Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks. We often talk about the resilience of communities in the blitz or after an event like Hurricane Sandy.  Barrow Cadbury in recent research on this issue asks the question – “what happens if a community is not resilient enough to face the shocks?” Their concern is that these communities will face long term decline and poverty.

The Centre for Local Economic Strategies believe that many communities face a 10% reduction in their income in the next three years – with, of course, more serious consequences for those who lose their jobs. Other commentators are concerned about “housing churn” as neighbourhoods see well established households forced to move elsewhere in response to benefits cuts.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) state “Cuts, recession, and benefits changes create an unmanageable spiral of decline.”

Building resilience NEF say resilience “depends on relationships – and the quality of those relationships – in a particular place between public, commercial and social spheres.” Social Capital in a neighbourhood becomes a really important indicator of that neighbourhood’s capacity to survive the challenges thrown at it. The development of social capital requires the active and willing engagement of citizens within a participative community.

Research by the Chamberlain Forum in Birmingham demonstrates a strong correlation between social capital and house prices. People want to move into communities that are lively, proactive, supportive and generous. Housing associations benefit from the deliberate actions they take to equip and enable the community.

US author Edgar Cahn talks about the core economy – the real economy happening under the surface. This is fuelled by relationships, through family, community and the things we love and give time to. Can we tap into this core economy to build resilience?

Four steps to resilience

Four key steps a Housing Association can do directly or working with others are

1. Co-production: This is a technique to enable communities to work together with the public sector and housing providers to address those problems that won’t go away. Inevitably austerity is a great catalyst for fresh thinking and the neighbourhood that learns to adopt and shape its own way forward raises its chances of success.

2. Time banking – time banking links to the core economy. A time bank is a way of organising, extending and promoting self‐help and social networks between citizens and/ or between citizens and public services. Participants ‘deposit’ their time in the bank by giving practical help and support to others and are able to ‘withdraw’ their time when they need something done themselves. In a time bank, everyone’s time is valued equally: one hour = one credit. Time banking recognises and encourages people using their talents to benefit their community

3. A neighbourhood plan – a neighbourhood plan best mobilises people when it is focused on priorities that people can unite behind. We advocate a simple one page plan with five key neighbourhood priorities. Issues neighbourhoods may wish to priorities include loneliness, struggling families, poverty, health inequalities and youth unemployment.

4. A neighbourhood manager – neighbourhoods need a catalyst who can help them think through their key needs, help them shape solutions and enable citizens to engage with service providers, drive community projects and enable great communication.

NEF make the point that many of the organisations society relies on to build community resilience have been squeezed to breaking point. Housing Associations with their broad perspective, networking capacity and awareness of local needs may find themselves taking a more proactive role in building social capital.

The Challenge for Housing

In our contact with many RSLs we increasingly talk about the need to create a new culture, a new way of doing things. In doing so there are three key challenges Housing providers face

1. FOCUS – those organisations that succeed in challenging and complex times have a really clear focus. They have robust discussion about their priorities and manage their impact well. This creates alignment – the organisation works well together with a real focus on results.

2. CONSISTENCY – in a time when many neighbourhoods will struggle with large economic and social challenges Housing providers need to be credible and trust worthy.  Housing providers face a wide range of customer issues as benefits policy changes. They will need to work hard before issues arise to ensure they can address problems in a consistent and transparent way. Consistency will deliver value for money - poor preparation could lead to a wide variation in responses and significant added cost.

3. SUPPORT THE FRONT LINE – the Housing front line will be a place with many stresses and pressures – they need excellent support. This is a prime culture issue Managers – and the wider organisation needs to be supportive and enabling whilst maintaining standards.

In short Housing Associations will themselves have to become resilient if they are to face the shocks and changes that lie ahead.  They need to build their own social capital if they are to work effectively with stressed neighbourhoods. This is a time when a good Housing Association may be the difference between survival and economic decline for our communities. We need to be ready.

Steve Botham is Chief Executive of Caret Consulting Group and Chairman of the Chamberlain Forum

The old wartime song - “We’ll meet again” can seem like a demotivating threat in many current organisations –“if you don’t behave I’ll call another meeting!” In these cost and time conscious days meetings are – quite rightly – coming under more scrutiny. Let’s face it – meetings can be a great way to frustrate people and waste time.

I was in an organisation recently which said the first fifteen minutes of every meeting are a waste of time because senior management are late so everyone who has made it on time (a diminishing number) wastes their time. How much unproductive downtime does that create? Are senior management complicit in driving organisational inefficiency? There’s plenty of evidence of poorly prepared, poorly facilitated, unfocused meetings that lead to poor decisions, actions that are not followed through and the disappointing decision to meet again!

Becoming sharper, faster, fitter – just as Olympic athletes continually have to increase their personal best so do leaders in challenging times. A focus on improving your meetings culture can make a significant impact on the organisation.

Meetings Focus – the first question is what is the purpose of your meeting? Some meetings lost their purpose a long time ago – they keep on meeting because no one has the courage to end its existence. Most organisations can reduce their meetings by at least 10 – 20%. The impact and usefulness of your meetings is directly related to the focus and clarity within your organisation. A colleague works on a quarterly basis with a client’s leadership team to ensure they have five clear priorities for the coming quarter. From this they plan their weekly operational meetings ensuring they focus on the priorities and they have quarterly strategic meetings to ensure they are planning for a shaping the future. The leaders ensure the entire organisation and its meetings are aligned to work together at the same pace to deliver the priorities.

We often quote Jim Collins and say – organisational success depends on the deliberate actions you take. So much of that deliberate action is around meetings. Being deliberate in setting time aside for high quality innovation, being deliberate about focusing attention on making the organisation more effective, being deliberate about horizon scanning- looking longer term at risks and opportunities and ensuring the organisation is well prepared.

Be prepared - arguably one of the most important task a leader has is to sort out the agenda for his/her meetings. To many supporting papers are written to impress not enable decision making, going into uneccessary technical detail. Sometimes this is in response to one technically detailed committee member who makes life a misery for all their colleagues. This is all poor time management.

Another time management issue is around selecting people to be at the meeting. Some don’t need to be there all the time, some don’t need to be there at all. A timed agenda helps bring focus to the most important issues and bring advisors in and out of the meeting effectively.

Facilitate well – a meeting should be about collecting a wide range of perspectives and making the best possible decision. Some Chairs think it is about an opportunity to ramble and rubber stamp the decision they wanted the meeting to agree. Great Chairs recognise that a meeting is a collection of loud people with lots of ideas and enthusiasm and quiet people with important nuggets of insight. Great Chairs encourage the quiet and the reluctant to contribute and build up their confidence and they tackle counter productive behaviours – a dominant voice, tensions, lack of engagement etc. head on.

It’s rude – organisations slip into ineffective and often just plain rude behaviours. I worked with a large organisation where a senior manager annoyed everybody he came into contact with by arriving late, fiddling with his emails during the meeting, taking calls, and then criticising decisions when he himself had not been engaged in shaping them. People felt he was communicating real lack of respect for them and the subject under discussion. Others tell us – our CEO fiddles with his emails all the time. What’s the message? This meeting and you people in it are not as important as what is going on elsewhere. In todays environment blackberries and IPads mean that people are not fully engaged in the meetings – and the meeting and relationships suffer as a result.

Performance Management – Chairs need to take responsibility for performance managing their meetings. They need to ensure actions are followed up and staff are challenged when inaction occurs. If the actions don’t happen however good the quality of your debate this was an unsuccessful meeting.

I came across a situation where one willing meeting attender had 50 incomplete actions against his name. He makes unrealistic commitments to act and the Chair has not challenged his unreliability.

A meeting is measured by its impact. Increasingly good teams finalise their decisions at the end of the meeting – reviewing what was agreed, sharpening their actions, ensuring the timescales are challenging but realistic and it is clear who is doing what.

Staff morale – you won’t please everybody with your Chairing skills. Some may accuse of being to task oriented and not investing enough time in the team – others will say we are to pink and fluffy and should just concentrate on task. Some will say the meeting is to structured, others not structured enough.  What you must aim for is a consensus that your meetings are outcome focused, that everyone makes a strong contribution and the meetings are real value for money – and we really do want to meet again!

Steve Botham is Chief Executive of Caret Consulting Group

LEADING TO A NEW CUSTOMER FUTURE – FOR HOUSING

Meeting Customer Needs in Challenging Times

Any Housing leader who loves a good worry will be in their element at the moment – there are worries galore. “I am really concerned that we are going to lose our credibility with our customers” one CEO from a very highly regarded HA told me recently. “Our customers are going through horrendous situations at the moment” said another, “and we hardly dare tell them that it is going to get worse.”

The recent NHF report Building Future reports that Housing Associations provide services to eight million people.  Many of them in trouble, hurting, and stressed.  People will complain bitterly as your staff provide unpalatable options for them as benefit issues hit, people will question why your team are so well paid when they and all their friends are out of work, people will damage your properties when they feel over charged – or they simply cannot afford your prices.

We use the phrase “predictable surprises” – the things we should think about before they come up and bite us. It’s predictable that we will see more stressed customers, customers with increased mental health problems and customers who begin to see you as part of the “establishment” working against them. This in turn leads to stressed staff that become more reluctant to engage the majority of customers because of their negative experiences with a few.

Housing Associations are naturally customer and community focused – they have mission statements such as “Our aim is to deliver excellent customer care services to all our customers” “We will work to the highest possible standards of service and professionalism.” No problem with that – the question is what does excellent customer service look like in 2012? Who determines the standards?

It’s time to revisit customer service. We start by asking – what does our customer want in 2012? 2013? 2014? Some of the basics remain – they want a decent home, to be treated as human beings, to be able to access information and support easily. But new issues exist – how do we communicate in the social media age? How do we handle those who are downsizing from the home you told them was “ideal”? How do we support people under added stress? How do we streamline and simplify our processes to reduce errors, take out costs and save time? Do we need to provide more choice – what some Councils are calling the Easy Jet approach with a more basic core service and a choice of additional support?

But in Housing the customer relationship is two way – Has have always wanted to encourage “good citizenship”, proactive tenants” “community volunteers”. Again in a changing environment – what do good customers look like in 2012 – how do you reward and encourage them? How might this link to an increased number of social enterprises, community “companies” and trusts – people who contribute to the value of your assets.

One Housing Association claims it has got its customer service right because it has supplied training, got the processes in place and monitors its performance regularly. This seems very limited to us. We need People and Community Leadership strategies in place – and they need to be at the heart of your organisation. Key things to look at include

· Review your purpose – is it to provide “excellence” – what does that mean in cash strapped times? Do customers want excellence or value for money? What’s most important to a family on reduced income? Or an elderly person with reduced social care support?

· Scenario planning – what are the predictable surprises for your customers? The difficult challenges your staff will face? The challenges that your processes and standards need to be able to respond to. What will you need to monitor in coming months

· What customer service skills are needed – a ready smile and a telephone friendly voice may not be enough for a customer with a mental health problem, a host of clients resisting eviction or a Council asking you to do stock transfer within very tight timescales.

· What are your values? What will give you a firm reference point in challenging times

· Is your leadership fit for purpose (“of course we are” you cry – but we are entering unchartered waters). Do you work together robustly to ensure the organisation is focused, effective, and aligned. What behaviours will get rewarded and encouraged in the future?

· Will your managers provide coaching and support to enable front line staff to deal well with the challenges they face? Will you ensure that you are learning from the new challenges you face and constantly getting better at what you do?

· What will you stop doing? How will you get rid of processes that are to long? How will you stop inefficient working in your organisation? How might you create more standardisation to reduce costs

The secret? - High impact leaders who work effectively together to shape and deliver a new customer strategy and develop the organisation capacity to deliver that strategy. Leaders who understand the future risks for their customers and staff.  Leaders who bring real focus and clarity in order to energise and align the organisation. Leaders who ensure that customer service training or development is not treated like fairy dust sprinkled on children to make them play better but is linked with “what we reward, what we role model as leaders, what we talk about.”  Leaders who can innovate and improve their organisation and the services it provides with changes that will be well implemented. Leaders with the humility to recognise they have not got all the answers but make best use of the expertise, talent and energy within their organisation.

Steve Botham

Caret Consulting Group are experts in delivering change, enabling leaders and shaping and empowering leadership teams within Housing. We work in partnership to help HAs shape the future

Christmas is nearly upon us and workplaces across the land are beginning to look forward to the staff Christmas party and other shared festivities. It’s usually an occasion of great fun and team bonding but it’s also the time when leaders and managers can be at their most vulnerable.

Most leaders are wise enough not to drink too much and end up doing something inappropriate or embarrassing. Yet managers can also get ambushed at parties once the alcohol has begun to flow with colleagues. Sober judgement can be suspended and words said to the boss that are later deeply regretted. In other words, it’s not just about what you do or don’t do; it’s also being aware of what others may do because you are there.  One seasoned chief executive I work with has a principle for these occasions of being the first to the bar and the first to leave the party.

I think the boss should always go to the party. It’s important to party with your people. But go with a plan.

Merry Christmas!

Leaders can often become too wedded to plans. Consider the political bun fight going on between the government and opposition about making any changes to economic policy. Certainly having a plan at the very least gives people reassurance and a sense of direction but when should plans be adjusted or even abandoned? Why does it matter changing a plan?
 
General Eisenhower said, “Plans are dispensable, planning is indispensable.” The art of leadership involves improving planning capabilities and this includes nurturing an attitude of flexible thinking. Adjusting plans in response to  a volatile strategic context is often necessary. The trick for leaders is to change tack whilst explaining (and explaining again) why you are doing so and also ensuring that all activity is being realigned to the modified plan.

Eisenhower shifted the date of D Day because of adverse weather conditions. What needs to shift in your plan?

A very good friend was trained at Sandhurst. He took a patrol out on night manoeuvres through a dense wood - trying to avoid being discovered by the enemy. His team came to a break in the woods and had to cross a road. This was a danger point threatening the patrol with discovery - and defeat - in the exercise. He gathered his men in a ditch by the side of the road, they synchronised watches and agreed that when he signalled them they would move quickly across the road, keeping low and throw themselves in the parallel ditch. The signal came, my friend kept low, crossed the road and flung himself in the ditch, only to find the rest of his patrol were still in place where he had left them. He was a leader without followers. However clear or urgent his instructions had been he was in one place and his team were in another.

Ira Challeff created the term “followership”. As my friend’s story illustrates, it is the actions of followers that determine the success of a leader.  We were fortunate enough to spend some time with Ira recently. He describes follower as a role not a personality type. We decide whether to take that role. As Ira points out people do not like to describe themselves as a follower.  We may be reluctant followers, we may be compliant followers - or we may be courageous followers. Ira points to the well-chronicled failures of followers - failure to pass on important information, failure to challenge wrong decisions, failure to respond to challenges. Followers were ineffective in Enron, Andersons, Lehman Brothers - but of course, the reason for that failure is strongly linked to the leadership culture. Effective leaders engage followers, they encourage and actively enable openness and challenge. they respond positively to the bad news or the reality checks that come from further down the organisation. In turn this leads to empowered followers who have the confidence to make decisions, be proactive, be innovative - and support the success of the organisation. 

In times of challenge and change it is so easy (and tempting) to revert to a command and control style of leadership. This creates compliant followers. The more courageous leader wants to tap into the passion and intelligence of their teams, to find the new and more effective ways of working, to have front line staff who can be powerful ambassadors for the organisation. Ira’s book ‘Courageous Followers’ gives a refreshing insight into the impact of leadership - it is an essential read whether you are on night manoeuvres or have bigger battles to fight in the day to day challenges of enabling organisation change.  

Leadership does not happen in a vacuum – good leaders in one situation can be terrible leaders in another and different situations demand different leadership qualities from us. In Caret’s recent Catalyst publication, Professor Prabhu Guptara looked at how it is not only our qualities as leaders that is important; but also the fit between those qualities and the environment that we are in.

Environmental scanning is an essential part of any strategy development but a global economic shift is largely out of our control as organisations and individuals. What we can do is manage our teams. As we try to fix an uncertain future, how do we keep our teams motivated?

It’s partly a matter of communication and reassurance, but I suggest it has a dimension we don’t always consider - in strategy discussions do we look only to our own wisdom or that of our top colleagues and professional advisors, or do we take into account in an active and deliberate way the advice we can get from customers and political leaders?

The more diverse perspectives you can get into your strategy process the more likely you are to come up with a range of possibilities that makes sense. Teams will be much more reassured by the actions you take to ensure this wide and diverse input into decision making because that will demonstrate that you are doing things in a way that takes political and economic uncertainties into account.

Read more…

The Work Foundation has just published some work called Exceeding Expectations: the principles of outstanding leadership. It looked at outstanding leaders. Three key themes emerged that we believe help organisations move from Good to Great and are worth ‘benchmarking’ yourself against.

1. Reaction follows action: outstanding leaders understand their impact on others. They empower others to make a difference, they stretch people to unleash energy
2. Performance comes through people: organisational outcomes e.g. productivity, quality, innovation and great customer care are all achieved by engaging others, enthusing them, growing them, building confidence, creating trust and passing on power
3. Their impact comes through others: outstanding leaders are comfortable about acknowledging their own weaknesses, keen to empower others and have great self awareness

We like this ‘high impact leadership’ thinking! Very useful for 2010

“What’s going on?” “Can we make this work?” “What do you think?” Three normal questions. Do we get honest answers? Jim Collins in Good to Great talks about facing the brutal facts; history tells us of lots of situations where groups working together failed to face the brutal facts - whether it be Hitler in the Führer bunker or airlines where the crew did not challenge each other with fatal consequences. The ability to gather all the information needed; to encourage the introverts to share, the nervous to be bolder and the reluctant to take some risks is a key leadership skill. Given the long term impact of many of the decisions we are making at the moment, leaders need the ability to ensure people are engaging in conversation, thinking things through robustly and challenging “group think”.

It is worth reflecting - next time you ask “can we make this work?” how do you get your colleagues fully engaged? How might you challenge them to raise their game in the next round of decision making?

In the field of management practice and thought, one of my heroes is Bill George, the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, which develops medical technologies to treat chronic diseases. In his latest book, 7 Lessons for Leadership in Crisis he points out the importance of being deliberately systematic in staying positive in a crisis. To help leaders do this, he advocates learning and living by seven lessons:

Face reality, starting with yourself.

Don’t be Atlas; get the world off your shoulders.

Dig deep for the root cause.

Get ready for the long haul.

Never waste a good crisis.

You’re in the spotlight: follow your True North.

Go on offense: focus on winning now.

George also makes this observation about leaders: “Everyone inside and outside the company is watching what they do. It is imperative that they stay focused on their True North as it sets a standard internally for principled business behaviour and will make their companies stronger over time”