Switching to a strength-based approach
“All great changes are preceded by chaos” (Deepak Chopra)
Around 70% of change programmes in organisations fail (McKinsey 2015). But the good folk of South Yorkshire Housing Association are essentially optimistic folk, and this year we have embarked on an ambitious plan to roll out strengths-based ways of working across our LiveWell services.
Our services support a wide range of people: we run employment programmes for those with a mental or physical health condition, schemes for the homeless and those with multiple or complex needs, services that support older people, and mental health provision, from residential accommodation to support services.
Why the switch to strengths-based approaches?
The clue is in the paragraph above. I’ve told you about the people we work alongside in terms of their diagnosis, condition or a perceived ‘deficit’.
Is there a phrase that is worse than ‘complex needs’? All of us as humans are complex beings with a range of things we need to help us thrive – just look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We want shelter, food, connection, to belong…. Just thinking about my own complicated needs, particularly in times of vulnerability or difficulty, can bring forth a good long list – and all of us would have one of those lists.
Nothing in my opening paragraph indicates that any of the people we work alongside have strengths, aspirations, talents and skills. And all too often things like pathways into support, assessments and ensuing follow on support is based around deficits and needs.
We want to do things differently at SYHA, and we have a history of innovation and leading change. Our employment programme, Good Work, has been using strengths-based approaches for a couple of years now – If you want to support someone back into employment, it’s much better to start with what they are good at and aspire to do.
We’ve also piloted strengths-based approaches at one of our services that supports ‘those people with complex needs’. And ‘those people’ now tell us that they have a different relationship with our staff – one that is more equal and trusting. And we’ve found that instead of supporting people with complex needs, we are working alongside people with a wide range of talents – from cooking to art to boxing.
Rolling In
So, what else have we learnt along the way?
Well, we’ve found out that you will never achieve meaningful change unless you put the time into engagement. That’s why we refer to rolling in, not rolling out. We want to take people along with us on this journey – both the people who work for us and the people we work alongside.
We promise not to helicopter in like ‘Change Heroes’, dump some new lingo and jargon, and zoom off to the next thing. Instead we focus on building authentic relationships, genuinely listening, and accepting that those of us working for change are not the experts in how an individual service works and flourishes. We work with and alongside to embed our new approach, and know that there is rich expertise when we work like this – with insights from the people we work alongside, the people who work for us, and us as supporters.
Co-Creation
From the start, we’ve used co-creation. We’ve worked with people to re-design paperwork, assessments and the questions we ask when people enter one of our services. But we don’t see co-design as something we do at that start of a change programme and then put in a drawer somewhere marked ‘consultation’, ‘participation’ or ’engagement’. We’ve built a super accessible toolkit on co-production that anyone can pick up and use to start to have different conversations. We want this way of working to become everyday, not an exception that we think about from time to time or feel we need to call experts in to help us do – the expertise is already there, in the people we work alongside and the people who work for us.
“Frontline managers are central to an organisation because they oversee execution. They motivate & bolster the morale of the people who do the work.” (Hassan / Harvard 2011)
One of the things that came up early on was the fear (and sometimes the reality) of treading on toes. We were challenging and changing practice, and we felt we could easily become ‘critical parents’ to our frontline managers. So we put extra thought into how we engaged with them and supported them. We also worked to develop very open channels of feedback with the managers we were working with – and we challenged ourselves with questions drawn from solution-focused practice – If we could give each other honest feedback, what difference would that make? What would we notice? How would we know we were doing it well?
In an average organisation, frontline managers directly supervise around 80% of the total workforce. Put like that, it’s easy to see why having them engaged and communicating honestly with you is critical to success.
Courage: “You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort, but you cannot chose both” (Brene Brown)
Even with the rich expertise we get from working alongside people, you sometimes need someone to step forward and champion change. Finding your allies early is one of the best things we did. So I couldn’t have been happier when keyworkers Barry and Iain stepped forward to champion strengths-based practice. And they worked in ‘that scheme for complex needs’. And they flew with strengths-based practice, despite the doubt and occasional ridicule from the rest of their team.
Every big change needs a Barry and an Iain. The people prepared to try something new, to step out of their comfort zone, to be willing to fail, to promote and advocate, to challenge, and to be trusted allies.
“Language is the instrument of culture. It shapes domination and liberation” (Angela Carter)
“She’s DNA’d again. She said she couldn’t leave the house. It was only 10 mins up the road. I just can’t imagine myself feeling like I couldn’t leave the house. I suppose you have professional people and vulnerable people. I’m just worried – we’re getting to the end of what we can do with her.”
The conversation above and the level of judgement and ‘othering’ here makes me cringe. What did I do when I heard this? I went and talked to the worker. And after we’d had an open conversation about language and the way we talk about people, I asked him about this person’s strengths. He named three straight away.
Language matters – it shapes thought.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” (Abraham Lincoln)
So, where do we go from here?
The beauty of a co-created, more equal, strengths-based future is that I'm not the one in control of the roadmap.
The people we work with and alongside have always had hopes, dreams, talents and good ideas. The truly exciting thing is that they are now the ones creating the map.
Helen Phoenix is Head of Co-Design & Improvement at South Yorkshire Housing Association.
