Centre for Housing and Support – training and conferences

Chris will be delivering training for the Centre for Housing and Support in March, and holding workshops at two of their conferences.

You can find out about the winter conferences in their Conference brochure.

CHS Winter Conference 2012 – North edition (Leeds) Conferences – 1st Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

CHS Winter Conference 2012 – South edition (Cheltenham) Conferences – 22nd Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

The training is part of CHS series of national seminars:

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (Worcester) Seminars – 5th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (Worcester) Seminars – 6th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (London) Seminars – 8th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (London) Seminars – 9th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (Manchester) Seminars – 13th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (Manchester) Seminars – 14th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Distract yourself or develop yourself?

Painful things are hard to think about.  I notice myself pushing them to one side in my mind, and focussing on something more pleasurable instead.   Quite a natural way to prevent anxiety, but at what stage does this become ‘problem, what problem?  Let’s party!’  i.e.  the stage at which pleasure is used to avoid engagement with stressful circumstances.  Virginia Satir identified this type of reaction to stress as the ‘distractor’ response.

I have found successful projects much easier to engage with than less successful ones.  My way of dealing with this has been to notice it and ensure that I give the things I enjoy less, but which nevertheless deserve attention, the time they need.  Tackling them first in the day when I am fresh works well.

When do we give ourselves permission to engage with pleasures that distract us?  This is easier to answer when our days are well structured and there are clear times for ‘work’ and ‘play’.  Working for myself,  I have to self-motivate and organise my own time.  I find that I have to set myself rules, targets and manage myself so that I tackle the things that are necessary but less fun.

This makes me think about personal development.  Many people say that it is our failures we learn from, but thinking about them in order to learn is painful, so we will often slip into defensive ways of thinking – projecting blame onto others, distracting ourselves with pleasures, ascribing a failure to the context.  The other thing we do is distract ourselves, which also means we fail to learn.

For me a great way of spotting where I should be learning/changing is when I give myself permission for a ‘treat’ – am I trying to distract myself from something I need to engage with?  I’m not talking about some hair shirt approach to life, but about noticing when I think ‘let’s have an hour off now and go for a walk in the sun’ at a time I would normally be working.  Is this because everything is under control and I can enjoy this, or is it to avoid tackling something unpleasant?

Procrastination is another good indicator of what we are avoiding.  Last week I found myself grateful for a day of DIY as a way of avoiding dealing with other tasks.  In themselves those tasks were not unpleasant, but they had a negative emotional charge for me.

Noticing what is going on can help us make conscious choices, learn from errors and engage with areas of our work and lives which need to change.

Coming Unstuck

After two years working as a consultant, I reached a restless period.  Work wound down for the summer, nothing much was happening, a sense of dissatisfaction grew.

Somehow Wile.E.Coyote  had spread glue on my road.  Fortunately I had registered for a Diploma course with the Academy of Executive Coaching, and this involved being coached myself.

On the first session of the course I was disconnected and my mind was spinning.  I splurged everything I was feeling to my coach for the day and a weight lifted.  I began to travel forwards again.  Drive returned and I got back to marketing and getting coaching work, to clearing out the shed at the bottom or our garden and making other changes.  I just took 20 minutes clearing the debris to begin this process.

I’ve noticed similar things for friends and colleagues – it often takes an event to begin to unstick things.  This might be a coaching session, it might be taking practical steps to clear out a room, or it might be just getting some distance on a weekend break trip.  Physical clearing, emotional clearing or distance.

I attended a conference yesterday that had a model that made some sense of this for “serial achievers” – a person’s drive to learn and move forwards falls off into a period of stability until  there is restlessness.  A period of incubation follows, during which they may be searching or reflecting, which ends with an epiphany as the person realises where they want to go next.  Drive returns and the person sets off in a new direction.  This happens in cycles and different cycles may be going on in different spheres of the person’s life.

Being restless or stuck is ok, if uncomfortable.  That’s the time to look for a catalyst that might release that stuckness.

Emergent learning, targets and support

I developed the model above about a year ago, but last week found a practical application for it.  You may notice I adapted it from Mintzberg and Waters model for a planned vs. an emergent strategy, with Nonaka and Takeuchi’s idea of combination thrown in.

I was discussing ways of engaging with homeless and vulnerable clients, in a workshop for managers of a not for profit organisation.  The model helped us think about how planned targets (expressed in the “Supporting People” world as “outcomes”) were very difficult to plan for.

The process is expected to run like this:

Client meets professional and an assessment is carried out.  The client expresses aspirations and they set goals together.  Over a period of time those goals are achieved through a series of small steps, and the outcomes desired are achieved.

What often happens is this:

Client meets professional and an assessment is carried out.  The client expresses aspirations and they set goals together.   At the next meeting the client has done nothing towards these and instead expresses other aspirations.  This happens a few times, the professional expresses frustration and begins to nag the client to do stuff.  The client begins to feel bad and votes with their feet.  Personal change is even further off for the client.

This happens for two reasons.  First, the insistence on setting targets and having a plan early on, before the client has explored their current situation enough.  Secondly, the professionals involved are normally generalists, not trained therapists or coaches, and they have targets to meet, so their urgency is to get action and results at the expense of exploration.

Back to the model.  If you realise that a lot of value comes from what emerges unforseen, you may be less likely to grab the first plan that comes along and try to stick to it.  Where achieving targets and outcomes are concerned, this suggests that the right target can only be identified late on in the process and that trying to nail it early may be counter productive.

Transformational Leadership – 3

I would like to Continue my earlier thoughts about transformational leadership and particularly my wariness towards the “charismatic” element that Bernard M Bass identified as necessary (“Transactional to Transformational Leadership”, in Organizational Dynamics).

One way in which a leader can transform others is by example.  This is popularly called being a “role model”.  It works because one way we learn is by copying others.   Understanding of the behaviour copied is not required, simply copy someone who is good at what they do (in line with Bandura‘s theory of modelling).  The idea is that understanding will develop later as you experience how the behaviour copied works, and get further help from the expert (sometimes called cognitive apprenticeship).  Learning physical activities where description of the activity in words is impossible requires this sort of learning, but it applies to other tacit knowledge.  The way a child learns from its parents is the most common example.

For a leader this puts a premium on what you actually do, rather than what you espouse.  You will modify the behaviour of those around you by acting differently yourself, not by changing what the mission statement says.  It also means that if you have senior team members whose behaviour is unhelpful, they have to either make a personal change or go, as their behaviour reflects upon you and how serious you are about enacting a set of values.

One up side to this is that if you want a happy and effective organisation, make yourself happy and effective first – permission to enjoy!

Dissatisfied of (insert organisation)

Work in supported housing in the not for profit sector brings me in contact with a lot of dissatisfied people.  Mostly they don’t know why, and think things should be other than they are.  There’s a lot of emotion and stress involved.

While this might often be projection (projecting dissatisfaction with self/lifestyle/partner/income/whatever onto an organisation), there can be a more positive personal reason.

Discussing this with my critical friend by the banks of the Thames, we came onto the subjects of self development, creativity, learning and change.  Government regulation may lead to a culture in supported housing organisations that is, if I can use a technical term, “stodgy”.  Management becomes hierarchy, empowerment becomes targets and statistics.  Playing this game well leads to advancement, a self reinforcing situation.

Self development can upset this situation, especially if it stimulates creativity.

Creativity, often released by being inappropriate, striving to be different or just a little crazy, does not sit well with such a culture.  Perhaps this is a reason the sector uses external consultants to import new ideas.

Self development stimulates asking questions and the realisation that actually, the person in charge may not know what they are talking about.  Suddenly you notice that the emotions and bias that drive you, drive them too.  No longer can you be satisfied with this, you ask questions, you become the one who always comments on ideas (often adversely).  You have changed and you no longer fit.

I framed this as a positive thing.  If you are dissatisfied with your organisation, and the reason is that you have changed, its time to go and find something that will help you keep growing.

Giving compliments to manage behaviour

One way of giving positive reinforcement in behaviour modification is in providing compliments, approval, encouragement, and affirmation; a ratio of five compliments for every one complaint is generally seen as being effective in altering behavior in a desired manner^[18]

Behaviour modification is concerned with changing how people react and behave using positive and negative reinforcement.  It has its supporters and critics.

I’ve highlighted the quote above (from Wikipedia) as its something I’ve discussed with participants in training.  It fits with the idea of unconditional positive regard for a person you are supporting (although you might take exception to their behaviour).  The 5:1 principle is something that many of us find very difficult to achieve in practice.

If we apply this to leadership and management, we would get a very different environment to that which is found in many organisations.   My personal experience has been that belief in people, positive feedback and trust get people to give their best.  Mistrust, blame and negativity generally don’t.

Why is it so easy to be critical rather than positive?  Part of it is practice, but a big part is about how we feel about ourselves.  This morning I was not feeling great, and on the way to work caught myself having a jealous moment or two, thinking negatively about some of my colleagues.  A “not OK” moment as transactional analysis might term it.  As soon as my mood picked up that vanished.

Staying with transactional analysis, being in an “I’m OK, you’re OK” position would enable the positive compliment giving type of leadership that effective behaviour modification would require.  We come back to ourselves, and changing ourselves so that we might more positively manage others.

So tonight I’m going to bed, thinking, “I’m OK”….

Leaders and followers

In previous posts about transformational leadership and Singapore, I began to wonder about the leader and the led.  In Singapore I perceived a leadership focused on the material and secular, whom people were willing to follow because it delivered success.  This appeared to produce a sameness that I found stifling.

Should leadership also be about the spiritual in government and secular organisations?  In the UK church and state have been kept largely separate, but I’d like to apply the question to leading organisations.  Singapore also kept these things separate, and a wonderful diversity of religion existed – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Chinese.  Yet outside this strict rules and materialistic sameness were backed by a culture of conformity.

Lee Kuan Yew’s (former Prime Minister) leadership might be termed transformational – he inspired people with a vision of a materially better future and led them to it.  However, this also created conformity and sameness that carries a risk for the future, one where the reliance of the people on good leaders is a weakness.

An alternative for a leader, be they a business or political leader (and are the 2 different?) is to lead not through inspiration, but by creating the conditions for people to question.  The Internet (self organising and changing like a living entity) is an argument that you don’t even need the leader, and that leadership distributed amongst participants is equally strong in the right circumstances.

Whether you need the leader or not, I’d suggest that a leader’s job must always be spiritual as well as material.  How we think and feel is linked critically to how we act and so to the business of business.  This is normally expressed as motivation, but I believe it is more than that and that a truly transformational leader would inspire people to examine their own beliefs and ways of being.

I’d like to suggest that its important for all of us to move from followership to discovery, and that the key to this is how we go about learning.  I’ll end with a quote I find important:

Learning to become an effective self-directed learner is probably the greatest intellectual and psychological challenge that an individual can face in a lifetime……  Some people never attempt to acquire the competencies of serious learning to learn as they are addicted to the deferential prescriptive approach.

- Dealtry, R. (2004), “The savvy learner”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 16

Anxiety as a trigger for learning

The evidence is mounting that real change does not begin until the organization experiences some real threat of pain that in some way dashes its expectations or hope to make it open to the possibility of learning. — Edgar Schein

I was reading an interview where Edgar Schein asserted his belief that all learning is coercive, and that organisations learn because they are forced to.  He maintains that anxiety is neccessary as a trigger for learning, and talks about two types of anxiety.  “Learning anxiety” inhibits learning or trying something new due to fear of failure, while “Survival anxiety” promotes learning when the survival or the individual or the organisation depends on change.

Pessimistic although this seems, it immediately rang a chord with me.  Thinking on my own experience, on several occassions recently I have suggested innovations or changes that might help an organisation learn.  Here I am thinking of systems that deliver management information that were dismissed, only to be requested a short time afterwards.  In the specific cases I am thinking of, change/learning was embraced due to external pressure from funders and from poor performance.

I’m with Schein on the idea that learning anxiety – fear of getting it wrong – prevents learning and therefore change in organisations.  Perhaps not just fear of getting it wrong, but the fear that we will expose our own inadequacies, especially to ourselves.  Learning and change is painful – my own has certainly been at times.  I see this everywhere – especially amongst executives who perhaps have more invested in “being right” first time.

What can we do about this?  We can “feel the fear and do it anyway“, we can acknowledge anxiety and allow for it in how we propose change, and we can raise “Survival anxiety” when proposing change.  The latter puts me in mind of the “disconfirmation” stage of Lewin’s change model, the need to discomfort people and show that the old paradigm is spent, before asking them to change.

Innovation – failure and success

I have led two similar innovative projects for not for profit organisations, one of which was implemented, and the other of which suffered prolonged delays.  While many innovation projects stumble and fail, working on two similar projects gave me a chance to compare factors that may have contributed to getting through the planning stage to implementation.

First, I asked myself if it was me?  The projects happened at roughly the same time and I don’t think my approach was significantly different.  In both cases participants were very enthusiastic and I paid insufficient attention to some of the powerful stakeholders involved.

Next, I considered how they differed in scope.  The one that suffered the most delay was more ambitious and involved greater potential innovation.  This made it harder to persuade the powerful stakeholders to approve implementation.

However, the most significant factor appeared to be the forces driving the need for change.  The delayed project had powerful business drivers, but they were not as acute as in the other case.  In addition, the CEO set a clear deadline for the one that went successfully through to implementation, forcing other stakeholders to make decisions.

I’ve drawn several tentative lessons from this:

1. Projects need a powerful champion who can ensure barriers to timely implementation can be overcome.
2. Pay attention to powerful and interested stakeholders, even if they are only going to be involved in a final review and sign off – the importance of persuasion and politics.
3. Outside forces help promote change.
4. Smaller step by step adaptations are easier to implement than more ambitious innovations.
5. A big change requires either a very pressing need and powerful champions, or involvement of as many interested stakeholders as possible.

These lessons apply to my work in the not for profit sector, where the involvement of all potential stakeholders is widely expected and risk can often be treated conservatively.  Note that I am only thinking about getting a project through into implementation here, not about the quality of the final result.

Point 5 links to reasons why it is so hard for organisations to change and innovate in a timely way, and why strategic drift may be so widespread.  Innovation changes culture, culture can represent a mindset that it is hard to step out of, so perhaps the biggest job for any significant innovation is to manage powerful stakeholders so that they are ready for change.