Changing social care: an inclusive approach
Leadership for change and improvement: Create the right conditions
- Work out what actions are needed to achieve the identified purpose.
Examples from case studies:
- giving front-line staff more responsibility to allow them to affect the outcome of their day-to-day jobs
- creating a senior management team
- creating cross-team committees for information and management exchange
- engaging staff
- engaging resistance
- engaging external key stakeholders
- reviewing processes
- being accessible.
- learning programmes for staff groups and board members
- including people who use services on the board of directors.
- demystifying the organisation so that everyone involved has an equal understanding
- being accessible
All staff interviewed acknowledged that the arrival of the new director had been the turning point for change and that the leader had enabled the change. Beyond clarifying the purpose and ideology of the organisation, the director created the conditions that allowed the organisation to shift in the desired direction.
(Age Concern Sheffield)
Increasingly over time, service users began to sit on the board of directors. While the first frontiers were ‘persons with acquired disabilities, who had previous experience of the business sector’ (Willowbank service user), over time the user directors were service users who had ‘come up through the ranks and are probably more reflective of our user group’ (Willowbank service user)
(Willowbank).
To me CEOs are sometimes a bit distant, but she has approachability. You can contact her about something you think is crucial. She seems to be on the ground still as well. She knows everything that is going on around the country, [but] she is not so high up on her perch. She is at grass roots level and approachable
(SCIE Knowledge review 16).
How we know this
- Research shows that leaders need to both model and communicate their support for change. They must actively listen to the workforce and 'facilitate', and not necessarily 'direct' change (Fauth and Mahdon 2007).
- Factors crucial for managers to implement change
include:
- clarifying the reallocation of tasks
- allowing sufficient time for individuals to work out ‘who does what’
- ensuring that new tasks motivate staff
- keeping watch over the interpersonal ramifications of task reallocation
- working with the team to develop performance goals (Reay et al. 2003)
