Compassionate leadership requires courage

The subject of compassionate leadership has been on my mind this week. Following the Board’s session with Professor Michael West that I talked about in my last blog, we had a follow up discussion to consider how we can best support compassionate leadership and good team working across our organisation.

It’s a myth that you cannot be compassionate and strong. Compassionate leadership requires courage. The courage to listen to tough messages from those we lead. The courage to explore understanding of others challenges and have our own interpretations challenged.

You can be a compassionate leader and still take difficult decisions, manage performance and make radical changes. But a compassionate approach is about consulting, listening and compromising when it’s in the best interests of others. It’s by releasing people’s motivation and creativity through compassionate leadership that we can ensure commitment to purpose and performance.

Professor West talks about compassionate leadership being about paying attention - ‘listening with fascination’, where we are really present and not thinking about what we want to say. It’s about listening to understand, not listening to reply, and it helps us to move forward, progress, alter our behaviour and become more self-aware.  

Compassionate leadership is also about showing empathy and putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes; and finally it’s about helping – finding a meaningful response or action.

But it can be tough to help others when you yourself are at your limits. We’ve all chosen to work in the public sector, thereby actively choosing to be part of a sector that is there to help and care for people. Our desire to be compassionate is not in question.

But how can leaders help a team with burnout when they themselves are burned out? Staff shortages, ever increasing demands and the current climate can all lead to chronic excessive workload across every layer. Other work difficulties and personal circumstances can also pile the stress on, and the evidence shows that if people are under consistent pressure for a long period of time then this is harmful in so many ways. As the saying goes “You can’t pour from an empty jug”.

In the Board, we talked about three areas of potential focus during our session this week.

Firstly, how we model compassionate leadership for others, as it starts with us. We need to be constantly mindful of our values and display our expected behaviours in our day-to-day conversations and actions. And we need to check how we are doing with you, for example through 360 feedback to see where each of us needs to improve and grow. One of the things we are also introducing is reverse mentoring, so we have an opportunity to hear how it really is for our staff with protected characteristics.

We also talked about how we support our leaders and teams. We need to continue to identify where pressure is greatest and do all we can to reduce chronic excessive workload. This second wave of covid has really taken it out of people, and many staff were already under a lot of stress and strain before the pandemic turned our world upside down. Some services are under-resourced, others are going through complex transformation and corporate services are being redesigned. People are frazzled and worn out.

So, we need to make sure the Niche work, which shows where we need more funding, feeds strongly into the refresh of the Greater Manchester mental health strategy, the supporting investment plan and in our local contract negotiations for next year. And even where it is difficult to solve some of these long standing issues, we need to encourage conversations about chronic excessive workloads.

Managers often feel that if they initiate the conversation they have to do something about it. We might not have a magic wand to solve all of the issues immediately, but we still need to listen and see if we can help. Burnout is never a failure, we are all susceptible to it and our environment can precipitate it. We’re all in this together and even listening and being heard about how hard things are can help.

We are also going to develop a clear leadership strategy across our organisation that makes our aspiration for compassionate leadership explicit and includes the actions we will take to promote this. Every team should experience some form of team development at least once a year and we want to develop what’s on offer to you, from general to bespoke development.

We’re already rolling out a big leadership development training programme as part of our new clinical and operational leadership redesign, and this will include compassionate and effective team leadership and management. We also need to promote the importance of a ‘home team’ approach with shared objectives, regular supervision, time for reflection and mutual support.

And when I talk about ‘teams’, let's not forget student placements within this. I know one of the challenges during covid is sustaining the support and preparation for students, but they are ‘essential workers’ and supporting them to meet their learning outcomes is a vital part of our work.

The final area the Board discussed was about the importance of having time for reflection. It can be really hard to take time out when there is so much to do, with more tasks piling in. But we need to encourage people and teams to have a space for reflection, as well as informal catch-ups. Reflection is about careful thought. It give us a valuable opportunity to pause amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through observations and experiences, consider interpretations and create meaning. This becomes learning.

The communications team was telling me about starting every Friday meeting with a fun ‘how are you feeling’ picture scale. The picture montages range from different animals in wacky poses (last Friday was hamsters) to celebrities in emotional snaps from joy to despair. They said that the picture they choose is sort of irrelevant, it’s a fun catalyst to help everyone open up about how they are feeling and how their week has been. I think I’m going to introduce this into our execs meetings!

Positive leadership is about optimism and humour, as well as compassion. So, we need the fun and the enthusiasm as well as the empathy and kindness.

I loved a recent tweet from Jaco Nel, one of our consultant psychiatrists and chair of our disabled employees network. It said, ‘When you’ve had a difficult week and you feel you have failed. Reflect and remind yourself of all the things you have achieved. We’re human and can’t be perfect all the time. Have a good weekend’.

A wonderful message.

Best wishes

Claire

You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2