- Being approachable?
- Believing in you?
- Inspiring you to go further?
- Knowing you as a person?
- Supporting you if something goes wrong?
- Calm in a crisis?
What else?
In traditional approaches to leadership and management in western society, we have treated people a bit like machines. In the days of the industrial revolution, scientific management saw people reduced to being mere “cogs in a machine”. The emphasis on maximum output.
When dealing with tame problems like “how many widgets can you make in an hour“, this works well. Somewhere there is a known way to tackle the problem, your job is just to find out how. Your staff then, just ned to learn the “thing” and get really good at doing the “thing”. Over time productivity and efficiency go up.
But if you are dealing in complexity, with wicked problems like; how to end poverty, stop homelessness, or reducing the number of children in care, then this thinking no longer works so well because when dealing with wicked, complex problems what we need is multiple perspectives and clumsy solutions that emerge over time in conjunction with the environment.
This requires teams who can collaborate effectively to achieve organisational goals in volatile, uncertain, changing and ambiguous (VUCA) environments.
And this requires teams who know and trust each other enough to create a culture of helpfulness and innovation. Of support and challenge. Of high nurturing and high expectations. For this we turn our attention to Restorative Practices.
Restorative Practices are an approach to leadership and management that focusses on building healthy relationships where there is sufficient trust for people to disagree well, collaborate effectively and they are empowered to find their own best solutions.
I remember in my early days as a shiny new manager, thinking I needed to have all the answers. I hadn’t yet learned that my real job was to ask the right questions.
Then everything changed when I met a fantastic leader who embodied relational and restorative practice.
Relational and restorative is about a way of being that respects people’s natural autonomy through a balance of high support AND high challenge.
It is concerned with building, maintaining and deepening relationships, as well as repairing relationships after harm. Creating a culture of humility, where vulnerability in leadership is a superpower because when leaders can approach complexity and innovation from a mindset of working WITH each other, rather than doing TO or FOR them, we can unleash the absolute best in our teams.
This is far from fluffy, and it is no place for slackers. In culture’s like this, “Conflict is frequent because candour is safe” (Margaret Heffernan)
And it all starts with you!
What do you bring to your interactions? To what extent do you approach management with an attitude of “help me understand” instead of asking “why did that happen?”.
- How well do you know your staff?
- How well do they know each other outside of their job description?
- What happens when someone makes a mistake?
- How honest can people be?
This requires us as leaders and managers to break our conditioning from traditional punitive approaches that tell us we must “hold people accountable” (AKA find someone to blame).
What an overwhelming amount of evidence from neuroscience and psychology tells us, is that if your team are in a state of fight, flight or freeze, then all the rules and punitive measures you can throw at them won’t change the fact that in a year from now, nothing will have changed and no one will have moved forward.
Why would you expect anyone to manage risk and innovate in a culture where leaders think their job is to “keep people in line”?
What you get instead, ironically, is a lack of accountability. Blame and shame flying about all over the place.
And this transfers to the front line because when the boss kicks the staff, the staff kicks the customer, and on it goes. My husband describes this as “shit rolls downhill”. Forgive the French but you get the idea.
Now think back to the first bit of this blog, about what matters to you in your relationships with managers or leaders. What kind of leader do you want to be? What kind of culture do you want to set?
What leaders need is coaching, what their teams need is to see their leaders doing it! (Saleem Tariq, OBE)
As a Relational and Restorative Practice Lead, I spend the majority of my time coaching leaders, and working with their teams to develop healthy, effective cultures.
I work at all levels with people managers and leaders. Some are new to their role and want to get off on the right foot.
Others are more experienced managers and leaders who have found their way by watching how their leaders did it, developing what works for them and now are hitting inevitable bumps in the road that all teams experience from time to time. Issues are rearing their heads, and they want to tackle them in a way that strengthens trust in the team.
Maybe you found your way into management and leadership because you were good at doing the job and so you got promoted to managing and leading the job (a whole different job!) but you have never been taught how to develop a team that can think and act for themselves, and work well together.
If you want to maximise your management and leadership potential book a free discovery call to find out all the ways Restorative Leadership Coaching can help.
This is not just another personal development programme, and its not just another thing to add to your “to do” list. This is the stuff I do with managers and leaders at all levels who want to transform and accelerate their leadership impact and develop a culture of connection, compassion and accountability that maximises outcomes.
This is a psychologically informed, evidence based, tried and tested. It is coaching with strategies you can put straight into practice.
You will gain clarity on:
- How to move anyone to a place of accountability, and stop them coming to you for the answers all the time
- How to help your team stop blaming and shaming, and stepping into ownership instead
- How to step into your leadership with confidence
Most importantly, you will begin to develop a way of being that can have a transformative effect on you, your leadership, and anyone you work with.