81. An oath for the new public servant

This oath started with a conversation that I had with Carl Whilstlecraft and has been shaped by many others.  You can see the conversation in this storify – I think it’s important to show the workings out.

What’s it for?  Well for us it’s a reminder of what we stand for and what we have learnt.  It’s also a reminder of how we need to be different in times that are rapidly changing.  Finally it’s a set of ideals that are shared by many, that we are part of a community.

Of course it will always be a work in progress so let me know what you think.

An Oath for the New Public Servant

I swear by the power of the people that I will keep this oath whatever gets thrown at me.

I will always remember my values because they are the reason why I am a public servant.  With pride I will share my belief in democracy, public service and the common good.

I am a public servant because I want to make a difference for people and for places.   I will put the public first and strive to find out what people can offer and what people need.  I will start with people's interests and aspirations and will never assume I know what anyone needs without asking them.

I will focus on solutions and seek out strengths and great work.  I will celebrate the good stuff and always give credit where credit is due.  I will not waste my time obsessing about problems and causes.

I will be constructive and honest in my feedback and willing to receive constructive criticism when it comes to me.  I will give myself and those around me permission to fail and I will learn from failure.   All because I want everything to be the best it can be.

I will put my energy into changing what I can influence and I will not worry about the things I cannot change.  I will lead by being the change I want to see and bring people with me by showing them what can be better.

I will move quickly from ideas to action.  I will prototype, mock up, try out and test.  I will develop through iteration and use feedback to improve.  I will not spend time on unnecessary planning.

I will be social not siloed.  I will work across boundaries both inside and outside of my organisation.  I will help build networks with like-minded people.  I will be open and transparent whenever I can and I will share whatever I can.

I will always be interested in the latest technology but I will remember that it is only a means to an end.  Sometimes new technology is not needed at all; changing how people act is what really matters.

I will strive to be an expert in not being an expert. I will listen, facilitate, encourage and support.  I will remember that there is always something to be learnt from others and a new idea to be found.  I will be critical and ask questions and get the richest picture that I can.

If I follow this oath may I have credit from my colleagues and thanks from the public.

photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/5qcR53

79. Solution focused supervision for the public sector

This post describes an approach to supervision that is different from the performance management approach often seen in local government.  Solution focused supervision means a conversation that improves practice by focusing on the strengths and assets of the supervisee.  Many social work and education practitioners will already be familiar with the solution focused approach.  I'm certainly no expert but I find the approach very appealing.  I wonder if it might be used for supervision more widely in the public sector - for any role that involves professional practice.  Anyhow, here is my personal (and unqualified) take on the general approach and how it might work in practice.  

Traditional Approach

The traditional conversation between supervisor and supervisee is centred on targets linked to corporate objectives.  Supervision is a process of performance monitoring and management.  Tasks to meet objectives are agreed and targets set.  When targets are met praise is given.  When targets are missed encouragement, guidance and sometimes coaching is given.  There may even be criticism if things are going badly.  It is common within this framework to spend a lot of time analysing problems in order to try and overcome them.

Solution Focused Approach for the Public Sector

A solution focused approach advocates a therapeutic relationship where the supervisee is taken to be an independent and capable practitioner working towards broad outcomes in a complex environment.  The work of the supervisee involves an ever changing set of relationships with the public, partners and sometimes politicians.  The aim of supervision is to help the employee to develop effective strategies to navigate through this complexity by reflecting on their own good practice and building on their personal strengths.  This is what is known as an asset based approach.

In contrast to the performance management approach problems are not subjected to analysis.  Indeed, this is taken to be a bad thing as this gives the problem more prominence and permeates the conversation with negative ideas that can be self reinforcing.  From a solution focused perspective it is not necessarily helpful to know the cause of a problem - only what works to solve it.

In advocating this approach I’m drawing from Solution Focused Brief Therapy.  This is a highly specialised area of practice that requires proper training and support.  Here I am just an enthusiastic amateur taking some of the general principles and seeking to apply them to supervision in my own world.

Here is a quote about this style of supervision from a book I was given on the subject.  Solution focussed supervision is described as: 

“…an outcome focussed process of enablement rather than direction, building on success rather than correcting failure, and privileging the supervisee’s knowledge rather than that of the supervisor.  It is a process intended to empower each supervisee to develop his or her skills rather than imparting those of the supervisor.  This does not mean to say that supervisors abrogate their managerial or standard-maintaining role; this is an important part of any supervisor’s responsibility even though it is most often not required.”  Ratner, George and Iveson (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy p.213

What Does It Look Like In Practice?

So what does this approach look like?

A solution focused supervision session requires the manager to ask three questions (actually the first is optional).

Question 1.  How are you today?

It’s not in the solution focus manual but I just like to ask this.  To welcome the supervisee to the meetings and to give them a chance to get rid of any ‘baggage’ before we start.

Question 2.  Can you tell me about something you have done since we last met that you are proud of or pleased about?

The point of this question is twofold.  

First it ensures that the conversation starts with the positives, with the person’s strengths.  It gets that person thinking about something they have done well.  

Second it gives the manager a chance to explore an aspect of good practice with the supervisee.  

The manager’s role is to LISTEN and to ask follow up questions to help them understand why something worked, what the individual’s part in the success was and what might be shareable with the rest of the team (with permission of course).  This seems to me to be a useful way of understanding how practice is developing within a team.

Question 3. What are your best hopes for this session?

Yep, that’s it.  

No list of targets to review, no action plan to work through.

The idea is for the supervisee to bring an issue that’s concerning them at that moment and think about what they would ideally like to get from the session. 

‘I hop we can finish quickly so I can get back to something I'm doing’ is a perfectly acceptable answer - if there is not much to talk about then that's fine.

Where an issue is raised then the manager’s role is to LISTEN and help the individual draw on their own experience and resources to develop strategies that might help overcome the challenge in question.

There are a number of questions and techniques that can be used to start the conversation.

• The supervisor might ask the supervisee to think about what a person involved in the challenge might say that the supervisee had done that had been useful to them.
• The supervisor might ask about similar situations that had gone well and what the supervisee had done to contribute to that.
• The supervisor might use scaling.  This is where the supervisee is asked to give a situation or behaviour a score between one and ten, to explain what led them to give that score and to think about what would increase that score by one:  “What would change the score from a five to a six?”  
• The miracle question is another common technique.  It usually starts with something like: ‘Imagine that when you come to work tomorrow a miracle has happened and the problem has been resolved.  What would you notice that would tell you things were better?”  It is then possible to explore what might have led that change to happen which in turn might point to some practical steps that might be taken.

The points above are just tasters – if this is an approach that interests you should take time to some research and explore the techniques further -  there is plenty of stuff out there.

The Role of the Supervisor

As you will probably have gathered, one of the most challenging aspects of this approach is the role of the supervisor.  Traditionally the supervisor is the expert providing advice or the coach giving direction.  They may even be the ‘parent’ monitoring performance and providing ‘correction’.  

A solution focused supervisor is none of these things.  They are there to LISTEN and ask the right questions, to help the supervisee see the strengths and assets they already have and to facilitate a conversation about solutions rather than problems.  

This is much, much harder.

But, if done well, I believe this approach will be much, much more productive.

Photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/9MLDSd 

31. Appreciative Community Planning

Community planning (a.k.a. producing a community strategy for a local council area) is one of the things I’m involved in doing for my own authority.  If you have been involved in this type of process, either supporting or as a ‘stakeholder’ you will know what a challenging area of work it is.  The expectation is that local needs will be mapped, the public consulted and all relevant agencies and organisations engaged.  This is, as you might expect, quite a challenge.  While producing a community strategy is actually relatively straightforward.  Producing something that is meaningful and that makes a difference is a lot, lot harder. 

I would point to two particular problems.  The first is that community strategies tend to be all encompassing and will include all of the priorities of the major public bodies in an area without every really prioritising or creating a genuinely new focus.  They often don’t prioritise at all.  The second is that they tend to be generic.  It is hard to distinguish the vision, themes and actions plans in one area from another – maybe this is because everywhere has the same problems but maybe it has something to do with the process.

Recently I’ve come across an organisational development method called appreciative inquiry and it is something that I find really interesting.  The idea here, then, is to apply this approach to community planning to come up with a different type of process – let me know if it has been done before.

Appreciative Inquiry

I’m no expert on appreciative inquiry but, if it is not something you are familiar with, and it sounds of interest I’d urge you to research it further. 

Essentially it is an asset based rather than a deficit model of development.  In other words instead of asking ‘what’s wrong and how can we fix it?’ the question is ‘what’s good and how can we have more of it?’.  

Here is part of the Wikipedia entry (there are loads of other things to look at but I thought that this was quite a nice starting point):

Appreciative Inquiry attempts to use ways of asking questions and envisioning the future in-order to foster positive relationships and build on the present potential of a given person, organisation or situation. Applied research has demonstrated that this method can enhance an organisation's internal capacity for collaboration and change.  Appreciative Inquiry utilises a cycle of 4 processes, which focuses on what it calls:

DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well

DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.

DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design

The basic idea is then to build - or rebuild - organisations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn't. AI practitioners try to convey this approach as the opposite of problem-solving. They take a positive focus on how to increase exceptional performance instead of improving poor skills and practices. AI assumes that this line of reasoning is motivational. Progress does not stop when one problem is solved: it naturally leads on to continuous improvement.

Appreciative Community Planning

Appreciative inquiry applied to community planning turns the process on its head as community planning is definitely a deficit model of development – it asks ‘what is wrong with our area and how can we fix it?  Appreciative community planning, on the other hand, asks ‘What are our assets and how can we make the most of them?.  It implies the following stages:

DISCOVER:  Finding out what is good about an area, what the public like, what services and initiatives work well, what are the strengths of the local economy

DREAM:  Similar in some ways to the visioning process associated with community planning but done properly.  Rather than trying to boil down every aspiration down into a single sentence (‘a healthy, green, prosperous, fair and equal place’), giving people a chance to express themselves and collecting a wide range of ideas.

DESIGN:  A regularly updated statement of the services and processes that need to be valued and supported and of the new projects that can develop the assets (in the widest sense) that an area values. 

DELIVER:  The activity of doing the things that have been agreed.

There are a number of things that I think will be helpful about this approach:

• The discover and dream phases lend themselves particularly well to public engagement whereas the later stages would sit well with ‘professionals’ – the process might provide a clear division of labour which I don’t think community planning ever has
• By focussing on what is good about an area the planning process would promote distinctiveness rather than uniformity
• The process would be one that continuously unfolds – I’m not even sure the ‘statement of priorities’ would be a fixed plan or set of actions / targets
• The process would be much more motivating for those involved

As with old style community planning, appreciative community planning doesn’t prevent the majority of services in an area being delivered as usual and the things that need to be done by law would still get done. It is an evolving means of social and economic development in which the whole community can be involved. Well, that’s the theory anyway.   

 Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/la-citta-vita/5921677886/