Robin Riley

Information Age Government

Tag: leadership (Page 1 of 2)

Leading with Self: Emotional Intelligence

January 29, 2020 / / 0 Comments

What it was

A one-day session on what it means to “lead self” in the context of a changing civil service, through being present and leading with emotional intelligence. Part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme. Held in London on 28 January 2020.

What I learned

Emotional intelligence

The Emotional intelligence Framework – drawn from (Goldman, D. “Working with emotional intelligence”) – gives ways in which people can be emotionally intelligent and suggests areas to develop.

A similar model is the diagram here: https://hbr.org/2017/02/emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-work-on

This model considers Self Vs Others and Awareness Vs Action

  • Awareness / self
    • Self awareness: Emotional self awareness
  • Awareness/ others
    • Social awareness: empathy, organisational awareness
  • Action /self
    • Self management: achievement orientation, adaptability, emotional self control, positive outlook
  • Action / others
    • Relationship management: conflict management, coach and mentor, influence, inspirational leadership, teamwork

Social Motivations

People typically have a combination of three social motivations:

  • Power motive: Primary test: Have an influence or make an impact on others
  • Achievement motive: Primary test: Meeting or exceeding a standard of excellence and or improving ones performance
  • Affiliation motive: Primary test: Maintaining or avoiding disruption of close friendly relations with people

People are often uncomfortable talking about power as a motivation!

Where things can go wrong:

  • Communication problems, including inability to listen or failure to speak up
  • Poor decision making processes, individual and group
  • Experienced experts can make poor choices and commit fundamental decisions making errors, especially under pressure

As a leader you need to be able to see when the team’s emotional engagement is blinding them to reality, for example failing to challenge assumptions, and leading to poor decisions.

Overall reflections on the day:

  • I find this subject hard to “do in the abstract” – I need to revisit this often and see how it can be applied at work.
  • I need to be braver and unafraid to challenge assumptions – especially from senior leadership.

What I will aim to do differently as a result

  • Get closer to the different teams and people – make more visits.
  • Understand what senior leaders want and worry about, talk to them.
  • Think about people’s motivations and how I can help them.
  • I will figure out a way of getting actions from these learning write ups into my task-tracking system
  • I will make time in my diary for leadership and reflection, and for follwing up on the actions from this course
  • Reflect on my social motives (impact and influence) and not to see it as bad, and reflect on the motives of others
  • I will aim to research how to develop greater focus, attention and self control (e.g. Pomodoro technique?)
  • Challenge assumptions and groupthink, have courage

Future Leaders Scheme – End-of-Scheme reflection and discussion

November 11, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What it was

A meeting to reflect on our collective learning with a cohort of people who had completed the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme in 2017/18/19, chaired by Director-General at MOD and held in February 2019.

In this blog post I have pasted the content of the end-of-scheme learning template that I completed in preparation for the meeting.

What I learned

What was your key learning from the Scheme?

  • Better grounding in commercial considerations
  • Importance of self-organising, planning and review for my learning
  • Preparation and considering my approach before meetings and engagements
  • The value of coaching with my team leaders and as a general approach to conversations
  • The need to ‘bring the outside in’ and harness external perspectives whenever the organisation needs to learn, grow, change or do new things
  • Importance of planning and directing senior conversations
  • Understanding my leadership style, and ensuring that I embody this

What has been your most important learning about yourself during your time on the scheme?

  • I have a distinctive leadership style with helpful and unhelpful elements
  • There is a place for my leadership style in the SCS (previously I had though there was not)
  • I am able to adapt my leadership style to suit
  • I need (and am broadly able) to create structure, context and continuity for myself as well as for the team
  • I need support on project management / team co-ordination tasks
  • My learning and development needs to be planned and managed
  • Reflection is a powerful tool that I am able to use

What has been your greatest challenge over the past 2 years and how have you addressed this?

Aside from on-the-job challenges, the greatest challenge has been finding time/energy to dedicate to learning and development. I have addressed this by:

  • Booking time in diary for learning, booking onto courses and insisting upon attending these even under sever diary pressures;
  • Making my learning public, making a public commitment to act upon learning and therefore more likely to follow through
  • Using some hours every week ‘dead time’ to focus on technical skills development. I have used the time to complete an online Python course (coding skills for data / analytics).

What were your departmental and corporate contributions during your time on the scheme?

  • Arranged and hosted 2 x Action Learning Sets at MOD
  • As part of the Experiment Group work, I developed, executed and analysed a randomised digital survey (analogous to a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT)) of the FLS cohort (80 responses) – which showed that allowing flexible working makes a very significant difference to the number of candidates who will apply for an SCS post.
  • Contributed to early phases of corporate challenge (was not able to participate in later stages)
  • Set up the ‘lift lobby group’ of people involved in defence change programmes.
  • Began publicly sharing (blogging) my learning

Overall comments on your experience of the scheme and what your next steps will be?

  • I feel I have developed tremendously while on the FLS.
  • Some of this development is likely due to my being on temporary promotion to SCS this year – however I feel I have developed much more during this stint on promotion than during my previous stint, with FLS being the key difference.
  • I posit that the FLS has given me a framework and discipline to reflect upon and contextualise, and so truly learn from, my experiences – rather than simply experiencing them!

What I will aim to do differently as a result

Looking to the future:

  • I want to continue learning about leadership and management
  • I will continue to develop my technical skills and pursue becoming an intelligent customer for Machine Learning and AI.
  • I will continue to seek out and apply for SCS1 opportunities
  • I will aim to seek out a delivery role, and leadership roles.
  • I will consider opportunities outside central Govt Departments
  • I wish to stay in the digital/data/information field but would consider opportunities elsewhere that gave me the leadership and delivery opportunities I need.

Deputy Director Leadership Programme – additional reflections

September 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

Some reflections on my overall learning, plus some miscellaneous learning from my notes, derived from the two days of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

What I learned:

Focus on personal impact:

  • Focus on the key six or so relationships (boss, close peers, direct reports) where you can make a difference.
  • Where can I take a leadership position? How can I be useful to the wider programme?

Find the bandwidth to be a leader:

  • Carve out time in the diary!
  • Carve out time within the framework you are already operating in… so for example, Use 5 or 10 mins within existing meetings – do some reflection, ask how we are doing, how are people feeling, do we understand what we are doing and why?
  • Just do it!  Stop operating and start leading. Just stop doing the operator or manager work – give it to someone else. You are making the conscious choice to be in a different mode.

Miscellaneous points

  • People watch what you do and how you act, be aware of the shadow you cast.
  • Be a lateral thinker – think of it like a dating agency – how can you join together different unconnected parties to the common good?
  • Like a lobster, it’s good to feel uncomfortable as you grow
  • The importance of being able to manage between ambiguity and clarity

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Re-engage on leadership and learning
  • Get back into coaching and mentoring (myself and others)
  • Carve out leadership time
  • Make the conscious decision to lead not just do work

Some specific actions:

  • Adapt and update my leadership statement
  • Update my learning and development plan
  • Make time for leadership thinking and review
  • Re-engage on networking and stakeholder engagement
  • Put in new learning time (Thursday and Tuesday nights)
  • Get this blog into better shape and be more disciplined in publishing my learning
  • Start gathering shareable data about my work and consider how to publish it
  • Set up some self-coaching – e.g. some automated tweets or a similar tool
  • Complete an exercise to capture my reflections from my time as Hd C&MI
  • Write up the EOY feedback and make this the basis of the next phase of learning

Leading with Self: The personal leadership statement

September 17, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

A talk, group and individual exercise led by Dionne Corradine. This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.


What I learned:

A personal leadership statement can help crystallise your leadership style, your aspirations, and what you offer to the people you work with. It can also be used as part of your objectives and to measure your progress.

A personal leadership statement takes time to develop and should be considered a work in progress – it can be a blend of where you are and where you want to be.  It should answer the question “Why should anyone be led by me?”

We conducted a brief exercise to generate a first-draft personal leadership statement.  Here is my draft:

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP STATEMENT – Ten-minute draft

What do I stand for?

  • The power of science, technology and information to do public good
  • The Integrity, impartiality and objectivity of the Civil Service
  • Experimentation and taking decisions based on evidence
  • The importance of collaboration 
  • Development and growth for all

Why follow me? Because I am:

  • Inspiring:
    • Try to see where the future is going and get there early
    • Always work collaboratively, cohering teams into action
    • Work to set a compelling vision and concepts 
    • Work to engage people and stakeholders in that vision
  • Confident:
    • Enjoy communicating, engaging and influencing
    • See and do things differently
    • Practice open leadership, working out loud and being open to feedback 
    • Volunteer and step in when things are going wrong
    • Try to influence thinking outside my area
    • Aim to be aware of myself, my impact and be reflective
  • Empowering:
    • Create a team that’s fun, supportive, loyal to each other
    • Keep myself and my team at the leading edge, by driving change and developing forward-leaning skills
    • Try to help my team achieve their development dreams
    • Encourage and reward reasonable challenge, listen to evidence
    • Enable teams to do new things in new ways

Things I’m trying to be better at:

  • Servant leadership
  • Planning and managing the pipeline of work
  • Staying always a leader, not a manager or operator 
  • Maintain technical skills and being an intelligent customer 
  • Coaching and mentoring my team leaders
  • Maintaining and growing my and my team’s networks

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Develop the statement above and then try to live it!
  • Bake my leadership statement into my personal objectives
  • Build in review / reminder points
  • Consider ways to test my performance against the statement
  • Get hold of the speaker’s slides for this session as they contained lots of useful thinking.

Leading through complexity and change

September 17, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

A crisis management case study (based on a real DFID example), talked through in respect of the actions and behaviours required of senior leaders, followed by some reflections on crisis experience from a leader, and a group exercise on our own responses to crises and change.

This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

 

What I learned:

As a group we identified some early things the senior leaders would have to consider:

What we are going to do:

  • The overall principles we would adopt
  • This is primarily about partnership and the stakeholders to be managed
  • What are the key risks – what action do we take against each?
  • What levers do we have on this problem?
  • The need for internal communications and keeping an eye on staff impact

Reflection during a crisis:

  • Are we the right people to be leading this?  Do we need to change leadership style or change leaders?
  • Capture the lessons – as a case study to inform the response to the next crisis
  • Is there an opportunity for a positive outcome from this crisis?
  • Setting the context for the multi-disciplinary team
  • Crisis management expertise – Is there a template we could follow?

Reflections on crisis management from a senior leader:

  • It’s really difficult to get into crisis mode, but easy to identify a crisis in retrospect! Someone in the team needs to be able to see when you are in crisis – maybe you!  
  • It’s better to over-react early than under-react, or you will always be playing catch-up.  
  • Try to get to the right policy answer as quickly as possible – otherwise you will be dragged  to the right answer eventually.
  • Keep the ability to see beyond the invested position – be able to be disinterested and impartial.
  • What are our levers?  Need to understand what realistically can be done
  • A simple tool – think what I need to do for my Organisation / Team / Self
  • It’s important for the senior leaders to understand their own strengths / weaknesses and what value they can bring.
  • Never waste a good crisis – look for opportunities for your organisation (and where applicable the wider UK) to take a leadership position – find a way for the energy of the crisis to be channelled into something valuable and enduring.

Outcomes of the group exercise on Complexity and Change

When a shock happens…

What do I think my teams will be thinking and feeling?

  • Uncertainty, afraid of the future, worry they will not be supported
  • Think about their hierarchy of needs.

What are your own personal thoughts and feelings?

  • Regret / paralysis – feeling responsible when I am not 
  • Worry about being under scrutiny
  • Worry about my decision-making and judgement under pressure

What you would want people to say about your leadership style

  • Decisive, sets clear context and priorities 
  • Leads under pressure
  • Keeps team welfare in mind

What action could you take now to better prepare yourself and your team?

  • Have someone you can trust that you can talk to 
  • Understand your stress behaviours
  • Take care of well-being and promote this behaviour in your team


What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Try to recognise when a crisis is happening – don’t be the boiled frog.
  • Be more open with my bosses when things are not going well (on any front) – be less afraid to ‘cry wolf’
  • Familiarise myself with the crisis management structures and learning in Government
  • Have a ‘buddy’ (or more than one) to baseline with in the event of a crisis
  • Adopt the PERMA framework to undertake some team well-being and hence resilience building.

Setting the Context – Leading with the Civil Service – Matthew Rycroft, Permanent Secretary, DFID

September 17, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

A talk from a senior leader about setting the global context, followed by group discussion.

This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

What I learned:

When people are stressed, as senior leaders we can rise up a level and set the context. Think what is the global context for your team – e.g. PESTLE – and then relate this down the chain.

The UK will need a clear view on what it excels at: for example higher education, rule of law / rules-based systems and compliance (some countries want to disrupt the rules-based system). We are open to innovation and ideas. The prevalence of the English language is hugely beneficial.

An interesting question – what does UK need to do to become as important as Google? For example – the UK’s ‘net zero’ carbon commitment is a huge leadership position

Try to identify the things in your area where things are changing but being less talked about – this may be where you will be able to add value.

Our teams need us not to be stressed – they need us to think “up and out” – what is the context? What is coming? What are our partners and competitors doing?

“Future – Engage – Deliver” is a simple model of what a leader should do:

  • Future – It’s important to find reasons for your team to be optimistic – but it must be pragmatic and hard-headed
  • Engage – Bring that vision to each team member, what can they contribute?
  • Deliver – Decide what real impact you as a team will make.

Context, ambiguity and leadership – group exercise

  • Different people see ambiguity at different levels – the team may not care about the strategic ambiguity you are worried about!
  • Leading through ambiguity is a key common challenge
  • What are my key context challenges right now? Uncertainty over op model and resourcing, which is having real impact on the team.
  • Prioritisation: Everyone thinks the level above them is the level that should be doing prioritisation and isn’t. The problem is every level thinks this! So you need to do it yourself.

Four thoughts on leadership:

  1. You need to make the job your own. Be yourself in the role, don’t try to be someone else. My reflection – I have been guilty of trying to act too much as I imagine my predecessor would have done.
  2. Only do what only you could do. Deliberately push things down so that you – and your team – can do more “up and out”. Don’t fall back down the ladder from Leader > Manager > Operator. Stay a Leader, don’t retreat into being manager when under pressure.
  3. People always think they are incredibly busy, however busy things actually are. Could you and your team go up a gear? If not then this is a sign of lack of resilience. Things can always get worse! So build resilience.
  4. Personal development is not just about becoming adequate at the things you aren’t very good at. Develop your strengths – turn your powers into superpowers! Don’t think of ‘development needs’ as a euphemism for areas where people are not very good.

You can get energy for work from your work!  Identify which parts of your work give you energy. Minimise those elements which sap your energy – power through them quickly.  Think which parts of the day / week / month you will need to have maximum energy and when you can coast or build energy.

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Research and remember the “Future / engage / deliver” framework
  • Think about my wider interests and where I can add value – presumably the use and exploitation of information?
  • Remember to set context for the team and help them explore and prepare for potential futures
  • Find ways to bring external context into the team, and external thinking.
  • Make the job your own – don’t always think “what would my predecessor have done?”
  • Do more “up and out” for the team and for yourself. 
  • Don’t fall back down the ladder from Leader > Manager > Operator. Stay a Leader!

Certified Agile Leadership

December 6, 2018 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

A two-day interactive course on the leadership aspects of agile, run by the Agile Centre in London on 6 and 7 December 2018.

This course forms the Scrum alliance certified agile leadership (CAL) credential 1

What I learned:

PRE-WORK

“Conversational turn-taking” and “Ostentatious listening” – These create psychological safety

The key principles behind agile:

* Law of the small team: Small teams working on small tasks in short iterative work cycles delivering value to customers
* Law of the customer: an obsession with continuously adding more value for customers
* Law of the network: coordinating work in an interactive network

Self managing, organising teams are productive and efficient

DAY ONE

Agile overview:

Our reasons for doing agile:
* Be more customer centric
* Respond quickly to change
* Reduce risk in complex projects
* Adaptability

Economic trends and market factors for Agile:
* Complexity
* Speed to market
* Demanding customers
* Staff empowerment
* Globalisation of markets

Complexity and uncertainty:
* Uncertainty around what
* Uncertainty around how

Low Uncertainty around what, low Uncertainty around how: E.g building a bridge
This is simple

Low or medium uncertainty around how or what
This is complicated

High Uncertainty around what, high uncertainty around how
This is chaos

The rest… This is complex. This is where agile thrives. You need fast feedback to make it work!

Agile is a response to the VUCA world. It is about incremental adaptive delivery, and course correction. Agile assumes you do not have perfect information up front

Management trends fitting to the business environment of the time:
* Assembly line working; a simple approach used in the 1900s
* Waterfall; useful in a complicated world of infrastructure projects , mid twentieth century
* Agile and Scrum; demanded by the VUCA world of early 21st century

There is a need to improve my organisation agility because:
* We face a VUCA world
* Our Customers do not fully understand what they want and need

Agile transformation:

The main areas are:
* Processes and practices
* Structure and policies
* Culture and leadership
Organisations tend to focus on processes and practices as these are easiest to change quickly
But you need to do all of them!
Most agile training and coaching also tends to focus on agile processes and practices – the idea that if everyone could write good user stories then everything would be OK!
Agile leadership focuses on the structures, policies, culture and leadership

Challenges an organisation might face in adopting agile:
* Lack of enablers
* Organisational silos

Main impediments in my organisation:
* Lack of resource and skills
* Enabling processes are not agile

Do we require mainly changes to processes, structures or culture?
The answer is structures and culture – processes we can do as we go!

What role will leadership play in the change?
* Set context, and then culture
* Make the case
* Deliver the changes

The Agile leader

Management is an old practice and was designed in the 1890s for a different world. We face new challenges:
* Exponential change
* Greater speed and competition
* Knowledge advantage is hard to sustain
Management was created to solve a problem, to get people to do what you wanted, and not think too hard. The world has changed, now we need to exploit thinking, creativity and knowledge.
Organisational agility is one on the biggest correlates of business performance
Leadership agility is a key component of organisational agility

A model for leadership agility:
* Expert leaders
* Achiever leaders
* Catalyst leaders

The catalyst leader works to create the right culture, though actions and behaviour, to encourage and empower senior team leaders. They articulate an inspiring vision and empower and develop others to make it a reality.

Exercise: I am spending too much time doing, not enough leading, and hardly any coaching. I should be doing more coaching, and some leading, and much less doing! This resonated strongly with me. I am operating as an achiever leader, but it’s critically important for me to be a catalyst leader!

For agile to take root, we need catalyst leaders across the organisation.

“Post-heroic leadership”: leaders who develop beyond the achiever level to create highly participative teams and organisations characterised by shared commitment and responsibility

Agile culture

Culture can make an enormous difference to productivity
Organisational culture is the most frequently identified blocker to agile
“If you do not manage culture, it manages you”
Creating the right culture is the most important thing you do as a leader

Competing values in organisations
* Collaborate
* Control
* Create
* Compete

For ‘control’ (hierarchical) organisations like ours, compatibility with agile is inherently low. Processes and procedures often outweigh people and products. Governance can become burdensome and hierarchies are often a barrier to change. The best Agile framework to lead with in a control organisation is Kanban or SAFe.

There is a simple framework to help organisations understand how they need to change they culture to become more agile friendly

We must work hard collectively to create an enabling culture. Without that, Agile values, principles and practices will never survive.

DAY TWO

Increasing engagement

Organisations with engaged employees achieve 250% higher net revenues than their competitors with disengaged employees

Increase engagement through:
* Autonomy, ability to be self directed
* Mastery, ability to get better and learn new skills
* Purpose, bring about positive change

Need a growth mindset to lead in an agile context

From the David Marquette talk:
* Leadership is about embedding the potential for greatness
* If you want people to think, give intent not instructions
* Get your people to think what you are thinking, ask them what do you think I am thinking?
* Move the authority where the information is.
* Don’t take control and attract followers
* Give control and create leaders

Reflection: I prefer thinking and doing on leading and coaching my team and managing stakeholders than I do about the actual mechanics of my day job. I should sacrifice the day job for leadership, not the other way round!

Agile structures

To realise the efficiency of agile the organisation structure must be such that it can. Creating small agile teams in organisations not designed for agility will not likely give these efficiencies.

Lessons from the case studies:
* Communicating across teams and giving everyone a whole system view, so that everybody had some understanding of the whole
* Accepting that communication is necessary even if it comes with a local efficiency cost
* The complex interaction of parts

The common themes:
* Moving from efficiency to adaptiveness
* Removing silos and hand offs
* Invest in shared understanding
* Creating radical transparency
* Remove barriers to communication
* Decentralising decision making

Three waves: one single teams, scrum. Two, Scaled agile, three is the agile business

Organisation design

Scrum team is cross functional and has all of the necessary skills
Analyse, build, test, release quickly in an agile increment
Get teams to spend time with each other, encourage those relationships
Organising by feature not by function
Attributes that contribute to competitive advantage, in order
* Passion (contributes most)
* Creativity
* Initiative
* Intellect
* Diligence
* Obedience (contributes zero)

Management practices tend to maximise the bottom two, and ignore the top three. This is the wrong way round!
Collocation is key. Once people are more than ten metres apart, the chance of them collaborating drops off significantly

Great teams are
* Collocated
* Self organising
* Psychologically safe

Agile Governance

Governance is doing the right things, and doing things right

The (absurd) underlying assumptions of traditional project governance
* It is possible to know up front the best things to build to delight our customer
* Our is possible to know up front how much it will cost and how long
* Centralised bureaucracies are best placed to pick winning ideas
* Things will change little as we progress
* It is sensible to place big bets on minimal information

Better to have an experimentation pot, fund all business cases at small scale and then cancel the ones that are not successful, than choose a few big bets and give them all the funding up front.

Have an empowered product manager, with ‘control tribes’ alongside e.g. compliance, finance, legal.
This actually gives the control tribes more control, as they keep a tight rein in the money and can relate this closely to success, rather than signing over all the money at the start
The sprint review becomes the governance meeting

Leading the change

Nine steps, in order:
1. Align on the vision – why are we doing this?
2. Educate leadership
3. Align on current culture
4. Align on desired culture
5. Align on desired structure
6. Align on the starting framework – e.g. scrum
7. Establish the agility team
8. Educate all the teams
9. Experiment, measure, evolve – run small experiments and measure impact

Start with why. Need a sense of urgency among senior leaders
Get leaders to understand. Make them choose red or blue pill – are they really up for this?
The agility team, also known as the executive action team, establish the backlog of changes needed and deliver them in an agile way. Organisational change is the product.
They are a cross-functional team of empowered leaders

Complex change requires all five of the following in place
* Vision
* Skills
* Incentives
* Resources
* Action plan

Learning from the Q and A session:

Working in a truly agile business can be very empowering and refreshing… But then you get all the approvals very quickly then you have to deliver, so be careful what you ask for!

What I will aim to do differently as a result

This course contained much of immediate value to my work, and much that I could follow up on. I need to reflect on the courses content in slower time to determine how this could change my strategy in digital transformation

As a team leader, I need to:
* Create context for my team leaders
* Reforge the senior team
* Invest time in team leadership
* Be outward facing, talk to our customers

I need to move from expert leader, through achiever leader, to catalyst leader. I will significantly re-prioritise my week and my time in order to make sure I am coaching and catalysing, not doing.

I will Coach my team to use the framework to do some analysis on what our organisation needs to do to create an agile enabling culture

I will recognise that I can improve, my performance is not fixed

I will reflect to senior staff that agile is a leadership style and leadership capability, as much as it is a technical / project management approach

I will examine how the recipe for agile transformation can be applied to defence, can agile transformation be reflected in our wider strategy?

Health and well-being: Confident leaders

November 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

What it was

Half-day session on health and well-being for senior leaders, delivered by Bailey & French at the BEIS conference centre, London on 21 November 2018.

What I learned

Mental health accounts for 25% of MOD civilian sickness absence
Reflecting on three positive things from your work day at the end of the day for two weeks has been shown to have a positive effect on wellbeing months later
A simple model for wellbeing is PERMA (prof Martin Seligman, authentichappiness.org):

  • Positive emotions
  • Engagement
  • Relationships
  • Meaning
  • Accomplishment

Each of these is measurable and teachable.
Lots of work done has been done to address mental illness, but less effort on mental wellbeing, which can be thought of as getting people from the middle of the scale to the top, rather than from the bottom to the middle.

As a group we reflected on times when we had felt well-being along the lines of the PERMA headings, what had enabled this, and how we could help create this for our own teams.

I reflected on how a programme re-prioritisation exercise with one of my teams had left both them and me feeling empowered, better able to perform, more motivated, and less stressed about the amount work.

What I will aim to do differently as a result

I’ll aim to do something from each part of the PERMA model.

  • Positive emotions: Reflect on three positive things from your work day
  • Engagement: Set aside time for a flow activity and with the team
  • Relationships: Set up more coffee meetings with senior colleagues
  • Meaning: Set context, show the outcome even if intangible, phrase achievement as outcomes. Create meaning for the team.
  • Accomplishment: Have a good system for non financial reward and recognition with the team, find out ways to set this up.

Inclusive Leadership

November 20, 2018 / / 0 Comments

What it was

A half day’s training in London on 20 November 2018, attended as part of the Future Leaders Scheme.

What I learned

  • There are broadly three components of inclusive leadership:
  • Culture
  • Relationships
  • Decision making style

Inclusive culture

  • Imagine a time you felt alone in a crowd. How did you feel/think? How did thismake you behave? How might others have interpreted this?
  • Psychological safety: a shared belief that the team is a safe environment to put oneself at risk
  • Psychologist standing: a sense of entitlement to speak up and act
  • Servant behaviour: collective goals and team working for one another
  • Components of trust: cognitive (are they technically capable), affective (do Iget on with them), transactional (do what they say they will do)

Culture tips:

  • Actively encourage everyone to contribute
  • Listen to different views and challenge
  • Value others expertise and experience
  • Create a sense on entitlement to speak up

Inclusive Relationships

  • Building team cohesion:
    • Creating a shared team identity
    • Avoiding fault lines
    • Avoiding favourites
  • Investing time:
    • Get to know people as individuals
    • Increase contact with people from different backgrounds
    • Mentoring people from under represented groups
  • Networks:
    • Diversity of your network
    • Developing their networks

Relationship tips:

  • Conduct a network analysis – how inclusive are you?
  • Work as a team, not sub groups
  • Challenge yourself, don’t go to the usual suspects
  • Invest time
  • Mentor someone different

Inclusive decision-making

  • Openness versus perception of risk
  • Flexibility
  • Avoid gut instinct
  • Awareness of bias
  • Bias thrives under these decision making conditions: Pressure, high cognitive load, need to reach closure, overall impressions, tiredness
  • Micro-messaging: brief verbal and non verbal interactions that make people feel under valued, undermined and excluded
  • Negative micro- behaviours: interrupting, assumptions / benevolent attitudes, limited eye contact, ignoring contributions
  • Micro- affirmations: Non verbal: eyes, body language, acknowledgment, time and attention; Verbal: involving, encouraging; Recalling: remembering (contribution)

Decision making tips:

  • Understand your biases
  • Stand back and look at how decisions are being taken
  • Set the right conditions
  • Be aware of micro behaviours
  • Listen to diverse points of view

We completed a quick inclusive leadership assessment. Actions to address these weakest areas are captured below.

  • My strongest areas were:
    • Psychological safety
    • Openness
    • Flexibility
  • My weakest areas were:
    • Investing time
    • Diverse networks
    • Psychological standing

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Actions to create a more inclusive culture:
    • Allow time for people to speak up, and not just at the end
    • Ask people to say what they want out of the meeting, then cover that
    • Make more time with team leaders to discuss things, not just updates
  • Actions to create more inclusive relationships:
    • Spend more time with my teams at other sites, don’t just go for a meeting and leave
    • Involve a wider set of people in planning and senior team meetings
    • Become a mentor e.g. to a staff member from a minority group
    • Make appointments with colleagues outside my area and increase network contact
  • Actions to create more inclusive decisions:
    • Have one to ones with team members other than team leads. Some people may not feel able to speak up in a group
    • Try the Harvard bias ( implicit association) test

Health and Safety for Senior Executives

October 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

What it was:

A day of talks and discussions followed by a written test, held in London on 30 October 2018.

What I learned:

H&S leadership:

  • A leader sets culture, directs activity. Leadership is more people focused than a manager. A leader thinks long term and strategically, is proactive rather than reactive.
  • A leader can take risks that a manager then manages.
  • Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.
  • Management is mainly about process. Leadership is mainly about behaviours.
  • Leadership is “getting people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it” – Dwight Eisenhower
  • Leaders are absolutely key to health and safety. Health and safety regulators look to the leadership first.

Contrary to popular and press opinion, very few things are prohibited by health and safety legislation. Most risks can be managed.

Good health and safety management has numerous benefits aside from keeping people healthy and safe:

  • Productivity
  • Efficiency, financial
  • Confidence and empowerment
  • Reputation
  • Good Health and safety management allows you to do riskier things!

Health and safety requires consultation.

Three reasons for good standards of health and safety management:

  • Moral: having a mind for others
  • Legal: achievement of minimum standards, statute and case law
  • Financial: fines, insured and uninsured costs, insurance premiums, customer expectations.

Note that MOD has crown immunity and is underwritten by the treasury!

Video case study – “the call” :

What costs (in the widest sense) were involved?

  • Human costs of all involved
  • Time and effort for the investigation and potentially prosecution
  • Legal costs and fines
  • Distraction from the business, unable to function normally
  • Loss of business

Bad things will happen. It is possible to do too much on health and safety, at the expense of other things.

What lessons can be taken forward?

  • Have a plan for if things go badly wrong
  • Don’t  be complacent, take action after an accident
  • Consider conducting spot checks – trust but verify
  • In health and safety law, you are effectively guilty until proven innocent
  • Need to be wary of internal checking, it can lead to complacency and box-ticking

The Accident Iceberg

  • For every £1 in insured costs (injury, ill health, damage)
  • …There is £8-£36 in uninsured costs (product damage, plant/building damage etc.)
  • What goes challenged eventually becomes the norm.

Investigating accidents

  • Loss causation
  • Accidents and incidents
  • The ‘multiple causation tree’
  • Outcomes of an event:
    • A1. Injury
    • A2. Loss
    • B1. Near miss

Near misses are hugely valuable. Very few get reported, although the aviation industry is better at doing it.

Investigating an event: Event > Immediate causes > Underlying causes > Root causes
People often don’t get beyond the immediate cause

Immediate causes:
• Unsafe actions
• Unsafe practices

Underlying causes:
• Job
• Organisationn
• Environment

Root causes:
• Management and leadership failures

Not every event can be tracked back this far.

RIDDOR: reporting of injury diseases and dangerous occurrences regulations, set which sorts of injuries etc must be reported by law. E.g. fractures. Reported internally and then in block to the HSE
HSE estimate that only 25% of RIDDOR reportable incidents in industry get reported

Corporate governance

  • HSE: ” for many organisations, health and safety is a corporate governance issue…”
  • Best practice approach: “leading health and safety at work” INDG417
  • This is guidance not law. But could be used as a proxy to best practice in court.

Key actions:

  • Have a health and safety policy
  • health and safety represented on the board
  • Communication of the policy
  • Non exec scrutiny may be useful

Page 16, Paragraph 4 – implies that a jury world consider this guidance in a case even though it is not law. In effect, following this guidance would help you to ‘prove your innocence’

HSE research report 450 – these are case studies that identify and exemplify boards of directors who have championed health and safety

The HSE is a hugely useful source of information and advice on health and safety for senior leaders

Common law duty of care:

  • The duty of every person to take reasonable care over their acts and omissions with regards to themselves and others
  • Failure to do enough may constitute Tort (civil wrong) of negligence, based on:
  • Duty owed (you have a duty to people under your control when they are at work)
  • Duty breached
  • Loss resulted (must be actual loss, not potential)
  • Usually people sue (not prosecute) the employer not the line manger
  • Reasonable foreseeability is important
  • The harmed claimant may be awarded compensation for loss
  • Applies to you in your personal life as well as professional life, E.g. you leave a hole in your driveway and someone breaks their leg!

Employer’s duty of care:

Employer’s obligation to provide:
Safe plant and equipment (and premises)
Safe systems of work and adequate supervision
Competent staff

Tests of liability as regards negligence as above: duty owed, duty breached, loss

Vicarious liability – employers carry liability for the Torts (e.g. negligent actions) of their staff that take place during the course of employment (or under their control)

The overall legal framework:

Health and safety is a mixture of both common and statute law:

Common law:

  • Made by judges. Case law
  • Based on precedent
  • The injured party sues.
  • Civil law
  • Concerns the rights of persons

Statute law:

  • Made by parliament
  • Acts and regulations
  • The crown prosecutes.
  • Criminal law
  • Concerns the rights of society

The Health and Safety at Work Etc. Act 1974 aimed to apply to everyone working (even if unpaid), replacing the existing raft of legislation that was industry-specific. Came into force 1 April 1975.

Health and safety criminal law: Employer responsibility

Generally based on:
” So far as is reasonably practicable” – SFAIRP
Which is deemed equivalent to “as low as reasonably practicable”. – ALARP

…which means a balance between cost and risk. It does not require risk to be zero, only minimised.

Under the act, employers are to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of employees;
• Provision and maintenance of safe plants and systems of work
• safe use, handling, storage and transport of articles and substances
• provision of information, instruction, training and supervision
• places of with with safe access and egress maintained in a safe condition (note, this applies to all work locations even if outside)
• a safe and healthy working environment with adequate welfare facilities (e.g. showers, lockers etc)
• also, to conduct their undertaking with a duty to non-employees e.g. visitors, public, contractors

The managing health and safety at work regulations set out what is recommended in more detail.

Practical means useful, effective, usable (a practical stage chair)
Practicable means doable, achievable

Every employer with >5 employees must have a health and safety policy statement, and arrangements for health and safety

Defence H&S policy

Defence Safety Authority publication, DSA01.1 “Defence policy for health, safety and environmental protection”
Sets overarching policy on:

  • Responsibilities in defence activities
  • Risk management
  • Checking and performance reporting
  • Competence, information and training

DSA01.2 “Implementation of defence policy for for health, safety and environmental protection” covers the implementation. This includes guidance on culture. Essentially these publications expand on the secretary of state’s health and safety statement

DSA01.2 sets out the Defence safety and environmental management system, which is itself based on INDG417, the national and international standard

Four steps to implementation

  • Plan
  • Do
  • Check
  • Act

Designers and suppliers and employee responsibility

Designers and suppliers have a responsibility for equipment etc. And if you alter a piece of equipment you may have liability.

Health and safety at work act says these responsible apply:

Designers, manufacturers, importers and suppliers:
Safe by design and in provision i.e. fit for purpose
Adequate training and examination
Provision of suitable information for use, etc

Employees:
Duty to themselves and others
Duty to cooperate with employer
Duty to report any hazard they become aware of (this is key, and new)

Personal responsibility

HASWA section 37: senior managers have responsibility if consent connivance or neglect can be proven, and are guilty of an offence

HASWA section 36: act or default: if a senior person directs a junior person to do something that beaches health and safety, both parties are potentially guilty of the same offence

The Directors Disqualification Act – potentially 15 years, although not applicable to public authorities

HASWA enforcement in MOD

HSE cannot issue Improvement or Prohibition notices on MOD or its agencies add they are an exempt crown body. However:

HSE can issue Crown Enforcement Notices – these are adminstrative notices which in practice have the same effect as Improvement or Prohibition Notices

HSE cannot take prosecution action in a criminal court but can take a Crown Censure – an adminstrative sanction that is taken very seriously by Crown Bodies

HSE target enforcement areas across all organisations:

  • Work at height
  • Management of legionella potential
  • Management of asbestos
  • Pedestrian and vehicle interaction
  • Unplanned maintenance work
  • Management of vibration

MOD personal responsibility

Duty Holding

  • This is essentially how MOD ensures personal responsibility for health and safety down the command chain.
  • Based on controls, ‘risk to life’ and ALARP
  • Duty Holders must have a formal letter of delegation and a valid course certificate
  • Some specific “risk to life” activities always require a duty holder due to their high risk nature.

Personal responsibility – general reminders

  • Challenge yourself in relation to your role and responsibilities against INDG417
  • Ask yourself – am I doing enough? Am I meeting the MOD need?
  • Read the small print – look for shall / will / must
  • Remember good communication is essential, including job descriptions
  • If you are not going to do it, don’t say it
  • Remember ‘NA, FOF!’ – never assume, find out first!

Gross negligence and fatalities

Possible charges available for individual:
Gross negligence manslaughter (rare apart from ‘one man bands’)
Note: it is generally not the policy of the courts to put the firm out of business

Corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide act 2007

This applies to public authorities

  • Gross breach of duty of care
  • Conduct that falls far below what can reasonably be expected of the organisation in the circumstances
  • Reckless behaviour
  • Breach by senior management in organising or managing activities

MOD has some exemptions:

  • Operations where the armed forces come under attack or threat of attack
  • Activities in support of such operations
  • Training of a hazardous nature, necessary to maintain effectiveness of the armed forces

Management regulations 1999

These require the Employer to have suitable arrangements for health and safety in place
Record > planning > organisation > control > monitoring > review of protective and preventative measures

Risks resulting from MOD activities *must* be risk assessed
• Are based on initial hazard identification
• Must be suitable and sufficient

*Hazard is the potential for harm
*Risk is the chance of damage combined with the harm that could result i.e. impact times probability or likelihood versus severity
Controls and mitigation are to be SFAIRP / ALARP

ERIC.PD – mnemonic for risk mitigation:

  • Eliminate
  • Reduce
  • Isolate
  • Competent person
  • PPE
  • Discipline (safe place, safe person)

Health, as well as safety

  • Five times as many cases of ill health as of safety
  • 1.2 million suffer work related ill health annually
  • Workplace injuries and ill health (excluding cancer) cost UK society an estimated £14.3bn in 2014/15
  • The main issue is ill health not accidents, e.g.
    • Asbestos related disease
    • Noise and vibration
    • Asthma
    • Stress issues
    • Dermatitis

Human factors and behaviours

  • Defined by the HSE in HSG48: “environmental, organisational. Job factors are human characteristics which influences behaviour at work in a way that can affect health and safety
  • SQEP: having knowledge and experience to undertake a task safely
  • Some roles may require ongoing verification of competence
  • Engagement and communication
  • Safety culture has a serious effect
  • Visible leadership is key
  • Ignore human factors at your peril!

Summary: Key principles that underpin good health and safety performance:

  • Assessment and review
  • Worker involvement
  • Strong and active leadership – peer influence is very strong
  • Things to consider – Are near misses being reported?

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

  • Read the HSE guiee in full and consider any local actions
  • Read DSA01.1 and DSA01.2. Use the plan-do-check-act methodology to recover my actions
  • Use next team day to check that everyone understands the people and processes for reporting health and safety incidents
  • Set tone for reporting accidents, reporting and acting on concerns, and fire drills
  • Have a wellbeing focus at next team day
  • Seek advice from internal authorises around reasonable actions for health and safety in my area
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