5 September 2010 Good Evening

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Leadership into action in Cambridgeshire Managers from day services in Cambs move from managers to leaders

Background

Cambs disability service provides day support to around 300 people with a learning disability across the County. We are aiming to move our services from a traditional day service to services where people have more choice about what they do and can be involved more in their local community. The managers of the services were re named ‘community access managers (CAMS) and were given the job of leading the service into the future. In many cases, the people were good managers, but not great leaders.

Objectives

We wanted to give a non-traditional type of training to the CAMs to develop their leadership skills. Traditionally, Neuro Linguistic Processing (NLP) is only accessed by senior managers; we wanted to see if it's emphasis on communication, behaviours and successful outcomes would help the CAMs in their new role.

The Plan

The workforce development team, senior manager for day services and a local NLP provider designed a programme. The delivery was to last 3 days. There would be pre-liminary interviews, shared with the training team to customise their content, delivery and post training interviews. The first two days were set, whilst the third day was planned to be open to 1;1 coaching or group learning, whichever the group requested.

What Happened

The Cams met together for two days. They looked at communication, rapport building, their own communication style, shared and common values and handling difficult behaviour. Here are some comments 'a truly different and inspiring type of training that can be used in professional and personal life', 'made me able to want to change, what and how I do things, share with my team and people who access our service', 'made me aware of steps I need to take to improve my leadership'
The group then decided to use the 3rd day to re convene to look again at common values and presentation skills.

What Was Achieved

This is difficult to judge as the 3rd day has only just finished. However, what has happened is the CAMs as a group are speaking 'as one'. Those who were comfortable with the leader role have been seen to be more forthright and clear in meetings etc and seem more confident. Those who were not comfortable in this role continue to struggle more.

What Helped and What Hindered

What helped was good management support, understanding from colleagues when time out was needed and a willingness from all to 'try something a bit different'.

What was less helpful was delivery in a large chunk; in retrospect, perhaps mentoring in the workplace may have been better at talking the difficulties of transference of knowledge once back to work.

What we found?

We found that the use of non-traditional techniques made staff feel good about themselves and their work. The CAMs could see a benefit for both their professional and their personal lives and this created a lot of 'buy in' to want to learn. What we also found was that using external trainers with no background in social care made the CAMs 'free' to share in a different way than with County Council staff. Describing to an 'outsider' why you got involved in and are still involved in care, was very powerful to many of them and has re-invigorated their commitment.

There is quite some debate over whether you can 'teach' leadership, or whether you are a born leader…this programme seems to indicate that you can enhance the inherent personality types of some through training, whilst it appears that leadership itself is harder to 'teach'.

Evaluation

Longer-term evaluation will be on going in the coming months.

What new or changed skills do people need to work in this way?

Self-awareness is key. Also, time to focus on relationships, rather than seeing these as a time-consuming extra to managing a service.

The Future

Leadership and management development is due to be a key theme in the coming year’s workforce development strategy for Cambs. The challenge is to see how NLP and the learning from this pilot enhances this goal.

Any other info
You can contact
Diane.buddery@cambridgeshire.gov.uk