psychodynamics

Beyond The Hype Cycle – Innovating Effectively For Organisational Survival

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

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With the current financial and structural upheavals across UK civil society, organisations have to be highly adaptable in order to survive. They need the capacity to develop brilliant innovations, and they have to implement these quickly and sustainably. Many organisations have the raw talent for innovation but find it tough to embed new ideas in the system. This is my framework for harnessing that talent and giving it shape – making the most of tightly stretched resources, and investing your energy where it is most effective.

I am very excited by The Gartner Hype Cycle. It is an unlikely source of inspiration for me because it’s actually a tool for assessing the maturity of new technology innovations! But I think it can also be applied to the way we understand how cultural change is driven – whether this is internal organisational innovation or wider social policy change. I’m really interested to hear what you think of this.

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The Garner Hype Cycle Tracking Technology Innovations

Firstly, to explain the Hype Cycle in its original context as it applies to technology:

  • A new technical discovery creates buzz – a Technology Trigger.
  • It is hyped in the media to a Peak of Inflated Expectations – suggesting exciting possibilities that seem to take us into the realm of science fiction. (eg. currently it’s cloud computing that’s getting hyped.)
  • But then this new technology doesn’t live up to its elevated expectations, and instead a Trough of Disillusionment sets in. (eg. consumer-generated media seems to be going nowhere at the moment.)
  • Then a second wave of interest and enthusiasm adopts this technology and accelerates its development – there is a stable and evolving Slope of Enlightenment. (eg. app stores are becoming widely appreciated.)
  • A third wave then improves reliability and user experience, and it is accepted in everyday practice. It reaches a Plateau of Productivity. (eg. speech recognition software is now commonplace.)

I came across the Hype Cycle via my favourite new technology blogger, Digital Tonto, who makes 3 essential observations about the process of developing innovations:

  • Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum but must interact with other ideas to become useful. “It’s when ideas and technologies combine that real value is unlocked.” (My interpretation is that technological innovation needs to fit with the social context to become a social innovation.)
  • Innovation requires two profoundly different skill-sets to take hold: one to create radical new ideas; and another to bring about mass adoption of these ideas.
  • It’s very difficult for these two strands of innovation to co-exist – the strands need to be separate to allow both to flourish, but must be sufficiently networked to enable synergies to happen between them.

Of course there are lots of practical differences between taking new technology to market, and driving cultural change, but I think the overall trends from the Hype Cycle are relevant to our thinking about change, and Digital Tonto’s essential points about technology are transportable to the cultural change process too.

The Stages Of The Gartner Hype Cycle.

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This is my take on The Gartner Hype Cycle from an organisational perspective:

  • Leaders will identify a Trigger for radical change.
  • They will work with their top teams to build their vision of a ‘brave new world’ for the organisation – then announce it to the staff with a great deal of enthusiasm. This risks being a Peak of Inflated Expectations if the anticipated change is too idealistic and unrealistic about what the organisation can handle. Staff experience it as hype.
  • A few staff may ‘get it’ right away, but on the most part the proposed innovation will fail to register with the workforce. People lower down the hierarchy will struggle to engage with the idea or to appreciate its practical implications for their work. They will be reluctant to let go of ‘the way we do things round here’. The proposed changes will fall flat and run adrift in the Trough of Disillusionment.
  • Then leaders will invest a great deal of effort, pressure, engagement and persuasion to get the rest of the organisation to grasp the value of the idea. They will involve staff in more solid, practical analysis – developing a business plan, and testing the viability, applicability, risks and benefits of the proposal. Gradually staff will take ownership of it, and fit it to their way of working – it will travel up the Slope of Enlightenment as they improve its ‘usability’ and ‘debug’ working practices.
  • The benefits of the new ways of working will be demonstrated and accepted as routine practice, and the idea will reach the Plateau of Productivity.

What I would add about the Hype Cycle as it applies to cultural change, is that the process of adopting an innovative idea and assimilating it into everyday practice dilutes its original radical edge. On the one hand this reflects the success of the change programme – something new has been accepted and no longer poses a threat to staff. On the other hand it also reflects the fact that established culture ‘neutralises’ the impact of change – making it more mundane and less profound than the leader might have expected. It doesn’t conquer the peak of inflated expectations, but instead settles somewhere lower down the slopes!

In my consulting I come across pioneer leaders who feel gutted at this point when their radical change programmes don’t yield the rush of exhilaration and success that they had hoped for. Some want to move on to a different organisation to have a go at changing another system. Others want to plunge into a new change venture in the same organisation. Either way if they don’t first take stock of their mental models of change, they risk frustrating themselves unnecessarily all over again.

I think it’s essential for leaders to recalibrate their expectations and to refocus their energy where it is most effective. They need to recognise that something will inevitably be ‘lost in translation’ between original concept and working practice, and therefore that they need to work hard at connecting up the different parts of the Cycle to minimise this effect. It takes sophisticated integration to achieve sustainable change – rather than heroic solo efforts to scale the peak of inflated expectations. Leadership is about chemistry, and finding the right fit with the organisation.

You may have noticed that The Gartner Hype Cycle is similar to the Change Curve that I described in my earlier blog on How To Handle Those Really Tough Decisions In Your Organisation . While the Hype Cycle describes the mental process involved in adopting new ideas, the Change Curve describes the psychological adjustments involved in adapting to difficult changes. If you put both models together, you can identify the most appropriate strategies for supporting your staff and keeping them engaged through the different stages of organisational change.

Here’s a checklist for staying focused and making your interventions more effective:

  • For change to be compelling it has to resonate with meaning for the people you want to engage, so make sure that your innovation fits the organisational context.
  • Anticipate peaks and troughs in the change process so that they don’t throw you off course. When these occur, hold the organisation steady and provide containment for your staff’s anxieties.
  • Help your organisation to anticipate these peaks and troughs too by talking about them at the start of the process when everyone is most in alignment. Explain that differences will become more apparent, and that these may be painful and uncomfortable at times, but that the organisation will be better for the change, and you will all survive the experience.
  • If you find your ideas falling on stony ground, resist the urge to push harder at ‘hyping’ them. Step back and think about what mechanism will bridge the gap between your proposed innovations and the practical realities of those who have to implement these for you.
  • Develop the talent in your middle management teams to provide a ‘translation service’ between senior leaders and those at the coalface.
  • Encourage frontline teams to experiment with implementing your ideas – to transform these ideas into practical processes with coalface ‘usability’.
  • Encourage service users to demand more so they create a ‘pull’ to reinforce the changes that you are pushing.
  • If you want to introduce profound change, it is better to approach it as a series of initiatives – to use the cumulative effect of several waves of change so that their momentum isn’t neutralised.
  • Empower your staff to be the instigators of change, rather than just the implementers of top-down initiatives. Create separate space for the organisation to focus on generative ideas, free of the pressure to justify how those ideas will be implemented. Engender a buzz of excitement and expectation that innovation will happen.

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This blog describes the implications of the Hype Cycle for internal organisational change. In my next blog I will pick up on the very different implications for wider social policy changes. I believe it identifies significant opportunities for civil society organisations to put themselves on the map and take advantage of the disillusionment that arises in the early days after new government policies have been hyped.

I’ve already had some great conversations about these ideas, so I hope they resonate with you too. Do please leave comments or contact me directly let me know your responses to this article.

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My grateful thanks to Dr Barbara Grey, Director of Slam Partners, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, for contributing additional ideas to this post.

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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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How To Handle Those Really Tough Decisions In Your Organisation

~ Consult James Barrett ~ 2 Comments

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So you’ve realised the need to take crisis action to bring your organisation back on track. Perhaps you’re having to implement radical changes to terms & conditions, to shake up working practices, or to introduce redundancies. You’re clear about the strategic imperative for this, you know your legal responsibilities, and your mind is fixed on a course of action. But how do you implement such tough decisions and still keep your staff engaged? The solution lies in intellectual and emotional clarity.  This is one of the essential skills of contemporary leadership. It’s difficult to get right, so here’s a structure to steer your interventions.

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Many clients say that it can be a lonely experience leading these difficult changes.  In the current funding climate a number are feeling sorely tested. (“I didn’t take on this job to dismantle services and implement compulsory redundancies!” “Staff are so angry with me, I dread going into work at the moment.”) These leaders face a really difficult dilemma. For the sake of the survival or their organisations they know they have to act fast to implement tough crisis decisions that will have major negative consequences for their staff. But they also know that they are completely reliant on staff going that extra mile to help bring the organisation back on track. So they have to find a way to engage staff and sustain their goodwill by helping them to understand why these hard decisions are being made.Some clients admit that in the past when they faced tough choices they became detached and hard to avoid the guilty feelings that their decisions stirred up in them. “I wanted to ‘slap’ staff who become angry or distressed – couldn’t they see what a mess we were in?”  Others felt so overwhelmed by their statutory obligations that they became mechanistic (“I followed a tick-box consultation just to cover my butt!”). But these approaches made things even more difficult for the organisation. So leaders actually need to do the opposite: to remain conscious and articulate about the unhappiness that your decisions might cause people, whilst being totally clear about why these decisions are necessary. As one clinical director put it: “You have to feel the pain and do it anyway – as compassionately as possible” …mindful of the fact that it’s awful to have to deliver bad news, but even tougher to be the recipient. 

 


To do this you have to attend to two parallel issues simultaneously: one is to engage people in the logical rigour of the decision-making process itself; the other is to attend to the emotional impact of the decisions on individuals. If you want people to engage with the logical changes that you are introducing, you have to be in sync with their feelings. And if you want staff to manage their negative reactions to your changes, you have to present a coherent case for for the judgements that you are making.

There are two things that infuriate staff. One is being shut out from the decision-making process. More so if they could have made an important contribution, and believe they would have reached a better quality decision themselves. The other is having their emotional reactions stifled by leaders who put a Pollyanna spin on their unhappiness.  (“I’m afraid your post will be made redundant, but at least that solves your work-life balance, eh?!”) So how do you attend to the decision-making and emotional dimensions of your leadership role? Let’s take each dimension in turn.
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The Decision-Chain
When presenting a difficult issue to your staff, you may be very clear in your own mind about why your decision is necessary, but it can really help to walk them through a structure such as the 6 elements in the decision chain below. Each element needs to be tested separately in sequence, to ensure that people have really understood the case that you are arguing.
 


1.) Dilemma – Have we articulated and refined the problem? What is the dilemma that we have to solve? (eg. We are heading for a serious overspend that threatens the solvency of the organisation. We have to balance the budget now.)
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2.) Data – What are all the relevant facts? Have we captured all the evidence available? (eg. There is no obvious funding to bail us out this year. Staffing costs make up 80% of our operational budget.)
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3.) Options – What options are available to the organisation? Have we explored all realistic alternatives? (eg. We could merge, share back-office functions, or share our CEO post.)
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4.) Impact – What are the personal and organisational implications of each option? Do we fully understand the risk in each case? How can we mitigate against negative effects? (eg. What packages of support can we put in place to support staff at risk of redundancy? How can we motivate those staff who remain?)
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5.) Solution – Have we distilled this information thoroughly? What conclusion have we reached about the best way to resolve our dilemma? (eg. We have no choice but to cut our staff posts by 25%.)
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6.) Action – What is the course of action for implementing our solution?
.In the pressure of a crisis meeting when tensions are running high, leaders can be thrown off course by the intensity of feeling in staff who are fearful for their jobs. Individual staff may be fired up by different issues in different segments of the decision-chain. One may point out additional options (“We don’t have to cut posts, we could all agree to working fewer hours.”) while another will question the original dilemma  (“We don’t have to balance the budget, we can use up our reserves.”) and another will raise new concerns about the impact (“If we cut posts now we won’t have the capacity to to deliver the services we are contracted to supply. The council will terminate our contract, and that will finish off the organisation.”). It really helps to lead people back through the structure, so that each contribution can be put in context. 

Remember that it isn’t a democratic process, and many staff may not agree with your conclusions, but this is an opportunity to listen to alternative perspectives and be really clear in your own mind about your decisions. The most important thing is that people understand the dilemma that the organisation faces, and get to walk in your shoes – so rather than get yourself boxed into a corner by a barrage of questions from staff, remember to keep asking questions yourself, link these to each stage in the decision chain, and really listen to the answers that staff give.

Many leaders are very familiar with principles of employee engagement, and place great value on staff contributions in business planning and scenario forecasting. But even when staff are kept in the loop, the reality of crisis decisions can still come as a shock. The tougher the decision that has to be taken, the more likely it is to rest on your shoulders as a top-down process without a lot of room for manoeuvre. So it is essential to be clear about what issues are up for debate, and what elements are fixed in stone – staff are infuriated by token consultation on issues that have long been decided. Even in severe consultations there should be scope for staff input into impact assessments and mitigation of negative effects, and in the action planning stages.

 


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Emotional Life
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Many people will recognise this diagram – charting people’s emotional reactions to difficult changes – but not everyone fully understands the implications of the curve for change leadership: People experience four different emotional stages when change is thrust upon them:

1.) Shock – in which they feel numb and stunned, and have very limited ability to think clearly.  They might deny the implications of the news, or even weird feelings of euphoria.
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2.) Emotional turbulence – in which they are consumed by sorrow, anger or guilt. They may have emotional outbursts, or might withdraw and need time on their own to make sense of their feelings.
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3.) Depression – in which they churn over the implications of the changes, and start to make sense of what is happening. They will feel emotionally flat, demotivated and resigned, and this churning will sap a great deal of emotional energy from them, so it is likely that their productivity will be low.
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4.) Gradual acceptance – in which they start to re-enage, come to terms with the consequences of the changes, integrate these into their everyday context, and look ahead more optimistically.
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What are the implications of this for leaders introducing difficult changes? One significant feature is that you are likely to be ahead of your staff on the curve. Chances are you’ve had the shock of realising that you have to take serious action, have run the gamut of upsetting emotions, and are galvanising yourself into action by introducing these decisions. This can make it more difficult to empathise with people who are still in a state of shock, or feeling emotionally wobbly.  People experience the transition curve at different rates, so different staff will be at different stages  – and their progress is never as neat as the diagram suggests, so keep an eye on how people are and adapt your interventions accordingly.

1.) When in shock, people won’t be able to take in much information that you give them, or to grasp the full logic of your decision-chain, so explain the headline features and provide clear written information for when they are in a calmer frame of mind. Acknowledge that people may be in shock, explain the stages that you will be taking for consultation and implementation, and reiterate that there will be future opportunities for discussion. Show that you have considered the impact of your decision by outlining what support you would like to make available. Time your input to minimise disruption to the working day, and to make sure that staff have time to get over the initial shock before they head home. Don’t put a “Pollyanna” spin on things by pretending that the circumstances are good, but do reiterate the positive bottom line that you are after (“If we can implement this redundancy programme now, the organisation will be more robust for the future.”).2.) When in a state of emotional turbulence, people will need help to recognise and name their feelings. Ask them how they are, and what support they need. Articulate your feelings (“I feel really uncomfortable having to break this bad news to you, cause I imagine it must make you feel very frustrated.”)  Walk in their shoes and recognise what they are going through. You are their most likely target for hostile feelings, so be prepared for that, and build in time to debrief afterwards.  Be strong and containing to model that you are capable of holding the organisation together through this difficult period. Carefully acknowledge the emotions you are noticing (“You sound angry with me at the moment, which is understandable given what you’ve just been told.”) and resist the urge to attack back. At the same time, you don’t have to endure abuse, so if any meeting gets out of hand, end it and schedule a follow up event – you need to model the fact that there are limits and that discussions have to be dignified. 

3.) Staff will reach a depressive stage in which they feel they have no choice but to accept the changes, so factor in a period of demotivation when productivity will drop.  It’s easy to be sucked into their sense of hopelessness at this point, which might churn up lots of helpless feelings in you. (“It felt like wading through treacle!”) The instinct is to go into “rescuer” mode and try to find practical solutions to their problems, when in reality these will be rejected because staff are really seeking affirmation for their feelings of resentment. So acknowledge that it is difficult for them, make an effort to understand what people are finding most difficult, and keep asking them to identify what would make their tasks more manageable. Notice those things that individuals are most interested in, and really focus on developing these. As they “churn” they will be incorporating the changes, so this is an opportunity to make some adaptations and to flesh out the practicalities of how to the implement the plan.

 


4.) As staff gradually accept the changes, the mood will become more positive. This is the time to pick up the pace, become more challenging, and really stretch them with questions about how they see themselves implementing their part in the programme. These are the activities that leaders are most familiar with – that some leaders try to implement prematurely, at the point when staff are still in shock and not ready to engage. If you can hold fire until staff are showing signs of acceptance, you stand greater chance of succeeding.  Again, remember to acknowledge the fact that staff are more positive, and be appreciative of their progress.
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When people are confronted by painful scenarios it tends to trigger “paranoid” anxieties, so it’s essential to emphasise the values and principles underpinning your decisions, and to act with integrity throughout. Keep the overall focus of your decisions on your organisational mission and your service users, but focus your implementation on the needs of your staff – give them permission to look after themselves, and help them to direct their energies at what they can control. Encourage them to have a “Plan B” in mind for their worst case scenarios – so that they can set aside these anxieties for the time being. (“We’ve done everything we can for now, and we’re not going to let ourselves worry about it unless it becomes a reality.”). The bottom line with difficult change is that feelings need to be understood, named and appreciated rather than bottled up. It’s once these can be fully acknowledged that your staff will begin to reconnect with their creativity and passion for the organisation.
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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.