change management

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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Gearing The Top Team for Tough Times

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

In the current climate of severe cuts to the UK’s public and voluntary sector, it is essential that your top team is geared up for the challenges ahead. This means building the team even when time and finances are stretched.

In the wake of the Chancellor’s emergency budget, many of my clients are gearing up for tough times ahead.  A few organisations are already in the thick of it – having to introduce emergency budgets in response to early funding cuts from public bodies – and others know it’s only a matter of time before this is a reality.

The big tension with budget cuts, is that the financial benefit comes from being able to implement savings rapidly in-year, whereas the recovery depends on how thoughtfully the process is handled – in the decisions about what to cut, the way in which the impact on individuals is handled, and the way in which organisations are reconfigured. If you can balance this tension and do both well, it will make a huge difference to your organisation’s future.

The sudden reality bite of the emergency budget has cast a spotlight the state of top teams. Not all executive teams are geared up to handle the immense demands that will be made on them in the coming months. Team members will have to work together like never before: to take tough cost-cutting decisions; to generate lean service innovations; to steer unpopular changes; to handle upsetting redundancies – including redundancies in their own teams; and to hold the organization on track throughout.

Up to now, most senior teams have managed a sufficient degree of give-and-take cooperation to get the job done. Their decision-making didn’t call for highly sophisticated engagement. But the quality of interaction that enabled them to get by in good times does not equip them sufficiently for the tough choices that they will have to make. It will now require a robust and sophisticated degree of sharing and openness to handle the complex demands that are about to be placed on them.

There is another paradox here – When teams most need to up their game, they are least able to learn how to do so. Under pressure team members find it exceptionally difficult to trust and to be open with each other, because a state of high stress tends to generate anxiety and suspicion. So at the time when teams most need to pull together to work on complex problems, they are least inclined to act in a unified way. And stress also inhibits team learning, so if members haven’t already learnt how to function as a high performing team, they will struggle to learn to collaborate effectively under pressure.

This means that leaders need to line up their executive teams now before the pressure really kicks in. This requires a substantial investment of time, effort and resources – and sophisticated PR to explain your decision to adopt development activities when all around you expect to see frenetic fire-fighting behaviour and a climate of austerity! Conventional wisdom dictates that it is wrong to invest scarce resources in executive team development at a time when jobs might be on the line, but remember that a slash-and-burn policy could destroy your organisation.

One CEO client has put her neck on the line: in anticipation of cuts of around 20% across the board, she embarked on a development programme to fine-tune her top team, much of it looking ahead at how they will take tough decisions and how they will keep staff engaged. She made a guarantee to staff that they will experience a positive difference to the way in which the forthcoming programme of cutbacks and the organisational recovery will be handled.  The fact that staff and trustees now have this expectation creates an added incentive for her executives to pull together and make the most of these development opportunities.

Key Action Points For Leaders:

  • Get cracking with teambuilding now, and get everything in place so that the team operates at optimum level before the toughest work has to begin.
  • Challenge your executive to deliver, and focus on the recovery not just the cuts. Reinforce key messages about rigorous decisions, treating all staff with dignity, and the importance of refocusing on top priorities.
  • Manage the PR dimension with your staff: investing in your top team is essential, and staff will experience a positive difference in the way these changes are handled. (Make sure you invest in your middle teams too – they will be handling change at the coal face.)
  • Understand that teambuilding isn’t something detached from the primary organisational task. Use the impending changes as a focus for your team development – build the team around the programme of change.
  • Aspects of the team development will require external facilitation, so get help where you need it. On a tight budget, target external input to those essential points where it is most effective. Good consultants can help you think through what interventions are most effective, and where best to invest their energy.
  • Understand that this places huge demands on you as leader to nurture and reinforce high-level cooperation in your top team. Make sure you are supported too.

Inspiring reading: David Casey, When Is A Team Not A Team? in Personnel Management, January 1985

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)