Becoming a leader

Adrian Ward

This chapter draws directly on my own experience of taking on a leadership role, which was not easy, and highlights some key issues about confidence, authority and about viewing leadership as a “process” rather than simply a title or role.

Leadership as a process
I began this paper by saying that I will be taking a “relationship-based approach” to the leadership task, by which I mean an approach which emphasizes the reality that in any “care” organisation what will matter most of all is the quality of the human relationships at all levels, in this case the relationships between the leader, the staff team and the young people, and those on the outside. It is a primary responsibility of leadership to monitor, influence and facilitate these relationships in support of the task of the organisation – in other words to work closely and effectively with people at all levels to ensure that the work gets done and that people remain in good communication with each other despite any difficulties which may arise. In the context of residential child care, in which strong emotions may be evoked on all sides, this is by no means an easy task, and it requires skill, understanding and tolerance as well as a high level of self-knowledge.

What goes with this relationship-based approach is also an emphasis on leadership as a process, an ongoing, evolving and interactive process, rather than an event or a static moment represented by an organisational chart showing the formal hierarchy. Leadership takes time – as with any relationship or set of relationships, you grow into it through a transitional phase, you “become” the role and the relationships develop and grow further, you use these relationships (in the best sense) to work as effectively as you can, and then eventually you move on.

It is especially important to bear in mind that last bit – the moving on. The truism that nobody is indispensable should apply to leadership as much as to any other role, yet it is not uncommon to come across apparently effective leaders who have sought to make themselves indispensable by playing up the charismatic or “transformational” aspects of the role, behaving – and encouraging others to behave – as if nobody else could ever make such a good job of leadership as themselves, only to fulfil their own prophecy when they leave and the place collapses or implodes, because the Dear Leader has actually removed everyone else’s confidence in their own and their shared abilities. It therefore behoves every leader to be mindful of their own temporary hold on the role and to avoid the temptation to believe in their own indispensability.

The transition into leadership
The other critical point in this “process” model is the transition into leadership, by which I mean the transition into becoming a leader, as distinct from simply being appointed to the position. This is likely to be a lengthy process involving much testing out by all parties, sometimes directly and sometimes quite indirectly, and probably some trial and error on the part of the leader.

New leaders have to establish their credibility in all parts of the organisation, and to find their authority at a personal level as well as at the “given” level within the organisation. Since the leader is such a key figure in the life of the place, they are likely to attract strong feelings of many sorts, as we shall see throughout this paper, but especially in terms of whether they will be seen as reliable, trustworthy, knowledgeable and respectful.

This is a tall order, and it helps to explain why the transitional process may take some time: although it is certainly possible to make a good first impression, it may take much longer in reality to establish and develop meaningful relationships throughout the place. Colleagues and children alike will need to make up their own minds both individually and collectively about their new boss and perhaps test them in various situations in order to establish the necessary trust. The interesting thing about the group care context, of course, is that so much of the work is done in public or semi-public: everybody sees how the leader responds to a child in distress or acting defiantly, and thereby everybody has plenty of evidence on which to base their judgement of their new leader. In particular they will be able to spot any mismatch between the leader’s espoused “philosophy of care” and his or her actual behaviour. This may also be helpful in terms of the leader being seen to have “feet of clay” and as having to struggle with difficult situations just as others do, despite being more senior or experienced. The other thing about the public context is that a new leader may sometimes be tested out by one person or group on behalf of another, as we shall see below.

To illustrate this discussion about transition I will offer a very personal account of my own experience. When I began my career as a leader in residential child care it was still the time of the 20-bed children's home, with a small army of domestic staff and a smaller troop of child care staff, some of whom lived on site and very few of whom were trained. The training situation has not greatly improved, although other things have changed significantly.

For me it was a very difficult time getting established as a leader – I was very young and probably naive, although I did have social work training and some relevant experience. Even though I had been a deputy elsewhere and had previously spent some difficult months as “acting” in charge of another home, there were many things which I was simply not ready for when I was appointed as “Superintendent”, as the job was known in the 1980s. Some of the staff had been there for many years and knew the children inside out (it was a long-stay home), and had weathered the storms of a period of great change. The previous boss and his wife (there were still married couples running children's homes at that time) had been in post for over ten years, and when they had left, the next appointment had not worked out. Some of the staff had become care-worn, which had left them insufficiently reflective of their task and in need of refocusing while a few others were keen to make a new start and eventually we were also able to start making new appointments. This gradual process of renewal enabled me to find my feet and establish my authority with the team.

Over the coming months things gradually improved but I was still quite lacking in confidence. The children were aware of this and were naturally adept at making the tensions very evident by testing me out in front of other “tougher” staff and kids. It felt like a trial of strength, in which I had to prove that I was hard enough to withstand anything that was thrown at me – quite literally so on some occasions. At the same time what I wanted to establish was something quite different – a form of care in which positive relationships would develop between staff and children and within the staff team itself. This didn’t seem too much to ask, as it was supposed to be a “therapeutic” home for very troubled children, and yet it felt very difficult and even risky to try and establish such an ethos, especially after such a period of disruption and loss. There was a particular challenge involved in trying to lead this sort of change of ethos, because although what I wanted to establish was a co-operative and collaborative set of relationships, it felt like I might have to be very assertive and even pushy to establish it, which seemed paradoxical. Perhaps I was discovering how difficult it was to establish an ethos or organisational culture, when so many things seemed to be standing in the way.

Meanwhile the domestic staff had their own views and had seen it all before. Many of them were old enough to be my mother, and one or two them even perhaps my grandmother, so they were not usually pleased to be asked to do things by me, and greatly preferred running their own regime and schedules as they had always done, however inefficient and sometimes irrelevant this might seem to me. Where possible I delegated the management of the domestic staff to a female colleague, which I now think was probably a result of both cowardice and sexism on my part, although it was also the start of my understanding that different tasks can be achieved by different people and that this needs to be taken into account in any delegating.

Two particular incidents of the testing and challenging which I endured stick out in my mind. There came a time when I felt that in order to establish myself more confidently I would need my own office, as until then I had had to share the general office with the secretary, with staff escaping for a coffee or cigarette, and sometimes with a wayward child hauled out of trouble to be spoken with. There was no space for guaranteed privacy or for the sort of individual and team thinking which needed to happen. Although it was a large and rambling building, there was not much available room for an office anywhere near the heart of the action where I felt I needed to be (rather than tucked away at the end of a corridor). One space which I had my eye on was the “sewing room”, where the children's clothes were ironed, folded and mended (not washed, this was done elsewhere). It was a pleasant enough little room whose only drawbacks were that it had bars on the window, perhaps left over from the time when the safe may have been kept in there, and that it was occupied by one or two of the domestic staff. Nevertheless I felt it was the best option and I explained this to the domestics, found them another space, and set out about renovating and redecorating it “and removing the bars! To have had a council decorator do the job would probably have taken some years to organise and budget, so I would have to do it myself. After a few days, when I was in there up a ladder with a paintbrush, the smallest and frailest of the domestic staff, Mollie, put her head round the door in an apparently friendly manner, saying “Ooh that’s nice dear – you’re a painter are you?”. “Only in my spare time” I replied. “Very nice, dear” came the reply, then a pause, followed by: “Hitler was a painter, you know”, and she left, letting the door shut silently behind her.

Even at that tender age, I received the message quite clearly – my search for lebensraum was not welcome, and would be resisted. It was my introduction to the ambivalence which people felt towards leadership, especially when it had previously been missing or problematic: everybody knew it was necessary for everyone else, but they did not really want it to impinge directly on themselves. It was also a reminder that being the leader meant being a leader to everyone in the place, not just to the children and the child care staff.

The second incident was more painful and even humiliating. Perhaps three months into the post I was still trying to establish real authority with the children, especially the ones who had been there before me. Their lives had been dreadfully disrupted not only by their original family traumas but also by the upheavals in the children's home. I knew all this and felt I understood it and thought I understood why they needed to “take it out” on the staff and especially on me in my role as the new figurehead.

One winter’s evening there was a power-cut, which led rapidly to pandemonium. The children were frightened, especially when one of the older boys grabbed one of the candles which we were using for lighting and tried to set light to the curtains. In an atmosphere of panic and contagious anxiety, we decided to “divide and rule” by taking the children in small groups to different parts of the house.

I took on the job of trying to contain a small group of young children in complete panic, and brought them into a small “quiet room” upstairs and tried to encourage them to sit down and calm down. Instead they took this opportunity to vent all their pain and fear by attacking me, first verbally and then physically by throwing books at me. I felt it was best not to retaliate or to make things worse by losing my temper with them (though with hindsight to have laid down some very assertive boundaries might have been the most appropriate thing to do), and I tried to stand my ground as they taunted me. But I too was scared by now, and overwhelmed with the whole situation, and the tears started to appear on my face too: I didn’t break down in tears but my distress and unhappiness was clearly showing.

As the lights came back on, one of the boys noticed this, and pointed it out in apparent triumph at first – although this soon turned to anxiety and perhaps guilt, as he called out to the others that there were tears on my face. For them there was something both appalling but also fascinating about the fact that they had “made me cry”. This only made me feel worse, of course, but it also meant something important because it was as if we had all reached “rock bottom” together, and could only come back from here together. The next morning in a state of despair I rang an older and wiser friend (a previous boss of mine), who reassured me that one day I would be able to reflect back on all the learning which I had achieved that night, which sounded fairly hollow at the time.

The leader as figurehead?
What I learned from incidents such as these was that what really mattered in my role as leader was not my qualification or university education, or the books that I had read, but the immediate reality that I was in the centre of a set of powerful human relationships in which my own responses and actions would be “read” by others, scrutinized for both immediate and symbolic significance, and that these relationships were experienced not only at the practical and rational level, but also at the emotional levels of other important and intense human relationships such as we normally experience only in our family or personal life. I was somehow becoming the human figurehead, expected to lead and take all the knocks, to inspire and motivate other people, even (or perhaps especially) when I was feeling anxious or depressed myself.

The notion of a figurehead is interesting – the leader does have to play this role at times although it can be an isolating and risky one, and at times quite inappropriate. In the “Valhalla” museum in the Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Isles of Scilly there is an impressive collection of ships' figureheads – these have largely been salvaged from ships wrecked on the treacherous rocks around those islands. The figureheads have been restored and repainted but they still show signs of the damage and battering which they routinely encounter right up at the front of the ship on the rockiest of voyages. However, the fact that these figureheads from wrecked ships have eventually found themselves thus restored and displayed tells its own story – having a figurehead to take all the punishment is no guarantee of safe passage, either for the crew, the cargo or the figurehead. Even though there may be some romantic appeal in the notion of being a “figurehead” leader, it may be better for new and aspiring leaders to avoid the self-delusion which may accompany such an image. It may also be better for the organisation that the leader is able to work through others to read signs of danger in advance and to help steer clear of them, rather than blundering on into them! I have seen more than one excellent residential unit crash heroically on to the rocks partly because they had not spotted the rocks or realised how hazardous they were.

For most leaders, a more appropriate image than being a figurehead would probably be one of placing yourself at the heart of the system, ready and able to engage with people at whatever level is appropriate, whether with the children themselves, with their parents or other carers, or with the staff, as well as with the external contacts such as line management and other professionals. As a management system evolves around you, many of these contacts can be worked with and developed by others on your behalf as tasks and duties are delegated, but you are still accountable for them, and that is what I was not fully prepared for when I took on the role. Perhaps you cannot be prepared for that in advance – you have to experience it at first hand, and discover what it feels like for yourself.

A leadership team
For me it all came together once I finally had a deputy with whom I could work in a genuine partnership of respect and trust, so that I was able to rely on him both in what he said to me about the staff team and also in what he said to them about me “not that he would always “toe the line”, but that his communications could be trusted and respected on all sides.

It is probably inevitable that some of what a leader needs to do will be unpopular: asking people to face unpalatable truths about the future or to reflect on where their work may have gone wrong, or perhaps trying to introduce a change which people neither understand nor want. In these situations the relationship of respect and trust between leader and team can become strained as people may become resentful or undermining, or may retaliate with unthinking responses. What is needed is often a go-between, someone who is prepared to foster good will on both sides and to promote better communication when it is at risk of breaking down. This is where a good deputy is invaluable, to carry the torch of good communication between all sides and to forestall the possibilities of mistrust and recrimination. In fact a deputy is also a leader and uses many leadership skills although in different ways from the appointed leader. However, even a good deputy is not enough – these days although the number of residents in each home is smaller, the number of staff is generally much larger, and there is generally the need for a leadership team within a home: the head, the deputy, and a number of team leaders or other senior staff. The role of the leader within this team will also be one of leadership – group leadership, which requires another set of skills, including the ability to “bring on” some people and to hold some back if they are treading on others' toes. I know of one large organisation, a residential school, in which the leadership team meets every morning at 9 o'clock after the children are in class, and another in which the heads of several small units on the same site come together every day to confer and compare notes, under the leadership of the head of the whole organisation. Smaller homes may not have the resources for such meetings, but the value is clear – it promotes what is known as “distributed leadership” in which power is shared rather than excessively centralised on a single leader. We will see other examples of this approach in operation later in this paper: its value is that it spreads the responsibilities of leadership amongst a senior team, although it in no way lessens the pivotal role of the formal leader.

Summary
Through looking at the transition into a leadership role, the message of this first chapter has been that what a leader needs to do is to establish and develop a culture in which people can work together to get the work done, and in which they are clear about what their task is. (For a short introduction to this thinking see Clough et al, 2000). I have shown how difficult this may be, and even though this paper is focused on individual leadership, I have emphasized the value of establishing a leadership team rather than attempting to be a figurehead leader.

References and further reading

Ward, A. (2003). Building a Team. In Seden, J. and Reynolds, J. (Eds.) Social Care Management in Practice. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Burton, J. (1997). Handbook of Managing Residential Care. London, Routledge.

Rollinson, R. (2003). What a long strange trip it’s been. In Ward, A., Kasinski, K., Pooley, J. and Worthington, A. (Eds.) Therapeutic Communities for Children and Young People. London, Jessica Kingsley.

Clough, R., Bullock, R. and Ward, A. (2000) What works in Residential Child Care http://www.ncb.org.uk/ncercc/ncercc%20practice%20documents/whatworksinrccsummary ncbhighlight.pdf

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This feature: Chapter 1 from Ward, A. (2009). Leadership in Residential child Care. A paper commissioned by the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care. The Tavistock and Portman NHS. NHS Foundation Trust.

*This is the twelth in a new series of chapters which the authors have permission to publish separately and which they have now contributed to CYC-Online. Read more about this program.