Radical Leadership Lessons: Community as well as Institutions
New Local’s fourth Radical Leadership session focused on one of the “four imperatives” the group identified for today’s public sector leaders – that in order to thrive institutions need to look beyond their own walls and engage with other organisations and the community. Adam Lent reflects on the discussion.
I wasn’t expecting Bananarama to play such a prominent role in New Local’s fourth Radical Leadership workshop. But the words of their breakout 1982 hit rung true with participants, when mentioned by James Moody of Test Valley council in his opening presentation: “it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and that’s what gets results”.
What James was so eloquently referring to was the need for public sector leaders to focus on working with other organisations and communities, as well as the institution they lead. Sometimes called ‘system leadership’, the idea is far from new, but the approach took on an extra urgency in the context of our discussions about leading in a particularly volatile and unpredictable era. The permacrisis is throwing up ever greater challenges while simultaneously shrinking the financial resource available to meet those challenges. Only by augmenting that limited resource with the assets, energy and insight of the wider system and community can public sector bodies hope to meet the challenges head on.
But what does that mean in practice for leaders? This is where the wise words of that early 80’s beat combo come in.
Focusing on the wider system and community is a fundamental shift in the way most public services work. It requires a big effort to move away from a “my institution first” and “we know best” mentality towards a more respectful, outward-facing approach. That means big changes in how the public sector operates, not just in what it does. Effecting that shift necessarily means leaders creating the space and capabilities for their colleagues to rethink how they work.
Partly that is about developing a design mindset. This requires leaders to work to create the right organisational conditions for new behaviours to emerge rather than simply exhorting for them to be adopted. This might include the creation of communities of practice, cross-disciplinary teams and new professional standards within the public sector workforce.
But it is also about the issue that arises repeatedly in this context: the leader as the shaper of organisational culture. Moving away from a mindset that places our own institution above all else is an often intangible process that draws on unwritten rules and expectations around behaviour and values. The key is to harness the power of emulation (a seemingly deep human instinct) which can replicate both positive and negative behaviours. If leaders are clear about the types of practices they want to see in a more system- and community-focused organisation and then work to exemplify those practices, they will have seeded the necessary culture change (although this is, of course, just a beginning). Once again, the radical leader’s focus here is very much on how things get done rather than what gets done.
Getting beneath the surface
Equally important is to be honest about the big wedge that has been driven between the institution and the wider system within which it works. This is the result of the competitive, organisational self-interest that is hard-wired into the public sector by its structure and the often-unhelpful practices of central government. But it also results from the tendency for public sector bodies to make decisions for, or even against, others rather than with them. Clearly, if the public sector is to get far better at releasing the energy and resource of whole systems and communities it must openly address these obstacles.
The starting point is for leaders to place a high premium on skills the public sector rarely values: listening without preconceptions to voices outside the institution, engaging in honest conversation and displaying considerable flexibility in response to the concerns and needs of others. As before, it is the approach and the ethos of our decision-making rather than the content that should primarily concern the radical leader.
Finally, the workshop delved into a particularly challenging aspect of working beyond the usual institutional focus: the need for leaders and the workforce to find ways to “get beneath the surface” and understand what is really going on both within wider systems and the organisations and individuals that make them up. It implies taking a step beyond even the more deliberative forms of engagement that themselves are improvements on shallow consultation and formalised involvement towards a dialogue and interaction that is fully human and caring and dispenses, perhaps, with the masks and shields we all wear in a public forum.
In large part that means very consciously ditching our preconceptions and automatic judgements about certain behaviours whether from public sector colleagues or service users we assume to be unhelpful, negative or even destructive. Leaders should give themselves the time and space to do the listening and relationship-building required to get beneath the surface. If we do that and come to really understand the context and motivation for those behaviours then the opportunity to build trust and thus generate collaborations for change is that much greater. That may well mean leaders moving beyond their comfort zone of conventional professional interaction to learn from other disciplines and approaches – such as trauma-informed therapy – that are specifically designed to break down what may be long histories of mistrust and apprehension.
As was mentioned in our first blog, radical leadership is demanding. Focusing on the how is a major challenge when so much of daily life in the public sector is about the what. But as the last paragraph intimates, the trajectory of our workshop discussions has taken us into even more challenging territory. A place where the leader needs to look increasingly within to question their own biases, behaviours and motivations to better enable them to understand what motivates and shapes others and ultimately find the way to work with them in a spirit of true system and community collaboration. A theme we will explore further as our radical leadership programme continues.
Many thanks to all those who participated in the first two workshops of our Radical Leaders Connector series and helped shape this article. They are listed below. Further workshops exploring each of the four shifts in more detail with new articles sharing our deliberations are planned.
New Local is planning an in-person event focused on building the ‘radical leader’ for tomorrow’s public services. If you want to be the first to know about this, email us.
Photo by Biel Morro on Unsplash.
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