service user engagement

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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“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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The Big Society Needs You! 5 Tactical Steps For Voluntary Organisations

~ Consult James Barrett ~ Leave a comment

The Big Society cannot succeed without the voluntary sector – and that’s a huge advantage in the long run for voluntary agencies. Here are 5 tactical steps for any voluntary organisation that is feeling the squeeze at the moment.


The public spending review will create a harsh climate for many voluntary organizations in the next few years. But if they can survive this period of austerity, there will be unexpected opportunities ahead from The Big Society. This is because The Big Society will see some early wins, but ultimately the limitations of the model, and the hardships caused by the spending review, will begin to bite.

Politically The Big Society cannot be seen to fail, so this is the point where voluntary agencies will be in a better position to negotiate contracts to plug some of the serious gaps in statutory service provision – and to turn The Big Society into a viable project.

So one survival tactic for voluntary agencies hit by the current spending review is to develop a sophisticated critique of what will and what won’t work within The Big Society framework. To then embrace The Big Society rhetoric and apply it to service delivery where this is possible; and, where this isn’t possible, to develop specific services that correct Big Society flaws.

These voluntary organisations need to consolidate rapidly now to absorb any immediate funding cuts and avoid insolvency – but without just resorting to a slash-and-burn strategy. There are 5 particularly tough challenges ahead that have to be factored into this consolidation:

(1) To retain leadership capacity at the top of the organisation – and redefine the leadership role. Voluntary organisations need entrepreneurial talent at the top to reposition the organisation to pick up on future funding opportunities. Leaders must have emotional literacy to engage and motivate stakeholders throughout these anxiety-provoking changes. The Chief Executive and Chair (and trustee board) need to be closely aligned – they need complex strategic planning expertise, sophisticated financial modelling, and a shared understanding of how change happens effectively.

(2) To design an organisational structure that can be stripped down to its core to ride out the cuts – but with the capacity to expand in the future when new financial opportunities present themselves. This structure needs to serve as a hub onto which you “dock” additional teams when new service contracts are won. The workforce needs a mix of freelance, permanent, and time-limited staff working in flexible roles. There needs to be a well-considered involvement of volunteers and service users in the structure. Everyone involved will need resilient personalities to adapt to changing demands.

(3) To rethink the organisation’s service delivery model to ensure that it is sustainable. To go back to the organisation’s core purpose and core values, and then consider whether there are leaner ways to meet the needs of service users. Some services and service users do fit the Big Society model of volunteerism and self-help – so some of these services that are currently provided by paid staff could be delivered safely by a blend of service users, volunteers and community groups. This is an excellent way to free up staff to do the high-level tasks that they are best suited to do. But remember that this model changes the relationship between the organisation and its volunteers and service users to something more ‘professional’ – they will make bigger demands of you, and vice versa – and they need high quality, supportive supervision to ensure a consistent standard of delivery. Who will provide this time-intensive development? Here is a powerful presentation by Sam Hopley to trigger some ideas.

(4) To identify the cracks in The Big Society framework, and spot the service gaps arising from the spending review – then seek out new service opportunities there. Local authorities have statutory duties that could be hard to sustain in the chaos of restructuring and cuts, and there are many marginalised community groups that don’t sit easily within The Big Society model – either through stigma, or through not having the resources, knowledge, expertise or resilience for self-help (eg. chaotic drug users, ex-offenders, people with enduring mental illness or learning disabilities, long-term homeless, street sex-workers, and refugees). Voluntary agencies need to put the case for why these services are essential, and why they are best suited to deliver them in the most cost-effective and accessible manner. This requires slick expertise in full cost recovery, social return on investment, evidence-based service development, and outcomes evaluation.

(5) To monitor the real impact on people’s lives of the government’s sweeping reforms. The abolition of government targets will make it much harder to track the negative impact of the cuts on service delivery. It will also make it harder to assess the disruption caused by the major restructuring of the public sector. The localisation agenda will make it that much harder to connect up data and spot the over-arching trends. Voluntary agencies will be the closest witnesses to the hardships caused by service cuts. They can draw on this painful first-hand experience to spell out the negative social consequences of not providing services – and use it as a lever to secure funding to provide decent services where they are most needed. This information needs to be pooled to establish a nationwide picture of the human cost behind the programme for economic recovery – so it’s worth getting involved with NCVO’s debate.
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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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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)