Empowering staff

Larry Brendtro

Although the concept of empowerment is useful, it has some limitations. Just giving power to someone doesn’t ensure a desirable outcome. We have to see power as one of three elements that go together to make a healthy climate. Here I borrow from a classic definition of positive self-esteem. Many people say that positive self-esteem comes when you have three things: power, competence, and significance.

One cannot just walk into a cottage or into a treatment situation and turn over all responsibilities for decisions and say that he has empowered staff. Nor can one approach a group of adolescents and say, “There is a new system in place. From now on you people are empowered.”

Competence
One must have competent staff if one is to empower them. Staff need particular skills in order to develop a curriculum for educational and group living models. In the European educateur model, child care workers enter the profession with a very long list of competencies, not only in understanding human behavior, counselling and teaching strategies, but also abilities in the areas of crafts, arts, music, and drama. There is a whole series of child care competencies which enable administrators to give staff power. It becomes more difficult in some traditional child care arrangements. An example is the pre-professional child care model which Mark Krueger calls “careless” instead of “caring” in which incompetent parenting functions are mistaken for acceptable care. I suppose that concerned administrators in charge of agencies are quite right in not wanting to empower these types of people.

Significance
The third element of power is significance, the feeling that one belongs, that one is a part of a whole.

Many organisations fail to create this magic group bond. I think that it was William Glasser in The Identity Society who said that one of the earliest instincts that developed in the human animal was the sense of identity, being a part of or belonging to some social group.

We have not always created schools and treatment centres that have made children feel that they belong, and we certainly haven’t created those kinds of organisations that make staff feel a strong part of those settings.

I read a paper recently on how one disciplines and manages behaviour in Native American children, by Hap Gilliland. He argued that the peer group process is the best way of managing the behaviour of Indian youth. If youths are not responsive to the peer process it is because they don’t feel that they belong.

If it’s true that belonging, feeling part of this almost primary group relationship, satisfies one of our most basic human needs, then we must design organisations that make people feel that they belong “or these organizations are not likely to be effective. By tapping the resources of all the people in the organisation, we release a massive power that generates the “therapeutic community”.

So I see this model as an ideal organisation for child care.

A programme that creates this therapeutic community is Fritz Redl’s “therapeutic milieu” or Harry Vorath’s “positive culture” which create a certain sense of significance and belonging for participants. One works very hard to develop the competence of all the members. Young people need to see that they are competent in helping to solve their problems, in achieving academically, physically, and socially. Likewise, staff need to develop in these areas.

Adults and children
It may have struck you that I see very little difference, if any, in what you need to do to create an ideal community of young people, and what you need to do to create an ideal community of staff.

I think it was Jean Vanier, a pioneer working in communities for severely handicapped persons in France and elsewhere, who made it very clear that this is not a caste system – of adults in charge and a lonely group of people being helped – but all people living in a kind of community and all having something to offer. If you listen to the workers in such a programme they will tell you how these severely handicapped, sometimes mentally retarded persons, are enriching their own lives and their own development.

It has to be seen as a two-way process throughout the whole organisation.

This feature: Brendtro, L. (1996). Empowering staff. Child and Youth Care, 14, 11. p. 14.