Self-Leadership in Social Work

Reflections from Practice

Mckitterick, Bill, Bill Mckitterick

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781447314851
• eBook ISBN: 9781447314882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This book is a call for confident, skilled and knowledgeable practice in social work.

The current managerialist agenda has restricted judgement and the exercise of discretion in the profession, and, more damagingly, has played down the social justice components of social work, as well as the responsibilities for therapeutic and change-orientated interventions. This book explores how, through strong self-leadership, social workers can both explain and demonstrate how social work can achieve positive change.

Offering a fresh and innovative view on leadership for social workers, managers of social services and social work students at all levels, the book identifies tactics and strategies to provide leadership both within a team and in senior positions.

ONE

What leadership means in practice in social work

Introduction

In this chapter descriptions of leadership are reviewed and its purpose discussed. What is its value, and what are the benefits of good leadership? Leadership is an integral, core part of both direct professional practice, and how we all work within services and with colleagues. The management of the organisation and of the services where social work is located, while important, depend on assertive, confident and competent professionalism. Without this, social work and social work services are subject to the negative forces of managerialism, the denial of expertise and creativity, with a dominance of technocratic or procedurally driven prescription of what is done and how it is done (Harris and White, 2009, p 149). It is interesting to reflect that this is not a new issue, but has been an increasingly troublesome one for social work. In a different context, Seabrook (2013, p 98) quotes the report from the Poor Law commissioners in 1834:

… the object of machinery is to diminish the want, not only of physical, but of moral and intellectual qualities on the part of the workman. In many cases it enables the master to confine him to narrow routine of similar operations, in which the least error or delay is capable of immediate detection. Judgement or intelligence are not required for processes which can be performed only in one mode, and which constant repetition has made mechanical.

It is notable that the English College of Social Work (2014, p 3) begins a description of the distinctive role of social workers with, ‘Social workers use a distinctive range of legal and social work knowledge and skills.’ Legal knowledge and skills are given precedence over those of social work. In the same document on the role and functions of social workers in England, out of a total of 130 references, 99 are from legislation or case law, 25 from government guidance or government organisations, and only three from social work organisations. This underlines the lack of clarity or certainty on what social work, of itself, can and should demonstrate – this is to deny the body of experience and expertise each social worker brings to their work. The evidence base for effective interventions as active social workers is an integral part of the leadership of practice, which recognises the range of research methods and approaches available across social sciences (Shaw and Norton, 2007; Rubin and Babbie, 2011). According to Featherstone et al (2014, p 73), ‘There is a pressing need to develop forms of organisational learning and social work education, which inoculate practitioners against becoming passive vessels into which chunks of knowledge or … policy incantations … may be poured.’ We have far to go.

A range of different accounts and definitions of leadership are discussed in this book, including transformational leadership, servant and citizen leadership, and self-leadership and the overall transactional nature of all leadership. The spectrum of traditional leadership accounts, from dictatorial and authoritarian, to servant or citizen, are aligned against the consequent level or degree of discretion and authority permitted or encouraged. This chapter concludes with considering leadership in other services and professions, including education and the health service.

Leadership is an integral part of practice, in direct work and in work with colleagues. While leadership is often linked with the management of an overall service, behaving as competent social workers is not just to follow, but to show the way through knowledge, skills and capability how a good and effective service is to be given. There are institutions and structures that could fulfil leadership roles for the profession, but in my experience they are weak, unambitious, unrepresentative and fragmented. They are not comprehensively rooted in authority drawn from the knowledge and experience built up from within the profession; they are also impermeable, rooted in organisational survival, and almost all dependent on central government or local government employer funding. Their focus and potential positive impact are often diluted by divergent responsibilities across social care and across all services for adults, children and families.

Description and purpose of leadership

It would not be appropriate to start from an assumption that leadership is simply of itself ‘a good thing’. The leadership of the profession as a whole has been unconvincing, so dispersed as to be almost invisible, and certainly beyond the influence of most. My own experience representing directors of social services during the planning and re-design of social work education, which led to the new degree and postgraduate qualification in 2003, contributing to the early planning of a college of social work and to several of the other work streams of the Social Work Task Force and Reform Board, has been that the views and experience from practice, while they may be sought, are not in fact heeded. Key decisions are made behind closed doors and reported back for information, not discussion or debate. Nevertheless, the social work sense of purpose, value base and therapeutic traditions have remained remarkably resilient, with some shared sense of veiled pride in its identity.

The origins of the meaning of leadership are rooted in a sense of direction and a way forward. Gilbert (2005, p 4) gives an excellent analysis of the etymology, the meaning of the term ‘leadership’: ‘The Anglo-Saxon laed means a path or road, related to the verb lithan, to travel or proceed.’ Grundy (2011) identifies the meaning from the Old English of ‘travelling together’, making pathways to a new place. The modern association with management arguably masks or obscures the leadership within everyone, including the people who use social work and their carers. Equally, the push to expect all managers to be leaders risks diverting managers from being effective and supportive administrators. Bennis (1989) actually defines leaders as innovators and managers as administrators! There are models of citizen leadership which are being used in the contributions of people who use social work services, their families and their carers, supporting empowerment, personalisation and a stronger and more assertive voice in how social workers work with and alongside them. (This is discussed later in this chapter, within the section on citizen leadership.)

I believe that the value and benefits of leadership are:

• identifying and maintaining a sense of direction;

• holding true to the purpose of achieving positive change, in undertaking purposeful work. In social work terms this is the ‘therapeutic imperative’ – if nothing is being achieved, then social work is not being done, or any other kind of work!

• building on what is already known, through progressive learning and using the research evidence base of what works;

• sharing authority including power, experience and expertise. This is a two-way transactional process, learning from and being guided by the people served and their carers, and within professional supervision and organisational structures;

• giving confident, credible and effective support, advice and direction to colleagues. This is particularly critical in working within multi-disciplinary teams and integrated services.

Skills for Care and Development, the UK-wide sector skills body for adult and children’s social care, offers, within its National Occupational Standards, a definition of leadership as, ‘the ability to provide a model of best practice that is creative, innovative, motivating and flexible and supports people to follow by example and through respect’ (2012, p 10). This is a positive, practice-driven description, which emphasises the value and importance of the direct service provided. Interestingly it is directly followed by:

Management is the ability to lead and organise the effective running of the provision and to meet the overall service needs and those required by legislation, registration and inspection. Effective managers are able to solve problems, balance the needs of all within the provision, to manage competing demands and to cope under stress. (2012, p 10)

This is an interesting distinction as it emphasises the critical and central roles in leadership of best practice, creativity and leading by example. Such leadership is the responsibility of all – it is centrally located in practice expertise and knowledge. Those managers who are professionals need to retain and continuously develop their practice knowledge and skills that are specific to their own profession. An alternative distinction is drawn by Kotter (1996), who delineates the activities and processes of management as planning, budgeting, organising human resources, controlling and problem solving, and leadership as setting direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring. This set of leadership activities are as pertinent to direct social work practice, working with colleagues on a complex case involving several colleagues across professional and organisational boundaries, and in working in teams, as they are for positional leaders occupying senior positions.

Leadership based on practice skills and knowledge provides the key for good and effective services. It requires a strong focus on purpose and outcomes. This is not the same as service performance indicators that are a proxy, designed to enable senior managers, local and national government, auditors and inspectorates to gain a simple overview of how a service is operating compared to others. While these have value, the focus for improving social work services is the quality, the personal experience of the service, and the outcomes for the people served and their carers.

Core of leadership within social work practice

• Practice skills, direct experience and knowledge, ‘practice wisdom’ (Sheppard, 1995).

• Critical awareness and knowledge of current research evidence, ‘what works’, the social worker as a social scientist (Croisdale-Appleby, 2014).

• Strong focus on the purpose of the service and the outcomes being sought – what success is.

Historically social workers worked in teams with ‘team leaders’, while later the title was changed to ‘team manager’ with no real change in responsibilities. The best supervisors and first line mangers remain those who deputise for their team members, who undertake joint work, assert their own professional competence and are proud to maintain their own practice knowledge and skills. Equally, they use supervision to promote the reflective learning of social workers in their team, to assure their progressive professional development, and undertake their management and administrative responsibilities as a support function for the service, not the dominant part of their role or in supervision. They are open in sharing their own professional and practice skills development as colleagues within their teams and using supervision for mutual learning. Their own practice skills and research awareness are just as vital.

Different descriptions of leadership

There is limited consensus as to what constitutes leadership and an enormous literature (see, for example, Marturano and Gosling, 2007). One definition offered by Robinson (2001, p 93) is, ‘Leadership is exercised when ideas expressed in talk or action are recognised by others as capable of progressing tasks or problems which are important to them.’ This description emphasises the interaction and achieving progress jointly. Fairhurst (2007, p 5) builds on this with an analysis of this account of leadership as process which:

• influences and gives meaning in order to advance to a goal;

• is an attribute identified by followers or observers;

• is focused on a process, not on communication;

• identifies leadership as influence, which does not necessarily have to be exercised by one individual.

This recognises the essential transformational nature of much leadership, focusing on development and positive change. These ways of looking at leadership have the benefit of moving beyond the ‘great’ individual and positional leadership, where it is associated with or exercised from a specific role or designated post. The ‘transformational’ model of leadership (Bass and Alvilio, 1994) emphasises the promotion of the potential of each individual, helping them to stretch beyond expectations.

Core components of transformational leadership

• Identifying the vision and strategic direction.

• Promoting change.

• Motivation for continuous improvement.

• Recognising the potential of each individual and promoting teamworking.

• Trusting and empowering people, and investing in their development.

This can be looked at as a set of actions and behaviours that managers can undertake and promote. It is equally and powerfully applicable to direct practice. It links to the notion of resonance, leaders drawing on and drawing out, welcoming the qualities and contribution of others (Boyatzis and McKee, 2005). This is different from traditional accounts of leaders as heroes, directing and based on power. Equally and more importantly, these behaviours can be used by social workers, individually within their team and in the service, in the way they hold on to their own sense of direction and purpose, and how they model and encourage their colleagues and teams to operate.

Practice example

An adult social care team identifies the need to make best use of the skills of the social work members in light of increasing service demands, decreasing budgets and the national policy expectation of promoting personal budgets and personalisation. The social workers are increasingly frustrated by the limited opportunities to use their skills in working with individuals, families and the wider community, bogged down in process-driven care management and formulaic assessments. In discussions within the team, the more experienced social workers initiate a straightforward analysis of the work coming to the team, and identify with the team manager the kinds of referrals that could be looked after by the para-professional staff in the team, those who would benefit most from critical analysis, counselling, family group work, and the community development skills of social workers, and those that could be turned around at source with advice and consultation. This focuses their work on the more complex cases of protection of vulnerable adults, conflicting interests, navigating services for the most complex needs, and working with the local community on developing and maintaining access to ordinary resources for older people and people with disabilities. They also make themselves available for advice, consultation and co-working for the other members of the team. While remaining direct practitioners, they also rise above their designated caseload as a resource and source of expertise to the service as a whole.

The social workers directly helped the team manager in the allocation of work across the team, became more active in providing advice and consultation to their team colleagues and partner agencies, and initiated outreach work with community groups in the area to encourage and support those that could provide informal social care and social inclusion for older people and people with disabilities. They also gathered the experience of the whole team on the challenging policy questions for the local authority in the successful implementation of personal budgets, the appropriate use of the funds, and how to safeguard the interests of those who received them. This enabled the team manager to work with senior colleagues on the resolution of these challenges, and consequently made it much easier to increase the take-up of creative personal budgets. In addition, the social workers and the team manager, as part of their shared continuing professional development, joi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: What leadership means in practice in social work
• Chapter Two: Leadership vacuum
• Chapter Three: Sources of leadership in the profession
• Chapter Four: Clarity of purpose in social work practice
• Chapter Five: The social worker manager as leader, colleague and champion
• Chapter Six: Leadership within direct practice
• Chapter Seven: Leadership within a multi-disciplinary environment
• Chapter Eight: Optimism, filling the vacuum and taking the lead
• References