Putting Relationships First: making relationship-building the purpose of our work
Summary of key points
The disruption caused by Covid-19 had led to more relationship-building in some cases, and we need to find ways of sustaining and building on this.
For relationship-building to become the central operating principle, it needs to be woven into everything we do: not just seeing it as our role to facilitate good relationships between people within the community, but also building better relationships with peers, clients, contractors and between funders and funded, for example.
The quality of relationships matter: equality, curiosity, kindness and listening are all important. We need to build up this lexicon and develop the language.
Organisations should be built around relationship-building rather than tasks. Processes, rules and regulations should be re-designed to support relationships, rather than the other way round.
Funders have an important role, not least to invest in relationship-building and measure this activity and its impact on outcomes, rather than looking at projects and outputs.
Cultural as well as systems change is needed. We need to start a different kind of national conversation in which we ‘uphold our human space’ against attempts to commodify human beings or de-personalise services.
Leaders, perhaps especially in the social sector, have an important role in achieving that cultural change, starting that national conversation and demonstrating ‘relational leadership’.
There are good examples of putting relationships first, and we should look for them where you might least expect to find them, and promote them to show what is possible.
In more detail
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, began by recapping what the network had learnt so far on putting relationships first. As explained in Time for a Change, three things had stood out:
Designing relationships in, not out, generates ‘relational power’.
Our humanity is the most powerful change agent.
We need to stop talking about people as problems, and see them as solution.
She explained that today’s discussion was going to focus on the first of these, building relational power, and we were going to look at how to make relationship-building the purpose of our work, with everyone in an organisation seeing relationship-building as core to the job they do.
She introduced David Robinson from the Relationships Project, who is acting as ‘thought leader’ for the group. The Relationships Project have been operating an Observatory during Covid-19 and David said that they had discovered that relationships had in many cases flourished, despite social distancing, especially in the first lockdown where communities came together and many people had volunteered for the first time. The disruption had helped to change the normal ways of doing things. As we seek to recover from the pandemic, there is a real opportunity to learn lessons from this and put relationships first in how we work with others, he thought. However, as we come out of lockdown, people needed a period of recouperation and reflection. It was a ‘time to be slow’ and remain generous to each other.
Graeme Hodson, who is the Commissioning Manager for Adult Social Care at Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council and also as a volunteer for Care Network Cambridge and a local community organiser, kicked off the discussion with some reflections. In his work, it emerged, relationship-building was happening in a number of different ways with different people, and all were important:
The councils are facilitating a stronger relationship between residents needing care and their personal assistants and communities, working in a variety of ways. For example, in East Cambridge they are seeking to change the situation where domiciliary carers often change from day to day and no real relationship is built up. Direct payments to people needing care are a standard option, but this comes with what can be a heavy and undesirable administrative burden as employer. So residents in East Cambridge are instead being offered Individual Service Funds in which a third party takes away the admin, but people needing care still retain direct control over who becomes their carer. The councils have also commissioned a Direct Payment Support Service to give advice for those who do want to take full budgetary control. They are also about to sign a contract with Community Catalysts to enable carers to become self-employed, so they are better able to develop strong, consistent relationships with those they care for, particularly in under-served rural communities.
The councils build relationship-building capacity in other ways, too, particularly through the social connecting role of community hubs and community organisers and mutual aid groups. For example, they have a network of Community Navigators who signpost people to local services and activities, with the aim of early intervention.
They build relationships with service users through co-production, for example through Healthwatch Partnerships Boards, and they work with providers at the very beginning of designing what they commission.
They also seek to build good relationships with central government, the NHS and other local authorities and, as a result of the trust this has created, they have been able to improve care, for example, directly providing PPE and vaccinations to personal assistants.
The council has also been looking at how to direct more resources to relationship-building and measure this, not outputs. They have moved from outputs to outcomes and to help them measure the right thing they ask service users: ‘What does good look like to you? What is it you want to do? How can we help?’ Graeme said he particularly likes the Social Cares Future’s definition of good care: ‘We all want to live in the place we call home, with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for each other, doing what matters most to us.’
Points coming out of the subsequent discussion include:
The quality of relationships matters: relationships can be good and bad and in places like Northern Ireland ‘relationship’ can have negative connotations. Equal relationships should be the aspiration, and qualities such as curiosity, kindness and good listening should be encouraged. There is a need to build up this lexicon and develop the language further.
Relationship-building is about a lot of different things all of which need to be done together if relationships are to become the central operating principle. It should be carried out across the whole spectrum of organisational activity, from forging good relationships with peers, clients, contractors and between funders and funded, to helping others to form strong relationships in the community. One-to-one conversations in which people get to know each other help create stronger bonds and space needs to be made for them.
A culture change is needed. We must ‘uphold our human space’ against attempts to commodify us or dehumanise services by putting relationships first. This requires a different kind of national conversation.
There’s an important role for leaders both nationally and locally to lead by example, especially in the social sector, and show ‘relational leadership’. Leaders should demonstrate human-centred values in which relationships genuinely are put first and create a different culture in which it is ok to talk about the importance of love. Relational leadership has to be reflected at the very top in order to change the culture, but it also has to permeate the whole organisation.
The system works against relationships. At the moment, relationship-building tends to be accidental but in future it needs to be intentional. Organisations should be built around the people, rather than the task; and processes, rules and regulations should be adjusted to fit with relationship-building, rather than aligning relationships to fit them.
Funders have a role in making relationship-building not just common sense but common practice, and should move away from measuring tasks and outputs to investing in relationship-building and looking at the impact on outcomes. Some contracts are already being expressed in this way.
This is happening in some places and you should look where you don’t expect to find it - for example housing allocations, benefit judgements and even evictions are being made with compassion in some areas. Let’s go looking for it and show others what is possible.
The disruption caused by Covid-19 over the last year probably helped to create new space for relationship-building. It showed what was possible and we need to find ways of sustaining and building on this.
The next meeting of this group will be on 6 May and we will be talking about:
Unlocking our humanity: how to turn organisations into communities, not machines. If organisations focus on internal relationship building, they can unlock creativity, and give front-line staff opportunity to build relationships externally too.