of their roles, staff also have to ration resources, and enforce unpopular legislation.

As long ago as 1959 Menzies-Lyth described how staff in the care sector develop unhelpful defensive routines to cope with the stresses of their work.  She suggested they need containment for their anxiety if they are to function in the best interests of their patients. (There’s some background here.). 50 years later many care staff still don’t get the supportive supervision that they need, that would enable them to feel psychologically fit to make rigorous decisions in their roles.

So of course public sector attitudes, processes and overheads have to change – some of the current pension and redundancy terms are unsustainable, and some decision-making is shockingly bureaucratised – but this change needs to be handled with dignity. Staff must not be made scapegoats for long-standing systemic problems.”

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Based on these themes, here are 4 factors that would make the public Spending Review more than just a slash-and-burn exercise:

1.)  Restructuring that is coherent, efficient and strategic – designed to enable, streamline, connect and simplify.

2.)  Restructuring that recognises the central importance of supervision in providing ‘containment’ for anxieties in complex services. Not crowd-pleaser restructuring that maxes out frontline staff and strips away their management support.

3.)  The programme of redundancies conducted with dignity and respect for the sizeable chunk of the public sector workforce who are lined up to lose their posts.

4.)  Localisation, commissioning, and procurement policies that do their utmost to allow arms-length decision-making and to decrease meddling from the top. (But see my earlier blog about partnerships to understand why the fragile Government Alliance is unlikely to let go – especially as the next election approaches.)
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The Voluntary Sector – A Lifeline For The Big Society?

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

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The Big Society model is flawed – but it presents unexpected opportunities for voluntary organisations in the coming years.


Many voluntary sector organisations have reacted to the prime minister’s proposals for The Big Society with scepticism. To many, the fact that it is being championed concurrently with radical austerity measures suggests that The Big Society is just a cynical ploy to get communities to pick up the pieces after public and voluntary sector services have been decimated.

Voluntary and community groups are right to be concerned about the spending review: they will bear a huge brunt of the cuts to public spending. Those agencies that survive the funding cuts will be most exposed to the harsh impact that the service cuts have on their clients. They will be under immense pressure to find some means of providing support to more service users on a far smaller budget than before.

That said, I don’t think that The Big Society is just a cynical ploy to lumber communities with the state’s social burden. I believe that The Big Society genuinely wants to champion civil society, and that it will be effective for mobilising some social action – but only within a limited range of possibilities.

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Big Opportunities

At its heart The Big Society seems to be a self-help movement. It wants to remove obstructive local bureaucracy so as to empower local people to take over failing services. It wants to give control back to communities so they can help themselves.

This could work well for people with strong leadership and social skills, with spare time to allocate, and with the vested interest to unite and tackle a particularly urgent problem that affects them personally. The example that is regularly put forward is of parents whose children are at a failing school taking over the running of the service. Parents would have an immediate vested interest in rallying together to sort out the crisis.

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Big Limits

But there are limitations to the Big Society model. My clients in the education sector will tell you that it takes years to transform a failing school. It is hard to imagine many parents’ groups sustaining intensive input into a school’s development whilst also holding down their other career commitments.

What is under-played is the fact that any take-over (such as parents taking over the running of a school) is a bloody and messy affair with blame and counter-blame, withholding of essential operational data, and complex legal wrangles. Today’s rescuing heroes quickly become demonised as tomorrow’s villains as soon as anything goes wrong. Groups who take over the running of public services will require a hugely sophisticated understanding of conflict resolution to be able to succeed.

So TBS might actually have the unintended consequence of helping citizens to appreciate quite how complex and thankless a job it is to manage public services. People might well rescue a failing service and then discover what a nightmare they have taken on. The are likely to want to parcel it up quickly and to hand it over to another managing body with the sustainable infrastructure to govern it effectively. This is where entrepreneurial voluntary organisations could come in.

And imagine how The Big Society movement would handle a different scenario : a neighbourhood experiencing major problems with chaotic drug use. The community might come together to reduce the impact of the problem via projects for public safety, removing used syringes quickly, and making it difficult for dealers to operate locally. Brilliant if the neighbourhood is given the resources to make this happen – but their intervention won’t tackle the complex social causes of illicit drug use, it just moves the problem on to a less resilient community.

It will take specialist voluntary groups to help local communities to understand that their longer term interests are best served by adopting more integrated solutions that include harm minimisation, rehabilitation, and anti-poverty programmes.

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Identifying The Shortfall

At some point in the next two years or more the successes and limitations of The Big Society will become more apparent. The impact of the spending review will be known, the chaos of public sector restructuring will be bedding down, gaps in statutory provision will be more visible, and the “blind spots” of GP commissioning will show. The government can’t allow The Big Society project to fail, so at this stage it will be pressed to do something about the shortcomings. It will have to consider:

  • Strategic development, prioritising of resources, and evidence-based approaches to service delivery.
  • Bridging the planning gap between central government and local areas (given that regional bodies are being abolished).
  • Reconciling the competing needs of different communities in local areas.
  • Service provision for constituencies that aren’t well served by the Big Society model, such as stigmatised user groups (like injecting drug users, ex-offenders) or  user groups where co-production is more complex (people with enduring mental illness or learning disabilities).
  • Capacity building, engagement with marginalised communities, and redressing social inequalities.

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The Voluntary Sector Could Offer Solutions

Much of this work could be picked up by voluntary and community organisations if they position themselves well and offer low cost solutions. The public sector won’t be able to deliver these solutions, as it will have to concentrate on high-level strategic planning, and will no longer have the capacity for new service delivery. The private sector will have to concentrate on large-scale capital-funded contracts – it won’t be able to compete against the voluntary sector on price and generally lacks the right ethos for community interventions.

So there will be new opportunities for voluntary organisations in the years ahead – that’s if they can survive the current financial hardships and align themselves with Big Society thinking. The challenge will be to scale back now to ride out the cuts, whilst still retaining the capacity to expand in the future when new opportunities present themselves. In the meanwhile voluntary agencies need to do some intensive work to identify what unique contribution they could make to turning The Big Society into a viable project.

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Forging Partnerships Across The Fault Lines

~ Consult James Barrett ~ 1 Comment

Partnerships may be the key to realising The Big Society but they need sophisticated handling to work effectively across the fault-lines. Effective partners engage tactically not idealistically.


Partnership working is being heralded as The BIG ANSWER to The Big Society, Localisation, and on a tumultuous public spending review. What’s not to like? It is true, partnerships will be an essential lever of The Big Society, but not in the idealised form that politicians would have us believe. Partnerships have innate adversarial tensions built into their relationships, and these can only be worked with – they cannot be eradicated.

To make the most of partnerships, the partnership leaders need to manage these tensions – as far as possible lining up member organisations behind a vision of what the partnership might be, whilst helping members to work with the frustrations and contradictions where it falls short of these aspirations. Equally, participant organisations need to understand that partnerships are a shifting coalition of interests, complex and messy, with unpredictable consequences. Partners need to engage tactically not idealistically, mindful of the pressures on other member bodies, engaging in satisfying alliances for a finite time within the current constraints, where they can see a clear advantage.

I guess the current ConLibDem Coalition Government is a perfect example of this  – The Cameron-Clegg pairing is an arranged marriage with possibilities and potential and risks and dangers. How can they make the most of what has been thrust upon them? If they misunderstand what is possible and presume to be in love, they will burn up their energy by flirting, seducing, squabbling and divorcing – missing the opportunity to have a significant workable relationship! That partnership will last (only) as long as each party can co-opt the opposition and has sufficient goodwill to involve each other in co-creating solutions. It will break up when the partners run out of goodwill or when their differences overwhelm their commonality.

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Learning From Local Strategic Partnerships

Although partnerships take many forms, I think the experience of Local Strategic Partnerships provides a particularly rich picture of the fault-lines that cut across effective working. Tensions emerge most clearly after Government spending allocations, and Council or PCT tendering rounds. These tend to bring into sharp relief the painful reality that there isn’t economic parity between members of partnerships, and partnerships are ultimately not democratic. Here are a few examples:

  • Although they don’t participate directly in partnerships, Central Government departments can have major impacts on these groups. They tend to grapple with espoused values of localisation vs their need to influence what happens regionally or risk getting slated in the tabloids or getting it in the neck from the electorate. Their main official tools of control are blunt instruments: funding, targets and inspections.
  • Central Government sometimes makes partnerships a criterion for funding local statutory bodies – thus confusing process (ie. “create a partnership”) with intended outcomes (eg. “reduce violent crime by 10%”). These statutory bodies rush to create partnerships in order to meet funding criteria, and the groups then struggle with disingenuous motives and unclear outcomes.
  • Local Statutory Bodies (PCTs, local councils) wrestle with the tension between democratising their decision-making, whilst feeling burdened by their safety liabilities, procurement legislation, and accountability to central government. They give out confusing messages to partnership members about their sphere of influence.
  • Government Departments can find themselves concerned to leverage positive results more quickly (eg. In time for elections), and allocate new funding that has to be spent rapidly on high profile initiatives. Local statutory bodies then struggle with the tension between taking rapid autocratic decisions to allocate funding within the timescale, vs losing out on the funding.
  • Local Statutory Organisations do not behave as unitary entities – different parts of each organisation pull in different directions and take contradictory decisions. (eg. Adult Services increases funding to a carers’ charity while Central Services evicts the charity from the council’s low-rental premises.) Individual members of staff representing these statutory organisations get it in the neck from partner organisations and can feel very put-upon.
  • Smaller Provider / Community Organisations wrestle with the tension between maintaining a presence in cumbersome LSP meeting structures where the sources of funding are, whilst trying to find capacity to deliver essential services in the community.
  • Smaller organisations feel compelled to tender for service contracts in order to earn income to survive, which can distort their original service mission and values.
  • Central and Local Government struggle to consult directly with service users without the mediation of local community groups. They both believe that they have the mandate of their electorate.
  • Local Community Organisations fire fight daily to resolve the crises of their users. They believe they have the mandate of the disenfranchised, and that they represent the “true” voice of service users.
  • If the partnership focuses on the details of the personal experiences of individual service users, then senior Statutory members disengage, stop attending, and the Partnership loses its “bite”. If the partnership focuses on very corporate matters, then local Community Groups and Service Users become alienated and the Partnership loses it’s “user-credibility”.

Future partnerships may take different forms, and may have different fault lines, but the underlying theme remains:

For a partnership to be effective, larger participant organisations have to manage the tensions between commissioning and providing services, and service agencies need to strike a balance between collaboration and competition. The successful players in a partnership are the organisations that recognise these dynamics and decide to engage tactically – rather than those that attempt to be idealistic and all-encompassing.

The successful partnership is able to see the relationships for what they are, rather than believing the espoused rhetoric of democracy. If these tensions are not managed effectively, conflict erupts, all institutions retreat, and everybody loses out – especially service users.

If the partnership can acknowledge the contradictions, and work with them in a measured and contained way, greater trust will evolve over time. Decision making processes will gradually become more consultative if partners demonstrate mutual understanding and learn together.

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