Adapt to the challenge

Adaptive leadership may sound like dry leadership theory, but it has proved its mettle in some of the most challenging real-life situations. Now children’s services leaders are putting it to the test with some encouraging results. Nick Bannister reports.

Policing in the incendiary atmosphere of Northern Ireland in the early years of the last decade might seem a world away from the realities of leading children’s services today.

The clashes between Protestant and Catholic communities stirred up during the summer marching season presented a major security challenge to the Province’s police force. The seriousness of the issue was visible to anyone who watched the scenes of violence and mayhem nightly on the TV news.

The challenge of tackling the unrest associated with one of the most notorious flashpoints, Drumcree, is an instructive scenario for a director of children's services (DCS) contemplating problems such as how to maintain key services with shrinking budgets. Both situations share a key characteristic: they are complicated, even intractable. In the current parlance of leadership theory, they are ‘wicked issues’.

For former police commander Irwin Turbitt, the problem of Drumcree required a radically different approach. His conclusion was that the police had not been able to restore law and order because they had got trapped into trying to act as a neutral referee in the conflict between loyalists and republicans.

Using the adaptive leadership theory developed by US academic Ron Heifitz, Irwin, now a senior fellow at Warwick University Business School’s Institute of Governance and Public Management, set about applying the new approach in negotiations with the Orange Order leadership.

“It’s about walking around the table to sit down beside the person…and work side by side with them on a solution.”

Adaptive leadership is, in short, a framework for managing ‘wicked’ issues where leaders take a more strategic and supportive role and allow the key players to take the lead in working out solutions.

“Wicked problems exist because of interaction of people,” says Turbitt. “Unlike technical problems on which there is generally an agreement about how to solve it, wicked problems don’t have a clear solution. People will have different views about the problem and different solutions. They often disagree about whether it’s solvable, who is to blame and who should fix it.”

A key feature of adaptive leadership is recognising that the people in the problem are necessary to work it out.

“We are very addicted to the idea that I give you a problem and you solve it and then give it back to me,” Turbitt says. “Adaptive leadership requires the work to be done in collaboration. It’s about walking around the table to sit down beside the person with the problem and work side by side with them on a solution.

This approach helped Turbitt and his colleagues to work with the Orange Order leaders and local residents, using the framework of the law as leverage to persuade each side that the primary responsibility for policing of the march lay with them and not the police.

It has paid dividends. Although Drumcree is still in Irwin’s words a “live issue”, there has been no violence for over seven years and it now costs no more to police than other similar-sized marching events.

For Anna Wright, Director of Children's Services at Reading Borough Council, Irwin Turbitt’s adaptive leadership approach to Drumcree has helped her tackle, albeit less dramatically, confrontational issues she faces in her authority. She is a participant on the National College’s DCS Leadership Programme and was introduced to the approach by Irwin at a recent residential session.

Reading, like many authorities nationally, is dealing with funding changes for early years and nursery provision designed to equalise the levels of funding for each child in the state, private and voluntary sector. The changes potentially mean less money for state provision and this has created conflict between the two sectors.

“We took the view that they needed to make decisions together so that they understand each others' perspective,” says Anna. “When we changed the way we managed it we got the two sectors together in a room. Both sides were really listening to each other. Some schools thought that private sector nurseries were in it for money and earned a big profit but they were earning less than the heads and some were recovering a basic salary. It debunked the perception that for the private sector it was all about profit-making. The group has come up with proposals that are now being sent to all schools for consultation, and these are of better quality then the ones we would have constructed without this dialogue.”

A key element of the adaptive leadership approach is for leaders to firstly take themselves out of the heart of the problem and put themselves on a metaphorical ‘balcony’ where they can observe the interplay of individuals involved in the issue and pinpoint who are the key players in what Irwin Turbitt calls “the dance”.

“There’s no simple manual we can use in tackling these issues.”

Murray Rose, DCS at Darlington Borough Council, said the ‘balcony’ approach had played a fundamental role in work to restructure his department and its priorities in the face of big budget reductions.

“There’s no simple manual we can use in tackling these issues,” he says. “It’s important to be able to take yourself out of the interplay and assess as objectively as you can what is going on.

“Everyone has been to a dance and knows that different people behave in very different ways at a dance. There are those who like to get involved and are first on the dance floor, while there are others who only dance with each other and there are others who sit on the sidelines and look on. The programme of transformation, when characterised as a dance, gives everyone a shared language to describe the participants."

Murray and his team took the dance analogy a step further by inviting all Darlington children’s services’ 600 staff to sessions in which they were asked to characterise themselves as participants in a dance, to think about their own part in the transformation programme.

The aim of this was to identify those who characterised themselves as willing to try new steps; be the first ‘out on the floor’. Murray and his team then tried to create the spaces for these people to learn the new ‘dances’. For example, colleagues could volunteer to work with managers in small working groups made up of individuals from across children’s services – called ‘action learning sets’ – with the brief of working out responses to key issues identified by staff, such as how to do more with less and how to get more agencies to share responsibility for service delivery to children and young people.

The transformation programme is now firmly in place and many of the staff who were involved in the action learning sets are now leading aspects of the programme.

This approach has resulted in some changes in how Darlington is planning to deliver many of its children’s services. A more targeted approach has seen the authority question its priorities in the delivery of youth work, for example. “We asked ourselves whether our youth work strategy should focus on providing Friday and Saturday night activities in anti-social behaviour hotspots, or delivering more general services across the board. Instead of a ‘buckshot’ approach, we’re going for a more targeted ‘bullet’ approach,” explains Murray.

Aidan Melling, operational director for DCS Leadership at the National College, said the aim of the DCS Leadership Programme was not to equip DCSs with technical skills but to give them the means to explore and understand the complexities of their role and the leadership that is required.

“The provision is based on real work. We get DCSs to talk about their own real work situation and how they apply their learning and then go back to their authorities and put it into action,” he says.

"Feedback has been excellent. One DCS described the programme as the best professional development she had received in 20 years."

For DCS Anna Wright adaptive leadership is much more than a theory – it’s a framework that has given her and her colleagues a fresh perspective on the complex issues that they regularly face.

“Occasionally I’ve found myself getting into heated discussions with leadership team colleagues and found myself or one of my team saying that it is time to get on the balcony,” she says. “We are constantly reminding ourselves to say this and it is proving invaluable.”