Guest Blog From Arlene Kyle – an international transformational coach who’s passionate about empowering people to transform, grow and flourish to truly live their best life.
The social care crisis is making demands of our leaders in a way that we haven’t experienced before. As a result of my coaching work in the social care field, people have shared countless stories with me about organisations and their leaders operating in ‘survival mode’, juggling competing and conflicting pressures of increased demands on services. They tell me about their diminishing resources, a dearth in their workforce with increasing numbers of people leaving the sector, and new ‘competition’ with the big chain supermarkets becoming a rival for staff recruitment – key ingredients for a perfect storm!
The complexity of need has seemingly increased whilst the skill set in the sector feels like it is dwindling, as many experienced people have left due to the impact of burnout, vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue. Covid did not help an already grim picture. The gulf between demand and resources appears to be growing and is felt intensely across the sector.
This has forced our leaders into short-termism, firefighting and ‘survival mode’ with the day-to-day operations and ‘getting through the shift’ being the immediate priority, and anything else a bonus. This gives rise to the managerial aspects of roles being the dominating force, with ‘leadership’ in its truest form being something viewed as a luxury and for some a mythical unicorn.
Like many other sectors, social care leaders are people who were promoted because they were good at their job, and promoted with the hope and expectation that this trajectory of success and accomplishment would continue with each promotion. However, with each promotion I have observed many leaders receiving less investment – less peer support, less supervision, less time to reflect, less training opportunities, but increased expectations and demands. I have learned in my Coaching practice that generally we don’t ‘teach’ our leaders how to lead but we expect them to know what they are doing.
Leaders are often taught the ‘managerial’, operational and business acumen side of things (though not always!), but we appear to have a blind spot with the other skills that are required for being a leader. This includes (but is not exhaustive to):
- how to lead with compassion and vulnerability
- how to deal with effective confrontation
- how to delegate and upskill teams
- how to empower others
- how to navigate away from drama triangles
- how to deal with splitting and projection behaviours
- how to motivate and inspire
- how to build and maintain psychological safety in the workplace
- how to develop and protect a healthy wellbeing focused culture
- how to reflect on triggers that could affect decision making and reactions.
These skills, in my opinion, are vital ingredients for effective leadership – yet we don’t train, teach, mentor or guide our leaders to learn these vital aspects of their role.
Interestingly, many of these areas are battle grounds for our leaders, whilst the demands upon them continue to grow and show no signs of slacking off – the perfect storm ahead continues to brew. This may paint a bleak picture of the realities in the sector, but to fairly balance the picture I do see hope! There is a willingness for change and an acceptance that change is needed. There is a willingness to approach change with positive intent and renewed hopefulness. There is a willingness to tackle our blind spots head on and take action to address them. There is a willingness to become ‘able’ to do all these things and more.
A common phrase we like to use in the coaching world is ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’ – so how can we expect a leader to stop people pleasing if they don’t know how to hold a difficult conversation safely? How can we expect them to delegate if they are a perfectionist or hold a belief that they must be seen to be ‘doing’ to be considered a real leader? How can we expect them to show vulnerability if they were told this was a weakness? How can we expect them to avoid the drama triangle if their default position is to rescue but they don’t understand the dynamics? Having expectations without giving the proper tools just exacerbates an already pressurised situation.
The solution is simple – to go from Lost to Leader requires an investment in and for our leaders.
We need to carve out protected time for them to reflect through coaching, mentoring, wellbeing-based supervisions. We need to provide opportunities to stand back and take the ariel view and breathe. We need to give them a safe space to talk and be heard. We need to acknowledge that it is tough right now, but they are not alone in this battle and that we will equip them with the tools they need to succeed. We need to invest in our leaders with the appropriate learning and development opportunities to focus on what they really do need to know about and understand – then, and only then, can we expect our leaders to truly lead. Effective and inspiring leadership is what is required to get the social care sector through this storm and safely through to the other side.
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” – Rosalynn Carter
