Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 3
Summary of key points
Successful collaborations require good relationships, a shared vision, shared principles, shared behaviours and shared infrastructure, e.g., workforce development, and need to be enabling and facilitative, to adapt through learning and work to shared targets.
This is very different from co-operation or partnerships. Everyone has to be involved in developing the shared purpose and has to work together to achieve it.
Personal and relationships and behaviour can make or break collaborations, and need to be actively nurtured.
Shared infrastructure needs to be developed. Behavioural standards and joint leadership training can play a role, and shared language, values and principles and information are also important.
Shared leadership requires a change of culture and systems: engaging with end users through deep listening; involving front line staff, not just the top teams, in designing change; creating time and space for imagination about future possibilities; moving away from organisational plans with pre-determined goals; and different commissioning and procurement arrangements
In more detail
Steve Wyler, Co-convenor of a Better Way, said that some clear messages had emerged from the previous meeting, which had looked at how to sustain change when a leader moved on:
A clear, shared purpose across organisations which has become part of the culture is important.
A focus on the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, helps sustain that sense of purpose, and they need to be engaged and their voices heard.
Relationships are very important too, and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.
Lasting change only happens through distributive or shared leadership, and change becomes more embedded when leaders stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’.
Great leadership is also about enabling others.
Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.
He said that this time we were looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice, and introduced Dawn Plimmer from Collaborate as our main speaker.
Dawn said that Collaborate work with many place-based collaborations and often work with local authority partners. Complexity is their starting point: no one individual or organisation can address an issue alone and systems, not organisations come first. The collaborations they were involved in often have a geographical dimension and are seeking solutions at local level. It was important to put people first, not services. Collaborations are a long journey, she said, and can be challenging: there is often a ‘fox and chicken’ wariness between commissioners and those funded, for example.
She identified the following conditions for success
Relationships
Shared vision
Shared principles
Shared behaviours
Shared infrastructure, eg, workforce development.
The features of collaborative or systems leadership are:
It’s personal: ‘start with our own capacity, appetite and commitment for challenge’
Relationships and trust are key, which is why the most effective local action on Covid-19 took place where these existed.
A shared purpose must be developed.
Enabling and facilitating.
Adaptive, constantly reflecting, learning and finding new truths.
It’s about delivering shared results, with clear roles.
Today’s collaborators are pioneers towards what will hopefully become the new normal.
Covid-19 had galvanised the system, she said, and put an emphasis on trust and empathy, and the crisis had helped to turbo charge relationships and helped people to work beyond boundaries. The challenge now was to stop reverting to the old model, after the end of the crisis.
In discussion about what makes a good quality collaboration in practice, key points included:
The difference between collaboration, partnerships and co-operation
The key to shared leadership and collaboration is to ‘leave the lanyards at the door’. There had been many earlier attempts at collaboration, for example Local Strategic Partnerships, Our Place and Community Planning, but many so-called collaborations are just tick box exercises and unequal ‘partnerships’.
In partnerships, partners often start working together by signing up to a pre-determined agenda. Collaboration can only flourish where there is no set agenda and a shared purpose can be developed together.
As one person in the group put it, co-operation is where everyone is working alongside each other toward a number of independent goals to achieve particular targets. ‘In contrast,’ she said, ‘collaboration is where a group are working collectively toward a shared goal, parking the business of their particular organisation. In collaboration, rather than exchanges of information and resources, team members share, no-one pulls ahead of the pack and the success of each individual depends on the success of all.’
The importance of behaviours
To be successful, you need to ‘get the right people on the bus’ and work with people to make sure that everyone is on board. Behaviours are often the reason why collaborations failed to lead to systems leadership. People are not intentionally blocking, but can dig in behind entrenched positions, seeing change as criticism of what they have achieved.
Facilitation techniques with open-ended questions and the limitation of dominant voices can help. OPERA is one technique designed to create a functional meeting that is quick, efficient, and inclusive. OPERA stands for OWN, PAIR, EXPLAIN, RANK, and ARRANGE. Participants start with their own suggestions by writing down their ideas. Next, they are grouped into pairs to discuss their best suggestions. The best ideas are explained and shared with the whole group followed by a ranking of the proposals. Finally, similar ideas are arranged into groups.
A focus on users, not organisations
A focus on users can help break through entrenched organisational positions and is an important starting point for creating a shared sense of purpose. Deep listening is important, with an open-ended agenda. We heard of one example where families were brought in and asked, ‘What would good look like?’ Another example was where policy makers in senior roles held late night sessions with rough sleepers in what became deeply personal encounters, and this made a big difference for a while.
Shared infrastructure, including behavioural standards and shared language
Shared infrastructure can help to break down organisational boundaries and culture.
Cross-sector training is one element. There need to be shared learning spaces.
Shared language is important.
Shared values and principles are important. Behavioural standards might also play a role. For example, respect for each other rather than judging, recognising the value different partners can bring, curiosity, and not being risk averse.
Some shared governance might be needed.
A change in culture and systems
Commissioning and procurement and funding can be a block to systems leadership and must be addressed.
Organisational strategies and planning can create inflexibility and be a block. We heard of one example where a major organisation is trying to move away from 5 year strategies with clear plans and trying to align instead around common purpose and principles.
To create a shared sense of purpose, it helps to imagine the future you want to see together, setting aside the practicalities, as set out here by Robert Hopkins, the founder of the Transitions Town Movement, and author of From what is to what if. He says using imagination needs time and space and for us not to feel under constant surveillance.
There needs to be an organisational shift to focus on people. Part of systems leadership is to give permission to the front line to become systems leaders. The principles for collaboration can be agreed at a high level but change can only be achieved by front-line staff.
Participatory budgeting is a useful technique and one we might explore in further discussions.
Reflecting on the discussion, Cate Newnes-Smith, the thought leader for the group, said she would particularly take away the thinking on shared infrastructure, including shared information, shared language and behaviour. Steve Wyler agreed that shared infrastructure was important and that there were very few good examples of cross-sectoral infrastructure at present.
Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 2
Summary of Key Points
Leadership is important but great leadership is about enabling others.
When individuals change, collaboration is likely to continue where a clear, shared purpose has been created across organisations and has become part of the culture and where good relationships at all levels have already been forged. Language should be simple and shared, so that everyone understands the vision.
Relationship-building and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.
People must stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’. Lasting change only happens through distributive leadership.
The focus must be on ensuring the system matches the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, and they need to be engaged and their voices heard.
Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.
Next time, we’ll be looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice.
In more detail
Steve Wyler introduced the meeting by summarising some of the key messages from the previous discussion:
Relationship building is critical to good collaboration
This relies on openness, trust and honesty
Collaboration had been speeded up under Covid-19 and one of the reasons is that there is a clear common cause
One question was how to build on this as circumstances changed
Steve explained that the focus of today’s discussion was what happens when key individuals move on? He said that the thought leader for this cell, Cate Newnes-Smith, the CEO of Surrey Youth Focus, was now experiencing this challenge in the most tragic of circumstances. The Director of Children’s Services in Surrey, with whom she and others had been working across sectors to transform opportunities and services for children and young people (known as Time for Kids), had suddenly died. He invited her to speak about Dave Hill, the lessons she had learnt from him and about the future. A blog she has written in tribute to Dave Hill and his work can be read here.
Cate said that great leaders are about enabling others: Dave had created space in the system for others to do things. He had also brought in a really good team of people and had established a network of relationships between people in Surrey which meant that hopefully the reforms he had initiated would continue after his death. Since Dave’s death, for example, she had recently presented about Time for Kids to the SEND partnership board and pledges had since flooded in to take it forward.
Nonetheless his successor would be important, and Cate is hopeful that a successor to Dave will be chosen who wants to carry on taking the work in the same direction. Another plus factor is that as the political control of the council in Surrey tends to remain stable, the councillors and other senior leaders are unlikely to change in the next few years.
In conclusion, Dave had been a driving force, but she also thought that Dave had created such impressive momentum in the system and had put the right people in place to make it happen without him.
Points made in the subsequent discussion included:
Relationship-building is essential and takes a long time and we need to find ways of getting this funded as part of the business model. Individuals at all levels in the collaborating organisations need to see relationship-building as part of their job. Voluntary organisations were sometimes performing what a Better Way is now calling the ‘connector role’ but this is often not recognised or rewarded. Indeed, contracts or grants tend to be awarded for specific purposes which do not include relationship-building. Surrey Youth Focus was fortunate in that it was now being funded to do that connecting role by the council; and the Community Foundation for Surrey was increasingly seeing part of its role as convening. A national example of government funding organisations to work together was DCMS’ place-based giving initiative which had given core funding to finance posts to facilitate collaboration for local-funding-raising.
The role of systems leadership must also be promoted but funding mechanisms can get in the way, encouraging competitive behaviours. Surrey Youth Focus see ‘systems stewardship’ as part of their role, and what that meant for them was to ensure that ‘voice of the child is in the room when they are there’. This needs to be built into commissioning and procurement, as was being done in Surrey in a co-operative bid for CAMS work. With systems leadership also comes distributive leadership at all levels, which also helps to embed change and ensure it does not rely on any one individual.
A shared purpose inside and across organisations which helps people to focus beyond their organisational agendas is crucial to good collaboration and it also helps to sustain collaboration when individuals move on. Changeover of staff in local authorities could be a serious problem. One person had worked with a council where three different CEOs were put in place over 5 years, with restructurings as well. A lesson based on experience from the Wigan Deal is that two things are crucial a) a culture linked to a clear bigger purpose and b) ownership of the agenda outside of the council of that purpose, as well as within. If a bigger purpose is ingrained in the culture of the organisation, it naturally encourages people to work in a different way, including new people coming into the organisation. A clear culture based on purpose ensures recruitment of new staff will result in a continuity of vision. Different parts of the local authority also work more seamlessly together where this is the case because staff share that bigger picture. Language matters and needs to be clear, simple and shared across organisations.
This purpose must be based on the needs of those served and it is important that their voices are built in through participative processes and through organisations who see it as part of their purpose to facilitate and represent those voices.
Succession planning could also help ensure continuity but was neglected, and it was important to get governance and systems right, for example through co-chairing where there were formal partnerships, for example, where funds were jointly managed. That said, some collaboration could be driven by less formal mechanisms. Time for Kids had no structure or governance and would only be effective if it influenced the agenda of existing bodies and partnerships such as Health and Well-Being Boards. In that case, clear principles and vision were important.
The group finished by identifying this issue for discussion at its next meeting on 9th September at 3.00-4.30pm:
What does collaboration look like? How does it differ from other similar practices such as partnership or consultation?
What does systems leadership look like? How do we know it when we see it, how do we know when we don’t?
What does distributive leadership look like? What does it require in the way of leadership and followership?
Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 1
Summary
Collaborative leadership is fundamental to place-based working: ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.’
At the heart of this is relationship building, for its own sake, in advance of a specific need.
It helps to be enthusiastic, open and honest, to build trust with other people.
It is possible to work as a systems leader or steward, and create spaces for people to come together, so that they learn to respect each other as valued contributors to a shared cause.
Where beneficiaries, not organisations, are the primary focus, more will be achieved.
The Covid-19 crisis, while terrible in its impact, has nevertheless created favourable conditions for collaboration. One challenge will be to sustain this as the crisis recedes, and another will be to find ways of establishing and embedding a collaborative system that can survive departure of key individuals.
Aims of the cell
Steve Wyler, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way explained that ‘Our systems and leadership styles often force organisations to compete against each other rather than collaborating to achieve the changes people need.’ This cell is for those who are working in places to put the Better Way principles into action and want to learn from each other about how best to abandon organisational silos and become systems leaders, and develop common causes and shared outcomes, within and across sectors.
The cell is a working group which will meet several times, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.
2. Opening Presentations
We started the meeting with two presentations:
Cate Newnes-Smith from Surrey Youth Focus described how she has built relationships over several years with people from the statutory sector, and as a consequence was asked to play a part in the appointment of the council Chief Executive Joanna Killian, who then brought in Dave Hill as Social Services Director, and this created an opportunity for a new way of doing things. Cate explained that she makes a point of building relationships before she needs them, inviting people for a coffee, asking them what they need, and listening.
Through the Better Way, Cate heard about Toby Lowe’s work on Human Learning Systems, and realised that she and others like her were carrying out the role of a ‘systems steward’. Surrey Youth Focus now has one foot in the third sector camp, and one in the public sector camp, and know both well, and a lot of its work is bringing people together, getting people talking, making things happen – on many levels both strategic and tactical. This has resulted, for example, in the Time for Kids initiative, which is being rolled out to all practitioners across Surrey, encouraging them to focus on positive relationships with children. This initiative started with a small group convened by Cate, which began by building trust.
Cate distinguished between strong and weak collaboration. In a strong collaboration all the partners embark, as it were, on a boat with everyone agreeing the direction together, and they stand together at the helm making adjustments as needed. This is very different from the much weaker (but very common) forms of collaboration, where the invitation is ‘come on to our boat, and we will steer it, and will allow you to express an opinion every now and again’. Cate reminded us of the useful phrase: ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.’
Avril McIntyre, from Community Resources, in Barking and Dagenham explained that seven years ago there was a new Council Leader and a new Chief Executive, both with a vision to do something different. Many in the voluntary sector had become used to campaigning against the statutory agencies, but Avril and some others realised there was an opportunity to work with the Council and help shape direction. Last year the contract for voluntary sector infrastructure came up to for tender. Avril and eight other charity leaders took the opportunity to come together, with the ambition to act as door openers rather than gatekeepers, and to work together to share power and change the dynamic across the social sector. They established the Barking and Dagenham Collective.
This is not a traditional CVS, but rather aims to grow the social sector through partnerships and collaboration. For example the council was developing an adult care strategy and wanted to consult with the voluntary sector. The Collective said no, let’s not do that, instead let’s all get in a room together and re-imagine what adult social care could look like locally.
When Covid-19 hit it was horrific, but it also accelerated collaboration, connection and relationship. Because trust had already been established, the Council was more easily able to accept that often the voluntary sector was better placed to take action in the emergency, and a connected borough-wide response quickly took shape. Where things didn’t go well, it was always possible to pick up the phone and get it sorted. This felt to Avril like a very different way of operating, compared to the past. Avril shared some examples:
The foodbanks hadn’t talked to each other for twenty years but now a WhatsApp group was formed, with 17 foodbanks working together. The Council quadrupled referrals to foodbanks, but rather than simply offloading a problem, is now working with the foodbanks to develop a food strategy for the borough.
Children’s social care wanted to produce a directory of voluntary services, and asked for voluntary sector representation on a Council panel. The Collective said no, we won’t do that, but instead we will put you all together, in a room, with the voluntary agencies who are working with the children and young people who are being exploited.
The thing to do, explained Avril, is to create an environment where people are talking together, and building relationships, and are willing to hear one another – then something changes.
3. Discussion
Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the questions, ‘What are we learning about working across sectors in a place?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Caroline Slocock, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
Relationships are centrally important. Where people had put in the time previously to build local relationships this has proved valuable in the crisis. Conversely, some large agencies, for example in the housing sector, struggled to respond where they didn’t have the local connections.
It helps to be enthusiastic, open and honest, to build trust with other people.
Collaboration can be highly dependent on a few individuals in leading roles. When they move on, the collaborative efforts are put at risk. So, what can be done to maintain a collaborative culture and practice – a system - which is less dependent on a few key individuals?
Relationships with the private sector can be very valuable in a place but are often neglected. A presumption of moral superiority in the charity sector (often unwarranted) is a big obstacle.
There are often power imbalances. Smaller local agencies, especially BAME and women’s organisations, are still having bad experiences at the hands of larger ones. With funding pressures post-Covid, many smaller organisations, closest to the ground and to the people they serve, will be especially at risk. We need to build partnerships where there is much more mutual recognition and respect for the value generated by small as well as large organisations.
It is important that the voices of people are heard and acted upon. Creating a good place is not just about a physical space but about our place in society, and collaborations need to ensure that those who are not currently heard can express their views of what the place and space means for them so that the place works for them.
The common cause produced by crisis has enabled rapid change, sharing information for example, or new ways of working with people. But there is now a risk that momentum in favour of collaboration will be lost as the crisis recedes.
Good collaboration and strong partnerships require clear purpose, a shared vision, where beneficiaries are the focus, not organisations.
However, this focus can be difficult to maintain. When leaders become once-removed from beneficiaries, their attention and energy can too often switch to organisational management. They are constantly tempted to act in ways designed to secure the future of their organisation, and for example bid for work that others could deliver better. Organisational leaders need to be explicit that they will not compete with others ‘just because they can’.
4. Topics for further meetings of the group
The following were suggested (at the meeting and subsequently) as topics for the group to address in future meetings:
How do we establish a system based on relationship and trust that will continue even when people move on?
Public engagement in systems change (e.g. in citizens assemblies or in other ways).
Members of the group are invited to provide blogs, video clips, on building relationships and on building collaborative systems, and also to suggest others to join the group.
5. Next meetings
Thursday 15th July, 3.00pm-4.30pm
Thursday 9th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm
Note from a network discussion: What could a national communities strategy look like?
Notes of a Better Way discussion on 26 November 2019, Euston, London
We brought together people from the public, voluntary and community, social enterprise and cooperative sectors to talk about what a future Government communities strategy might look like. This was against a background of an election, different proposals in manifestos and, in July 2019, the publication by the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) of a communities strategy, ‘By deeds and their results: strengthening our communities and nation’. Participants came up with a range of ideas for future community strategies, which are listed at the end of this note.
Introduction
Introducing the discussion, one participant, coming from a public sector perspective and having looked at the manifestos, said he thought the following issues needed to be considered when thinking about future strategies:
Size of the state: in the past public services have been subject to large scale privatisation, often with unhappy results. But what is the alternative? Should more resources flow out of the public sector towards community-led wealth building and co-operative endeavours, or should the state reverse direction and bring externally delivered services back-in house?
Boundaries of the state: should we expect more to be done by citizens themselves, and if so what forms of public participation in service design and delivery can achieve this?
Balance of power: should central government take the lead through national directly-funded programmes, or should local government and local communities have greater rights to deploy resources and take action on their own terms? It was notable that all the manifestos promised a big shift in power to a more local level.
Lessons from the past
In our discussion we noted that various aspects of a national community agenda have had some success across the country over the last decade or so. Government-funded programmes, and in some cases enabling legislation, have encouraged the transfer of land and buildings to community ownership, helped people take over and run their local pubs, trained local community organisers, and helped local communities establish a neighbourhood plan, for example. The Lottery’s Big Local programme has devolved resources and decision making to neighbourhood levels, over a ten year period. However, some promising experiments, such as the Our Place programme (which encouraged cross sector collaboration and pooled budgets at neighbourhood level) were not followed through.
For successive governments community policy has been problematic. It has often been tentative, with major spending departments regarding community development activities as peripheral or ‘soft’. A top-down, command and control approach to delivering the Big Society had, for example, often caused damage to the fragile eco-system of existing voluntary, community and social enterprise activity. The National Citizens Service was set up at a time when youth services experienced major cuts, for example. Competition for contracts had undermined local collaborations. The recent devolution agenda has shifted some power in favour of city regions and city mayors, but devolution is not decentralisation as far as local communities are concerned, and these arrangements continue to disempower people, who have little or no ability to influence behaviour at regional levels. The new Communities Strategy had been generally welcomed as a positive statement of intent, but some felt that the proposed actions lacked ambition.
Involvement, participation, power
In future, ways needed to be found to give communities more power, including influence over key decisions and genuine control over things that really matter. But we recognised that there were numerous challenges.
There is a baffling array of tools available. The Involve website sets out 58 different forms of public involvement: action planning, appreciative inquiry, citizens’ assemblies, co-production, conversation cafes, design charrettes, e-panels, feedback kiosks, forum theatre, participatory budgeting, planning for real, etc. Many of these are well established and can be effective, for different purposes, but if too many options are available locally that can produce confusion, and attempts to introduce new methods can undermine existing ones.
Important though engagement is, there was also some real scepticism and challenge about existing assumptions and methods from participants in this discussion. It was pointed out that we make a false assumption if we believe that everyone wants to participate or should participate in local community life. There is some evidence, eg from the Huddersfield Democracy Commission, that although people want some form of engagement they do not necessarily want participation. As one participant put it, when I go to my GP I want to be listened to, but I don’t want to participate directly in how the surgery is run. Many people feel overloaded and simply don’t have the bandwidth to take on more civic responsibility. They often feel lost and don’t understand how power works. People are experts in their own lives but rarely have expertise in the system. Sometimes engagement brought accountability without power, it was pointed out, and input could be ignored.
Indeed it is wholly unrealistic to expect full participation in every community; communities are simply too diverse, and modern life is simply too complex. Any strategy would also need to recognise that communities are rarely unified, except at times of crisis (floods for example). There are always multiple communities operating within a place, and people take part in and identify with these various communities to a greater or lesser extent at different times in their lives.
But the group thought there is nevertheless considerable value in making it much easier for people to become involved if and when they feel the need to, or believe they can make a useful contribution. Knowledge and communication are central requirements, it was pointed out. To make it work well, it was thought that we need to bring about:
A more universal understanding of how the democratic system works.
A constructive sense of entitlement which extends beyond the educated middle classes.
Investment in capacity building.
Easier access to associational activities, in new and revitalised forms.
We also need to understand that the journey of engagement often starts at a very low level, and that once someone is on that journey there needs to be the encouragement and support to take them on a trajectory where they can do more. Formal structures can get in the way – too often informal associations are required to incorporate as soon as they need even very small amounts of funding and that needs to change.
Community action could also end up in a quagmire of funding and admin, rather than creating real change.
We discussed some methods which can, potentially, help citizens challenge the power of large institutions, and take some power and control themselves.
Citizens’ assemblies are receiving attention at the moment, even if they have not always proved as influential as hoped for. Moreover, there we some in the group who thought that there were risks that these could actually undermine existing democratic systems by bypassing them and one said they thought they were tokenistic.
Community organising has also become more prominent in recent years. One key feature of community organising is that the agenda is developed by local citizens acting in informal combination, not by an institution such as local government.
Moreover, it was pointed out that we should not underestimate the importance of community spaces, at least those which provide a continuing opportunity for people from across a community to come together, to learn about each other and discover common cause, and take action together. Good community spaces can, it was said, could provide a better foundation for building community agency, and helping people take some ownership and control over the things that matter to them, than some more formal programmatic methods.
Often consultation and engagement happens to an agenda set by government, rather than being bottom up. Listening is really important. Some government guidance on how communities can best surface issues that really matter to them might be helpful.
The role of local government and the public sector
There needed to be a debate about rejuvenating good local government. Some said local authorities may not always be the best agency to lead engagement initiatives but others said they should be the convenors of this. However, they can and should develop skills to listen well. Some local authorities are working hard at developing a more collaborative style of working with their local communities. Barking and Dagenham and Wigan have received particular praise for this, but there are many other examples around the country.
Capacity within the local public sector is a problem. Often those working in the public sector feel overwhelmed, but once they start on the path they realise there is less red tape and regulations in the way of better engagement than they thought there would be. It is possible to introduce local procurement policies, for example.
Community wealth-building models have been introduced in Preston and elsewhere. In these, local anchor institutions take action to build a local supply chain and employ more local people, in order to reinvigorate the local economy,
Supporting communities versus national initiatives
Often the biggest challenge at community level is not the appetite to take action, nor the skills to do so well, but rather access to finance and many lived a precarious existence. There is therefore a good case for some national funding programmes to stimulate and strengthen community life but deployed in ways that support rather than undermine community based activity. Many new national initiatives can be spawned by eager Ministers which are put in place without any recognition of what already exists.
Some points for doing this well were suggested in the group:
Mapping should take place of existing initiatives and services before new ones are created and investment in them should be considered before replacing them with new ones.
New projects should only be funded if it can be confirmed that they are informed by real local knowledge.
Small amounts of funding should be easily accessible to large numbers of small organisations which are embedded in their community and which employ local people, with diverse backgrounds.
Trusted intermediaries should be available to provide advice, and facilitate peer learning and exchange.
Funding should be deployed wherever possible to build agency, allowing communities to do what they want to do on their own terms, and helping to build leadership from within communities themselves.
Innovative forms of grant making such as match trading grants (where funds are released according to uplift in trading income) should be considered, to incentivise and reward entrepreneurial behaviour, where there is scope for organisations to build up their earned income. Such mechanisms should be seen as an additional option, not as a replacement for traditional grant making.
Decisions about funding allocation should be made at the lowest practicable level, with involvement of people who understand the local ecosystem.
Funding should be for the longer term, ten years ideally. Funded initiatives should be given as much time as possible to develop their activities, and reshape their plans in the light of experience (as has been successfully demonstrated in the Big Local programme).
The Co-op Foundation is attempting to work in the space between grant hand-outs and commercial loans, by providing a combination of interest-free loans and grants and promoting co-operative models. It has also introduced match funding schemes with national government and lottery distributors, and has been able to play an intermediary role, acting as an advocate on behalf of communities. Perhaps there is scope to develop this type of trusted intermediary role further.
The digital world
Much of our community development practices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, with the growth of community campaigns and pressure groups, and the spread of community-led anchor organisations, often centred on a physical space, together with forms of engagement which relied heavily on those willing to engage in often endless meetings and committees. The dramatic emergence of on-line social platforms in recent years, and access to big data, has introduced new and much faster ways to engage people, sometimes in much larger numbers, in community activities, and to plan interventions in much more targeted ways. It would be wrong to assume that a single national community strategy can fully address the opportunity this brings (as well as the associated difficulties), but our thinking must not remain confined by practices which will increasingly feel out-dated and indeed alien to a younger generation.
Proposals for a national community strategy
Some ideas which came out of the discussion for a national community strategy were:
Community impact assessments for any new development or policy initiative, similar to environmental impact assessments, which are well established and accepted. This would stimulate a positive discussion and consideration of how community harm of new national or public sector initiatives can be minimised and community benefits enhanced.
The use of national funds locally should be determined by local people.
At present allocation of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy funding can be decided by local authorities without any wider community accountability. A national strategy should introduce accountability mechanisms, perhaps including the option of participatory budgeting.
There should be investment in building the capacity of individuals and communities to engage and participate, especially where existing levels are low, including raising understanding of how democracy and local decision-making works.
Funding for community based activity should be overhauled to make it more accessible to smaller organisations and to be longer term funding.
Good local government is key and it needs to be rejuvenated, with investment in its ability to listen, and to hear what matters to people, not just to engage with them on its own agenda.
There should be further nationwide activity to support community organising, and to support communities in neighbourhood planning, and in shaping (and where desired delivering) local services.
A national strategy should promote more community wealth-building, through local procurement and supply chain development, and employment of local people.
A national strategy should include programmes to maintain momentum, and indeed accelerate, community asset transfer.
A national strategy should set out ways in which private companies are expected to engage the local community, eg commissioning community researchers in development projects.
Ideally we should seek a cross party alliance on a national community strategy which transcends party politics.
Note form a roundtable: Collaboration and shared leadership so that people and communities come first
Better Way Roundtable, 5 June 2019
Introduction
Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, pointing out that in the Better Way, we believe in collaboration and shared leadership because that way people and communities come first. We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, including from:
Toby Lowe, who has written about how co-ordinated action not only better addresses structural causes, it also matches the complexity of individual lives, arguing for commissioning and funding to support this.
Cate Newnes-Smith would like to see more ‘holistic systems leaders’ who understand the real issues in people’s lives and work across organisations and sectors to deliver shared goals.
Polly Neate, who says that large charities should not compete against local charities, to To choose not to win, even though they can.
Kathy Evans, whose organisation Children England created the Declaration of Interdependence, advocates listening to your heart, not the head, if you want to follow a Better Way.
Audrey Thompson, who says we need ‘social connectors’ who can empower and link up individuals, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
Tom Levitt, who demonstrates that big companies are increasingly reaching out and working innovatively with charities toward shared goals.
Collaboration - a perspective from the homelessness sector
Rick Henderson is CEO of Homeless Link which now has 780 organisations in its membership. Rick described various experiences of collaboration:
The Making Every Adult Matter (MEAM) coalition was a largely successful collaboration to find better ways to support people with multiple disadvantage – across the fields of homelessness, mental health, criminal justice, and substance abuse, and including MIND, Homeless Link, Clinks and DrugScope (now Collective Voice). The MEAM Coalition has had significant impact at national policy level, influencing the work of the Lottery, leading grant making foundations, and government as well. There were challenges – the founding partners were of different sizes, and there was for example a big difference between the funds they could contribute to make things happen. But the common purpose was clear and much was achieved.
Homeless Link adopted a ‘partnerships by default’ policy. Everything the organisation did would if possible involve at least one partner. The number of partnerships quickly doubled, and there were some gains, not least that more people could be reached. But the rationale was not explained or understood well enough, and practice has drifted back to unilateral work.
Homeless Link attempted to form a strategic alliance on migrant destitution. This emerged from a ‘car-crash’ conference where it became clear that the homeless sector was failing to respond well to the changing demographic of homelessness, which included a sharp increase in migrants and refugees. Despite a promising start, the alliance failed, when two leading homeless charities decided to work with the Home Office to support repatriation efforts. It became clear that operating cultures were very different – homeless charities tend to be highly pragmatic, doing what is needed to, for example, help people off the streets, while the refugee sector tends to be driven by a particular set of values.
Let’s not romanticise the importance of personal relationships. Without a clear common objective, and shared values, it is hard to collaborate successfully.
Collaboration – a perspective from the refugee sector
Maurice Wren, CEO of the Refugee Council, pointed out that the term ‘refugee sector’ can be misleading. There are around 1,000 migrant and refugee charities/NGOs. Most are under-resourced, especially for policy work. Many are fiercely competitive for profile and position, and behaviours can be characterised by fear and suspicion. In 2015, as a result of the Syrian emergency, the landscape changed and existing agencies were unsure whether new actors were allies or threats.
There are rarely refugee specific solutions to the problems which refugees have. Most successes are process improvements, changes to regulations for example, behind the scenes, so it is difficult to point to a series of positive changes, although things might well have been worse with the work of the agencies.
It has been difficult to marshal and sustain a critical mass of collaboration. It has not been possible to build a movement. Attempts have implied a top-down model of leadership, reinforcing the difference between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’.
It might be more helpful to think about ecologies or ecosystems, where the notion of interdependence is forefront. This can produce more equality in the relationships, more voices which can be heard and respected. It shifts the focus away from leadership and towards co-ordination and organisation.
The Detention Forum is a network of organisations working together to challenge the UK’s use of detention. Some of the 30 organisations which came together hold a highly antagonistic view of government; others are prepared to work with the state. The Forum was however able to draw up a simple shared vision, and build a practice of collective decision making, respecting those who chose not to take part. It became evident that the strength of the forum was in its diversity. It was important to think long term, and about systems change. It is not realistic to expect members to change direction, but rather a gradual process of alignment of many years. It was necessary to invest in co-ordination of the Forum, for the larger members to behave in a more humble way, and for all to be willing to listen and be respectful. The way the Forum worked and the values that were practised were more important than mission and goals.
Discussion
Social sector organisations tend to highlight the importance of shared values in discussions about collaboration, but some of the most effective collaboration can take place across sectors where values can be very different, but there is a well-defined common cause and mutual advantage.
Moreover, we should not assume a single set of values operates in the charity sector and another set of different values operates in the business sector. Values can cross sectors, although more easily at the individual level, and less so at the institutional level.
Shared values can help to build strong teams within and across organisations, and storytelling produces a re-iteration of values, making them relevant and alive. Values can stimulate spontaneity (mission does not have that effect, it tends to constrains action).
It takes time to build trust, and establish credibility. The models we use in the social sector make collaboration and shared leadership more difficult:
The fetishisation of small differences is widespread in the social sector.
Governance models encourage the primacy of organisations over collaborative endeavour.
Planning gets in the way of spontaneity.
There are risks in polite behaviour. If we only look for consensus and avoid conflict, differences are never allowed to surface, and when they do, they become destructive.
Coalescence is necessary to identify and bring about change. For those in the social sector concerned with change and campaigning, working with others is nearly always necessary. In most cases social change organisations have few resources, so efforts to build alliances and systems thinking come naturally.
Leadership for social change needs to be more about building relationships and alliances rather than managing resources (although that is still not well recognised in recruitment practice). For a practice of collaboration to flourish we need leaders who are encouraged to behave as human beings first and foremost, with a willingness to encourage others to develop as leaders. Shared leadership means devolving decision making as close to people as possible, equipping them to become the designers and drivers of change.
The focus on impact, and in particular the expectation that individual organisations should be able to demonstrate their impact, is damaging. It is much better to focus on shared outcomes, and on collaboration as a good in itself.
Our world is wired for organisational growth but we need to rewire it for collaboration. We know this is possible; for example, most commissioning makes enemies of friends, but it doesn’t have to be this way; there are positive examples of alliance commissioning in Plymouth, Sheffield and elsewhere.
There is a particular challenge for larger established organisations, and funders, and how they should behave with new entrants and insurgents. Many are wary, but when they do create space for emergence and decide to support newcomers this can make a big difference.
In collaborations where there are inequalities between large and small organisations, we assume that the large ones should be in the driving seat. But that could be inverted. Local or specialist organisations, which may be closer to lived experience, could be in the driving seat, with any partnership funding flowing through them. One current example is the Health Now initiative, where Lottery funding comes to small charity Groundswell, and much larger national charities Shelter and Crisis are sub-contractors.
In a competitive capitalist society, size and money matters, and ruthlessness is admired. But in the social sector the most effective smaller organisations are adept at building their power, and those with most resources and in positions of relative power don’t have to ‘act like dicks’.
Note from a network discussion: What would a Better Way place look like?
NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DINNER DISCUSSION, 26 NOVEMBER 2018
Summary of key points
It is vital to create a sense of agency amongst local people – a kind of constructive sense of entitlement to a better life – to make this work.
Building connections between people and within communities is necessary so that change can be community-led.
Design and social infrastructure matters. Meeting spaces are important and communities can be designed to be inclusive and to facilitate connections, or not.
Communities do have ‘hidden’ resources on which to build, as demonstrated by the closing down of streets to cars to create play and meeting spaces for communities. Publicly owned land or buildings are another such resource. New funds are nonetheless needed to enhance social infrastructure in some communities; but local people can contribute eg through the creation of locally owned energy companies; or community shares; or through business donations to local wealth funds.
Funding of staff time to make things happen is important too, including funded social connectors, as exist in the Hackney and Hastings examples discussed.
A Better Way place would work for everyone in the community and be designed through its housing and communal spaces to encourage social connections. It would have a high street devoted not just to commercial but also community activities and places to meet. Businesses would be committed to their communities and business rates could be used to incentivise healthy high streets and good employment practices.
In more detail..
Jess Steele opened the discussion drawing on her own experience in Hastings. Often neighbourhoods are faced with a false choice between gentrification and decline. Capital gains resulting from regeneration were often lost to the community itself, whereas taking over ownership of a big community building tethered gains to the community. To make it happen, you needed a group of enthusiastic people but there are people from every background who can do it. They were now trying to develop a ‘common treasury of adaptable ideas’ to attract other people to Hastings and create a fund of ideas others could use.
Igniting an impulse to act and a constructive sense of entitlement
We discussed the fact that one of the challenges was lack of time and also, amongst those who had time, such as the unemployed or retired people, igniting the impulse to act. Creating a space to meet can help. A sense of personal agency is critical, we concluded, but education can kick it out of us, and many people are just shattered by the problems of making ends meet and managing the precariousness of their lives, for example, created by zero hours contracts or universal credit. This sense of agency can be much stronger in affluent communities. An example was given of a threat to a park in St Albans and how the local residents stopped it from happening, and now run the park themselves. If everyone had the ‘sense of entitlement’ that these mainly middle class residents demonstrated, local and national government would be challenged far more successfully than it is.
Shared leadership and common goals
It was agreed that shared leadership and common goals is vital to transforming a place. Although in theory the voluntary sector might play a leading role, at present it tends to be focused on the money and lacks agency.
Could collective impact, place based approaches help transform a neighbourhood? This could create its own problems, especially if finance is linked to it, as in the West London Zone, we were told. It requires some organisations to give up doing things, which they may resist. It also depends on common measurement approaches in real time. Measures are often driven by an external player and there is an underlying lack of power in this situation. It has happened in the States successfully but family foundations that are financing this are more generous so there is not a problem of scarcity. The USA is further advanced on measurement.
Context matters
We discussed how the context in London and the South East and many northern cities was very different with austerity hitting harder in the north. Many more play spaces had been closed, for example, and finding funds for repairs of buildings was far more of a challenge. The economy was worse.
In Newcastle, the choice between gentrification and decline did not exist. Local charities were going under. One building had been given to a charity on a 99 year lease but this was undercapitalised and went bust. Even where there was money, a top down approach can undermine otherwise good initiatives. The Big Lottery had funded a participatory budgetary exercise in one community which led to a decision to reclaim the lanes behind their estate. But in the end this was undermined by fly-tipping and the local council - without consultation - deciding to use the space for communal bins. In Newcastle, the answers lay more in bringing services together than community ownership. There was money in Newcastle, near the centre, but it was a struggle for less advantaged parts of the city to get hold of it.
Good design to promote social connections
It is often said ‘get it right for children and you get it right for everyone’. UNICEF has a framework for creating child-friendly cities through the participation of cities, though this in itself is not sufficient. Hackney was currently advertising for a post to put this into practice. The Mayor is very interested in the design of the environment and housing. It is important that children have safe places to play unsupervised, ideally in front of people’s homes, and this helps build social capital within a community. In Hackney, they were closing streets for children to play in for 2 hours, funded by Hackney’s public health budget. London Play have described children as social pollinators, and in Hackney not just children but also adults come out and take up roles like stewarding and making tea. Importantly, this had happened not spontaneously but by Hackney creating a part-time worker, and equally importantly this was a local resident from one of the estates, who could facilitate peer to peer activity. Around 50 streets were involved, 30-40 actively.
Building community wealth
We talked about the importance of social infrastructure – not just public services within a community but also its buildings and built environment and the social capital or connections within it. Social assets are created and maintained not just by public sector resources but also by the community and social sectors and the private sector. How could we build a social infrastructure fit for the 21st century and also tackle disparities between communities?
One idea that Caroline Slocock has been pursuing is a national Social Wealth Fund which might draw on public land as one of its assets and might also help seed local wealth funds which could also be supplemented from various sources. Bristol had established independently managed funds which included donations from local businesses, for example. There were also many local authorities which had set up not for profit businesses, for example, for solar energy, and some were setting up recycling waste businesses, which could generate funds for this purpose. There are community share schemes and also wealthy people who had attachment to a community they’d grown up in might be prepared to contribute, to give other examples.
What would a Better Way place look like?
Finally, we talked about what a Better Way place would look like. It would be designed around people, with pedestrianised areas and centres in which people don’t just shop but can meet and carry out communal and educational activities. These communities would work for everyone and be inclusive to people of all ages and backgrounds. Housing developments would be designed to encourage contact and to get people to work together and would have built in social infrastructure. There might be communal gardens in addition to private space, car sharing schemes, places to meet etc (nb contrast some new developments where seating is made deliberately uncomfortable and places for young people to congregate are actively designed out). In some countries, ‘parklets’ have been created out of parking spaces and pop up shops have taken the place of cars. Local businesses would be committed to their communities. Business rates might be used as an incentive eg higher rates for harmful businesses like gambling and lower rates for those that pay the living wage.
Note from Better Way and Place cell: is local better than national?
February and March 2018
Does place matter any more?
In the age of digital platforms and widely available travel most of us are connected to many communities, but it seems that place remains important. Place and personal contact cannot be replaced by the internet; and it is where the deepest and most lasting bonds are forged.
Local and national
Our proposition states ‘local is better than national’. Community life is where human relationships can best flourish, and imposition from the centre rarely works when dealing with complex social problems, as it inevitably produces standardised and transactional behaviours, and reduces the potential for people to discover their own solutions.
But that doesn’t mean that we can or should ignore the national dimension. For the local to function well, we need local action to be supplemented by a national system capable of sharing and promoting ideas, encouraging challenge, developing common standards, and providing validation – with all of this guided and informed by evidence from local practice.
The risks of localism
Localism is not necessarily benign. Local institutions can be guilty of hoarding power just as much as national and international agencies. And communities, at their worst, can be divided and dispiriting places, resistant to change, dominated by elite groups, hostile and oppressive for outsiders and minorities. At the local level, the quality of leadership, especially in the public sector, is generally weak, failing to attract real talent or younger generations.
One response to such problems has been managerial – attempts to professionalise local administration, with armies of paid managers (relatively wealthy) doing things for communities (relatively poor). We have seen a movement away from neighbourhood and community levels towards larger geographical regions, in attempts to create economies of scale, centralising political and executive power most recently with directly elected mayors. But this shift from localism to devolution leaves place behind, replicates the national command and control culture, and reintroduces many of the behaviours which leave people feeling they have somehow lost control.
Places under stress
There are many places across the country where deprivation is high and the local infrastructure is failing to cope, let alone improve things. In a time of austerity this is getting even worse. But while we need a strong and effective local infrastructure, especially where problems are most acute, we should not underestimate the untapped strengths that exist in even the poorest places. The answer is not to send people in to ‘intervene’, but rather to take steps to realise local capability and invest in the people who live in these places and create the conditions for them to design and manage their own local infrastructure.
Sometimes organisations themselves may be the problem?
Organisations can often ‘hoard power’ and create command and control barriers between themselves and those they serve. Power can corrupt but it can be important to understand the emotional drivers too. There may be anxiety about getting too close to those with whom one works, or fear of being attacked when something goes wrong. They may also suffer from a lack of aspiration and lack of belief that they can make fundamental change happen. Too narrow a focus on targets may lead to a loss of fundamental purpose.
What might Better Way places look like?
We have heard about places where people, including in some cases those involved in the Better Way network, are attempting to operate according to the Better Way propositions. Examples can be seen in Coventry, Taunton, Stroud, Frome, Doncaster and elsewhere.
This is partly about local institutions, including voluntary agencies, doing far more to build contact and credibility with local people over time, doing things ‘with’ rather than ‘for’, and a willingness to operate across traditional sector boundaries, identifying common cause, while recognising that all communities are highly complex, with multiple competing interests. Networked rather than command and control organisations are likely to work best.
Sustained community connector or community organiser activity, as well as activities to build community ownership, and spaces for people to come together to understand each other and make decisions together (such as participatory budgeting), alongside mechanisms to encourage transparency and challenge, all seem essential for real progress to be made.
Democratic institutions would be strengthened and community based organisations would help give voice to local needs and concerns and provide a challenge function.
We would have a better understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ – of where activity best takes place and how local activity is supported by national and regional actions.
Local organisations would have high aspirations to solve problems, not just service them, and to create stronger communities, and would have the tools to deliver this eg through better feedback mechanisms, ways of spreading experiences and greater front-line autonomy which encourages a ‘journey of discovery’.
There would be a better understanding of where local adds value and of what has been called ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ skills and knowledge. Community organisations and activists often have lived experience and connections that make them more effective than national organisations. The concept of ‘professionalism’ would be reconfigured to include ‘kindness’ and relationship building.
Ways would be found to get more resources for local activity, for example local giving organisations, crowd sourcing and commissioning that recognises the value of local.
What needs to change?
Big is not necessarily better than small, and often the reverse is true, as large organisations are more likely to become disconnected from their communities and more inclined to self-protection. So we should stop talking about scaling up whenever we see an example of good local practice and talk about ‘spreading’ instead. And large organisations would do well to consider whether they can let go, providing much higher levels of autonomy to their constituent parts.
We need to make a better case for localism and the power of place to drive positive change. Some national problems cannot be overcome without a much greater emphasis on local action (homelessness for example) and agencies working in fields where this applies need to be brave enough to say so, and change their operating model, even if that threatens the current way of doing things.
Some problems cannot be tackled only at neighbourhood level. The challenges of migration and climate change for example need concerted action at international levels. Perhaps the best future will come from greater emphasis on the local and the international, and less on the national.
That said, there is a still an important role for the national, which needs to be better understood and articulated.
Some issues to explore further
National ways of measuring quality often underplay the value of local organisations and some of our members are going to explore how to change this in a cross-cell working group.
Can national agencies with strong public brands (and the ability to attract resources on a big scale) reposition themselves to act in service of the local, rather than dominating from the centre?
How can we get more funds into local activity eg through local giving organisations or crowd-sourcing?
How can we better promote organisational and professional behaviours that avoid ‘power hoarding’, including by understanding the emotional drivers of behaviour, and redefining what it means to be professional?
Notes of the discussion within individual cells:
Founding cell - 18 February 2018
London cell 2 - 22 February 2018
Summary of four Better Way London cells discussions about Leadership
In November and December 2017, our London cells each talked about how to develop a leadership style that would help deliver a Better Way. This is a summary of the main points, with notes of the individual discussions also available below.
The problem
A command and control model of leadership is deeply culturally embedded in Britain, including in the public and social sectors. Leaders are expected to focus on the management of their agencies and on the delivery of specified outputs and outcomes, treating their organisations like industrial production units, rather than acting as change agents. CEOs feel under pressure to conform to (gendered) stereotypes and adopt behaviours that are neither natural nor effective. Competition between leaders, rather than collaboration, is ingrained.
However, many of the issues facing society cannot be solved by a single agency, or even by a number of organisations working together. There are many factors affecting health and well-being, for example. A complex system of influences and organisations are important and individuals and communities are critical actors.
The social sector is also not exercising a sufficiently strong thought leadership role in society, tending to comment on the agendas set by others in order to seek marginal changes rather than pointing out fundamental problems in the system and arguing for paradigm shifts. It tends to talk politics, rather than about what really matters to people.
What is needed is a bigger scale of ambition and more collaboration and shared leadership.
Shared leadership is essential to solve complex issues
Shared leadership is not something simply exercised by people at the top of organisations. It is about exercising influence and happens when others choose to follow you, not because of a job title. This is not about becoming a ‘saviour’ or a ‘guru’ but about empowering others to become leaders too.
This kind of leadership is exercised in collaboration and demonstrates the generous qualities which can be summarised as ‘love’. Qualities of respect, kindness, generosity, nurturing, enabling and empowering are all important. Such leadership is more about demonstrating the right behaviour and values than setting specific goals from on high. In one organisation, for example, everyone is encouraged to exercise ‘nine habits’ which include hope and love and to attend workshops with a mix of people at different levels of the organisation to explore how to put these qualities into practice.
The evidence points to shared leadership being far more effective than conventional models in relation to so-called complex issues, as opposed to ‘complicated’ and ‘simple’ ones. These distinctions are drawn from science, which distinguishes between systems that may be complicated, such as computers, but are man-made and systems that are so complex that we will probably never fully understand them, such as the human brain or a rain forest. Command and control forms of leadership have their place in relation to simple and even complicated problems and this is an important message. Any organisation is likely to face a mix but in complex situations, leadership is about getting the conditions right for everyone involved to be able to work with complexity. This is achieved, for example, through the creation of networks within and across organisations, and showing leadership by demonstrating core values rather than giving instructions or setting precise goals. It is recognised that the final outcome may be unknowable when the work starts.
Obstacles to shared leadership
Shared leadership is not prevalent and creating it is challenging:
Lip-service is often given to shared leadership but change will not happen unless it is shown that it works and will be recognised and rewarded.
Network-orientated leaders often find it hard to access circles of power and for their voices to be heard.
The versions of shared leadership tried out in the collectives of the 1970s and 80s were often chaotic and often led to factional dominance.
Community development, including community organising, is intended to grow bottom-up leadership but there is a danger that citizens themselves end up adopting command and control leadership models.
Often people do not see themselves as leaders and do not recognise the power and resources available to them. They lack self-efficacy.
As well as making the case for shared leadership, we need to have a better sense of what it means in practice and how best to embed and promote it.
Context matters, and culture and systems are important too
Better Way members recognised that leadership does not work in isolation. Culture and systems are important too. Indeed one member had come to the conclusion that it is systems change that brings real change, not individual leaders. The Sheffield Microsystem Coaching Academy, for example, trains coaches to work in the health service to redesign services, involving patients in the process. A RSA report identified three forms of power important to leadership – personal agency; the power of shared values and norms; and the hierarchical power of expertise.
Context matters too. What might work in a start up industry would not work in the culture of the public sector.
Some issues to explore further
What are the leadership behaviours and practices that we want to promote and how can we best articulate and embed them.
How can we convince others that a change is needed and would work? Can we deploy the complex/complicated/simple issue paradigm to persuade more leaders to adopt this thinking?
How can we build more self-efficacy and belief in those who do not see themselves as leaders?
How can we encourage greater thought leadership in the general media around the Better Way principles?
Notes of the discussion within individual cells:
Founding cell, 15 November 2017
2nd London cell, 29 November 2017
Note from Better Way London Cell 4: Leadership
Building Better Way Leadership, London cell 4: 13 December 2017
In complex environments when we face ‘wicked problems’ a command or management model of leadership is never effective. We need a leadership approach that recognises that a single agency will not produce desired change, that what is needed is the engagement of different agencies willing to work towards a common goal, and that leaders therefore need the skills necessary to bring many people and agencies together to work for a common cause. Keith Grint has written about this, making the following distinctions:
Command―critical problems―physical
Management―tame problems―rational
Leadership―wicked problems―emotional
Social sector organisations are usually dealing with ‘wicked’ overlapping problems, where multiple categories can apply in any one instance (eg homelesssness, mental health, offending, family breakdown). The need is to go ‘above and beyond’ such categories but leaders, whether acting as commissioners or providers, constantly collude in ‘officialising’ social behaviour. They adopt managerial practices which fulfil contracts and give the appearance of outcomes but simply don’t work for people, who end up receiving multiple interventions at many points driven by many leaders, all claiming they have created change, when in fact they probably haven’t.
In certain contexts we do need leaders able to fulfil command and management roles, they do sometimes need to have the influence and authority to get people to do hard things. But we should beware of people who feel too comfortable in such roles!
When we see leadership only in terms of command and management we tend to associate this with physical qualities, tall men in particular, and these forms of leadership tend therefore to become excluding and can have intimidating effects.
The RACI or RASCI models are widely used (implicitly if not explicitly). This identifies different roles in any change process:
R - Responsible - who is responsible for carrying out the entrusted task?
A - Accountable (also Approver) - who is responsible for the whole task and who is responsible for what has been done?
S - Support - who provides support during the implementation of the activity / process / service?
C - Consulted - who can provide valuable advice or consultation for the task?
I - Informed - who should be informed about the task progress or the decisions in the task?
This approach can be useful for simple managerial processes, where distinct functions can be allocated, but can become problematic when dealing with complexity, where the distinctions are sometimes unhelpful. In many social organisations we expect our senior staff to prioritise managerial tasks, and fail to distinguish between management and leadership, and as a consequence our CEOs spend too much time on the former and not enough on the latter.
Indeed, social sector leaders often present themselves as directive leaders, capable of strong centralised management, in order to win contracts and appeal to funders, even when they know this is not good enough.
So what are the alternative forms of leadership more suited to dealing with complex social change?
A shift towards shared leadership perhaps? But truly shared leadership is very difficult to achieve. Looking back, those who experienced collectives in the 1970s and 1980s found them ultimately unsatisfactory. Often chaotic, they would wear people down, and in fact usually created conditions for factional dominance. Looking forward we should not be complacent that new forms of organisation will necessarily generate a shift towards shared leadership: many social entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs are highly directive and controlling in their behaviours.
We can sometimes see a more distributed and networked form of leadership in smaller, local, neighbourhood based community organisations, where there can be a much closer connection with beneficiaries (‘they could so easily be my daughter or my grandpa…’), where managers and staff and volunteers can have a high level of day to day interaction, and where leaders can be more likely to lend a direct hand in service delivery.
Network-oriented leaders, who are very good at working with people, rather than telling people what to do, can be effective in such settings, but they often find it hard to gain access to circles of power, and when they do gain access, to be heard. This applies both to external gatherings of ‘sector leaders’, as well as internally where people who are less directive in their behaviours are often left out of key discussions.
As Toby Lowe from Newcastle University argues, we need to understand that organisations don’t produce outcomes, but that whole systems do. Good leadership therefore means avoiding the impulse to claim outcomes for a single organisation, but instead requires the skills to build a distinctive role within a wider system which produces change, and explain the value of ‘what we do’ in a very different way.
At a local level, it can be easier for everyone in leadership roles to get to know each other, and build system-wide working relationships, although it is also striking how often this doesn’t happen, and it is often the case that local agencies are not aware of each other, or if they are, they have a poor relationship.
The role of funders can be significant in this. Funders who are closer to whole systems are better able to support concerted and meaningful social change. The Big Lottery Fund for example struggles with this, because distance make it difficult to understand what added value a particular agency can bring, whereas local funders are, at least in theory, more able to build relationships and make the connections necessary to support whole system change, and support the models of leadership which allow collaborative working to flourish.
Note from Better Way London Cell 3: Leadership
Note of Better Way discussion in the third London cell, 4 December 2018
The group was discussing Better Way leadership, and was opened by some thoughts from Peter Holbrook, reflecting on the literature. It is said that a leader ‘knows, goes, and shows the way’ and that leaders have an ability to empower others and to do the right thing. Leaders should seek not to take the credit but be willing to take responsibility. Various styles were recognised, including coercive; authoritative; affiliative and democratic. Sometimes leadership was there but people do not recognise it in themselves. It can feel hard to lead the cavalry when you don’t feel comfortable on a horse.
One could get lost in the advice from the literature but ultimately one should treat others as one wished to be treated. The qualities of respect, kindness, generosity, nurturing, enabling and empowering others are important. Personal values matter and one should keep on learning and reflecting and act with love. This point resonated powerfully in the following discussion.
Love – warmth and accessibility - was not much talked about in leadership but was undoubtedly important, it was agreed. In the Oasis network, they seek to practice at all levels and in everything they do ‘nine habits’ which include joyfulness, patience, peace, love, self-control, hope and perseverance. Leadership requires ‘followship’. Their hope is that through this approach they are supporting lots of people who can be influential. It is about creating the right culture.
Generosity of spirit and the practice of love was not, however, the dominant model, the group reflected. Co-operation was talked about but competition was more common and the qualities that were more often rewarded were self-importance, lack of humility and ruthlessness. Leaders were often expected to grow an organisation and were judged on its financial stability. Under pressure, people often defaulted to a more primitive way of operating. It was argued that there is a need for more honesty amongst CEOs about leadership and what worked.
We argued for a bigger scale of ambition amongst social sector leaders and to look beyond one organisation. Gay rights had been achieved by more than one organisation and not by making minor adjustments to the status quo. Partnership was essential to achieve this kind of change.
We explored the model of ‘open sourcing’ in IT, which can make commercial sense. Resources are freely available but free input is also gained. At the same time companies like Google are knocking out competition and allowing no scope for plurality.
We reflected on the fact that sometimes people feel powerless to achieve change when in fact there are many resources and levers available to them. Leadership was partly about belief in ones own efficacy. Community organisers can help here and are another example of leadership. It would also be great to see more confidence from staff at all levels to push for change and believe in themselves as leaders.
The two questions from the group that could be explored further by the network are:
How we can embed a style of leadership that embodies collaboration and the generous quality of love.
How to create a sense of self-efficacy to unlock leadership amongst those at all levels of an organisation and in all communities who do not currently feel ‘comfortable on the horse’.
Note from Better Way London Cell 2: Leadership
Note of Better Way cell discussion, 2nd cell, 29 November 2017
The topic of discussion was a Better Way leadership and it was introduced by Richard Wilson who said that he had come to the view that it was system changes, rather leadership, that drives through real change.
One example of this was Sheffield Microsystem Coaching Academy, which hopes ‘to create a culture of sustained patient-centred continuous quality improvement’ within health services in Sheffield and trains ‘coaches in the art of team coaching and the science of quality improvement to work with front line teams to help the redesign the services they deliver…. It encourages coaches to deeply involve patients in their micro-system improvement, to help group members understand the value to the customer, drawing on tools including patient interviews and stories, patient representation in microsystems, and fictional patients. ‘
Richard said that this approach had really worked and as a consequence he had become really interested in geographical and issues based approaches. Harthill Consulting, which has worked with banks to encourage staff to think about their values and really apply them, is another example of this kind of technique. Some other examples of systems changes would be to give staff radical control over their pay and hours. At an aeronautics company, Matblack Systems they had a highly distributed model of leadership in which everyone had their own company. This was not going to work in the public sector, though. Context is key. Different contexts require different structures.
NESTA’s 100 days rapid response programme was considered as an example of trying to achieve systems change by bringing leaders together to explore radically different ways of doing things within a 100 days. It was a great idea but one experience of it in a local government context was that it was chaotic, involved few people working in the area and engaged no users of the services, and was too driven by a narrow and pre-determined view about the solution.
We talked about the problems of delivering change in local government. One issue was that if one leader who is sponsoring change moved on, things no longer progress. Or local authorities expect the voluntary sector to pick up innovations rather than carrying them through themselves. It could be very difficult to implement asset-based approaches when a top down approach is deeply ingrained. Systems changes could help guard against these problems. The Early Action Task Force talks of change only happening when three things occur: leadership and culture and systems change.
One type of systems review is carried out by Vanguard Consulting, which Locality had used to create its report, Saving Money by Doing the Right Thing, which identified how money was being wasted by the public sector by not sorting out problems early on and moving people on to multiple agencies who were unable to resolve their issues alone.
We discussed the idea that leadership was multi-faceted. A RSA report had found three forms of power were important to leadership – personal agency; the power of shared values and norms; and the hierarchical power of expertise.
It was certainly the case leadership does not necessarily take place at the top of organisations. Leadership can equate to influence, which can happen at any level. It is sometimes a question of finding the people who know how to make things happen.
If problems are complex, the literature in this area confirms that this always requires distributive leadership. This is not the case for simple problems, which can require a top down approach, nor for so-called ‘complicated’ problems. This analysis was powerful and chimed with the experience of the group that context mattered hugely and that no one leadership style was always appropriate. However, when it came to complex issues, on which both the voluntary and public sectors were often engaged, collaboration and partnership was critical.
The group was very struck by this last analysis and suggested that we further develop it in the Better Way network, as it could unlock fresh thinking about how to change services for the better.
Note from Better Way London Cell 1: Leadership
Building Better Way Leadership
Founding London cell: 15 November 2017
Our dominant culture of leadership runs very deep:
People crave strong leadership, someone to lead the way, someone with the answers, someone to believe in.
The dominant leadership model is highly gendered, emphasising characteristics which are seen as essentially masculine. Leaders are expected to be supremely confident, decisive, directive and willing to punish weak performance.
Leadership is defined by job title and an assumption of power and authority accompanies the title.
When people become CEOs it not only changes their behaviours but also that of people around them. If a CEO expresses doubt or lack of confidence a common response is, don’t worry, of course you are a leader, you wouldn’t be a CEO otherwise.
Others are not always prepared to share in leadership functions, especially in hierarchical organisations where financial reward is reserved for those in senior roles (‘what, you are asking me to do more, without rewarding me for this?’).
We are up against a major societal shift, where values associated with highly competitive and even cut-throat competitive business environments have infected our core sense of ourselves. Fifty years ago, when asked to describe themselves, most people used ‘obituary words’, typically focusing on character and quality of their relationships with others, whereas today most people use ‘CV words’, such as effective, impactful, smart etc. It is hardly surprising therefore that we place high value in the myth of the high-achieving command and control leader.
Better Way leadership might be something rather different. It might recognise that leadership is what happens when other people choose to follow you, not because of a job title. It might therefore mean divesting hierarchical power. It might also mean avoiding the impulse to present assured ‘solutions’ to complex problems, and instead cultivating a willingness to embrace uncertainty, and to work with others to find better ways forward. In other words, to create the conditions in which others can discover their ability to generate positive change and others can become more powerful.
This requires not only a shift away from controlling and punishing behaviours, but also a shift away from ‘rescuing’ behaviours. Better Way leaders should not see themselves as saviours. As the American labour leader Eugene Victor Debs said a century ago, ‘I would not be a Moses to lead you into the promised land even if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.’
Some leaders like to say ‘don’t come to me with a problem – come with a solution’. They believe that by saying this they are empowering others, encouraging them to take responsibility. But in fact that is not always the case, it can be an intimidating practice. What is more often needed is a willingness to engage with others to understand problems, and help them find a way forward.
It is a necessary and legitimate part of the charity CEO role to be a spokesperson, and we do need people who can operate on the public stage, challenging injustice, calling for action, and it is not always necessary to put forward solutions. Some of us thought that we could never make our Better Way propositions the basis of a mass movement or get the media excited. But others thought there was real potential to shift the public narrative. But that would mean speaking and acting differently from politicians in the media and talking about fundamental human values and questions, rather than simply accepting the current framework in which politicians work and seeking opportunities to fine-tune the policies they put forward. Talking human, rather than politics.
We discussed why so few third sector leaders have a big public profile. In the public arena, leadership requires ‘followship’. If we don’t get invited to the Today programme or Question Time or Breakfast TV it is partly because the ways we present ourselves are simply not interesting enough, we don’t provide sufficient ‘spectacle’. Camila Batmanghelidjh was a famous exception in this regard, but that did not make her a good social sector leader. On public platforms those who act as spokespeople for social change need to come across as authentic, driven by personal values, and also capable of displaying an ability to listen.
Various forms of community development, including community organising, are designed to grow bottom-up citizen leadership. However, there is always the risk that citizens who take on the role of leaders simply replicate the old way of doing things, ending up like Napoleon in Animal Farm. Better Way leadership will always need to be vigilant about the abuse of power.
A recent report by the RSA identifies three forms of power at community level: ‘the power arising from the individualistic agency of people, the solidaristic power of shared values and norms within communities and the hierarchical power of leadership and expertise within institutions.’ It claims that when ‘the interactions between all three powers come together in pursuit of common goals, much can be achieved.’ Leadership therefore, in its conventional sense, needs to be seen as just one element of the systems of power which can drive social change.
Perhaps we need to reject the idea that leadership means ‘an individual at the top’. It is not always an individual, and not always at the top. We must stop conflating leadership with managers and CEOs. The concept of ‘influence’ seems helpful. We all know people who are highly influential on those around them, and they are not always found at the top of organisations, in fact they can be found at all levels including junior levels. Doing much more to recognise and celebrate such people, and redefining leadership as the capability to exert influence in pursuit of common goals and so create the conditions for positive change, feels like an important part of the Better Way narrative. Imagine the possibilities if everyone in an organisation was a leader?
Some questions for further discussion:
How can we produce strong leadership, where others choose to follow, without leaders claiming they have the answers?
Should we seek to redefine leadership as ‘influence’, recognising that effective influencers are found in many places, not just in a single individual at the top.
How can we disperse leadership in an unequal power system?
How might leaders talk about the Better Way principles to inspire others?