Listening to Each Other: recruiting the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘How can organisations recruit the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear?’ The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
It is possible for organisations to recruit extensively from within the communities served, and so become mirror images of their communities.
But recruitment is only a first step. Organisations need to enable people who are appointed as staff or volunteers to be comfortable, creative, and accepted.
Flexible working practices, and a working environment that supports well-being, can make a big difference, as well as enhancing levels of team commitment.
It is possible to go further, to establish teams with a high level of autonomy which are of the community, rather than of the organisation.
Organisations constantly ‘other’ those who come from the communities served, thereby marginalising them. Overcoming this, and establishing a ‘team of us’ requires a profound power and culture shift.
By that mustn’t mean patronising these who have lived experience. And we need to establish teams that are truly diverse, even (and especially) when that feels uncomfortable.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is ‘How do we recruit the right people? The people best placed to listen and act on what they hear are most likely to come from the very communities the organisations serve.’
We started with two presentations:
Arvinda Gohil, CEO of Central YMCA
Arvinda explained that we need to start with listening, as the first rung on a ladder, then move to dialogue, to engagement, to involvement, to empowerment, and then to passing on power. But as a sector we have failed at the first step. We haven’t made our organisations mirror images of the communities in which we operate.
When people say, ‘You are not the right fit for us’, what does that mean? It means essentially that those leading organisations are only comfortable with people who are the same as themselves.
Good leaders have to challenge this, all the time. Questioning who we who we work with, who we entice into the organisation. This requires great tenacity, said Arvinda.
Opening the door is not enough. The organisation needs to enable people who enter to be comfortable, creative, and accepted.
The strategies we have tried on the past have failed, and we need to try new things. We have to take risks and be willing to make mistakes, learn from them, and evolve.
For example, leaders can seek out the ‘hidden gems’ within their team, those who are often unrecognised, and invest in them as bridge-builders, giving them time, empowering them to link to the community and to make changes in the ways things are done.
And it is better to ask people ‘What are the terms that would work for you?’ rather than ‘Can you work within the terms we offer?’
Nasim Qureshi, CEO of Inspired Neighbourhoods
Nasim described how Inspired Neighbourhoods started just eight years ago, and now provides a range of services, across four different communities within or close to Bradford. This includes, for example, mental health and physical health support, domiciliary care, employment advice, enterprise advice, and a library.
For each of its locations, the organisation drew a two-mile radius and sought to understand all the networks and communities within that area.
Before any project is started, there is a period of co-design with the community. This makes it harder to apply for grant funding, which usually requires that what will be delivered is already pre-determined. For this reason, earned income is preferable, because this allows the organisation to operate more flexibly.
Each centre has a community advisory Board, and the Chair of each advisory Board sits on the main Board. So community voice travels continually up and down, and this achieves a level of intelligence that could not be obtained from any number of surveys. There is no need to spend money on marketing and promotion to the community, said Nasim, because the connections are already in place.
The process is not just about co-design, it is also about co-delivery. People from within the various communities become volunteers, and they have written roles and responsibilities, and training opportunities. Most of the paid employees started off that way. There are now 60 employees and 42 volunteers. The library service is entirely run by community volunteers.
Staff are employed on a competency basis. 95% of the workforce is peripatetic. Nasim has a simple principle: ‘If we are sitting in a room, we are not working with the community.’
The organisation does not use time sheets, and employees work the flexible hours that are needed to deliver services, often outside standard hours, responding to emergencies, while balancing their own childcare or other family needs. Nearly all staff give more than their 37 contracted hours, and turnover is very low.
Many employees have lived experience of the difficulties the organisation is seeking to address. It is a disability-friendly organisation, and a lot of attention is paid to mental well-being within the team.
The Board composition in 90-95% local.The organisation is responsive to its communities because of the people in it, the informal conversations that happen all the time.
Inspired Neighbourhoods decided to establish a summer school service, to gain greater insights into how lives of children and young people have been changing in recent years. In the area selected for this service, the organisation partnered with a large number of local community organisations, building on their strengths, and reaching people they were not otherwise in contact with. They also involved the police, schools and statutory bodies, and were able to influence the City-wide strategy, inviting the Council Chief Executive and others into discussions with the young people, letting them speak for themselves.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can we build teams that mirror our communities and as a result are better at listening and following through? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses to the question:
Establish teams which ‘are the community’
In the past some organisations have taken a community development approach (employing people with specialist community development skills to enter a community and work with local people), or they have taken a partnership approach (forming partnerships with local community organisations to reach more people).
A more radical approach is to build local teams which are the community, in other words entirely or predominantly made up from the local community, who may be actual or potential service users, and who will be able to act as authentic community connectors. The challenge of an organisation supporting such a team is to provide it with genuine autonomy, so that it is able to operate as the community’s team, rather than the organisation’s team.
To do this well can take considerable time, and it is not easy, especially where organisations already have a deeply embedded way of operating, and it is made even more difficult when funders don’t allow sufficient flexibility.
But it can be surprising and encouraging to discover that quite a few organisations are now going in this direction. (And some funders too. For example the National Lottery Community Fund in Wales has introduced a funding stream to encourage more co-production.)
And it is always important, it was felt, to go where the energy is, building on what is already there.
Reduce ‘othering’
Organisations struggle to reduce the distinctions between those who are staff and those who are service users. How can we genuinely become a “team of us”, rather than professionals on the one hand and lived experts on the other?
We ‘other’ all the time in our language, our service models, our business planning, and the moment we do so we create a power imbalance.
For example a local community organisation run by Asian women immediately becomes ‘othered’ and then marginalised, because they are seen as niche and not mainstream.
We need to shift our perception of value, it was suggested, towards people and organisations which are from the communities served, instead of seeing them as niche and therefore as of less value.
Avoid patronising those with lived experience.
Designating people as lived experience experts, or as co-production partners, can lead to patronising behaviours, where those people are not challenged in the same way as other colleagues would be.
Those with lived experience are often more ready to tell their own story than to listen to others. It is important to recognise that listening is a distinctive skill, which needs to be nurtured.
Sometimes people with lived experience can become gatekeepers, and end up becoming a barrier for others, including those who have lived experience but different interpretations of their experience.
There is a difference between lived experience and lived expertise. Reflecting only on one’s own experience is different from possessing sufficient emotional and mental distance to critically assess what you are offering as an insight.
Build diversity even when that is uncomfortable
The recruitment processes matter, for example establishing balanced panels, not asking for qualifications that are not required, considering where best to advertise the roles.
Mirroring the community must not just become a tick-box exercise in representation.
There is a danger of focusing only on protected characteristics, instead of remembering the importance of diversity of thinking and approach. We need to be more willing to work with people whose political or social views we find difficult. And to establish safe spaces where people can test each other and learn from each other.
We mustn’t be afraid of diversity in our teams.
Shift and share power
We cannot share power, we reminded each other, without leaving our egos behind.
One suggestion was that leaders should always take on a direct delivery project, however small, so that they understand the system, and gain experience at first hand. Rather than simply telling others what to do they will find themselves entering into real conversations.
Now is a good time to shift our practices, it was suggested. Not least because many organisations have recognised that many things went better during the pandemic, when those at the front-line of services were making independent decisions, while office-based staff were on furlough or sitting at home.
It was felt that people from the communities served, who are playing advisory roles, should be given real power to review and shape services.
There might also be something to learn from the retail world, where consumers play a role in determining the success or otherwise of the stores they shop in. In the social sector (bearing in mind that relationships rather than transactions are usually what matter most) can we arrange things so that the success of our organisation is in the hands of our customers/service users?
Listen and engage better
There are challenges of personality – some people find it easier to be present, others have to work hard at this. Nancy Kline’s ‘Time to Think’ describes a practice of listening which fosters an environment where people can do their best thinking together as equals.
Does a flatter organisation produce better engagement? Not necessarily, it is culture rather than structure that matters most, it was felt.
We need to find better ways to engage with people without designating them as a class of people who need to be engaged with. Technology might help, it was suggested, for example by delivering constant feedback in the course of everyday activities.
Listening to Each Other: changing how we lead so that we listen better
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘how can we change how we lead so that we listen better’. The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
Radical listening is transformative, shifting the balance fundamentally in favour of the people and communities we work with, building confidence and agency, and the ability to influence and shape how things are done.
But many things, not least the conventional expectations of leaders, managerial cultures, and organisational hierarchies, can make the practice of radical listening very difficult.
Therefore courage and determination are required to change the way we lead.
There are some well-established techniques (action learning, appreciative inquiry, reflective practice etc.) that can be helpful.
But what is really needed is for leaders to make space for themselves and for others to listen, in a conscious way, and not react defensively when assumptions are challenged as a result.
Leaders can develop a less hierarchical and more participative leadership culture, so that radical listening can happen at every level.
At the same time leaders can build a much more diverse and inclusive team, in composition more like the people and communities served.
And finally leaders can challenge themselves to go further, by reaching out to the ‘silent society’, in other words those people whose voices are never heard or listened to, and also by building a practice of listening well right across the voluntary public and private sectors.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is how we can change how we lead so that we listen better, even when that’s hard – recognising that it’s not about knowing all the answers or finding the solutions for others, but about creating an open-ended culture where others can participate. We started with two presentations:
Karin Woodley, CEO of Cambridge House, has agreed to be the thought leader for the cell, and she opened the discussion. She spoke about radical listening, explaining that this starts from the premise that everyone deserves to be part of a conversation about societal reform. It aims to change the way we engage with the communities in which we work, so that people from those communities become more powerful.
Radical listening requires those who listen to be genuinely curious and inquiring, and enter into discussions where the purpose is not to provide evidence for what we already think. We have to learn to stop waiting for things that justify our own beliefs, said Karin. We have to be brave enough to have our assumptions challenged, and be willing to listen beyond the surface level to discover what most matters to those we are listening to, making time to do this well.
We need to be conscious of our own behaviour, avoiding for example summing up for people, re-organising their words, and telling them what the next stage is.
We can start practicing this with colleagues in our own organisations and if we do so we will make it easier to challenge traditional internal patriarchies, and well as creating the conditions to listen better to those outside.
Venu Dhupa, previously CEO at Community Links, and now working independently, then spoke about what makes good listening so difficult. Operating in an untidy world, she said, we have a tendency as leaders to want things to be well ordered, and it is difficult to live with ambiguity. Listening is time-consuming, and requires people to be present, but people with very busy diaries will struggle to make space for this. Leaders are under pressure to provide answers, and identify metrics, and even when they are genuinely curious they find it hard to say ‘I don’t know’.
However, Venu explained that when she makes space for others, and trusts that something worthwhile will happen, it often does. For example, Community Links was visited by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and Venu decided not to arrange formal presentations. Instead she created an opportunity for women from the local community to tell their stories, and this had far greater impact.
Listening can have multiple benefits for leaders. It can open them up to them to considering different kinds of evidence. It can help them more reflective judgements. It can create useful frameworks that others can fill. It can allow more careful questioning, especially when faced with a complex challenge. It can help leaders go beyond the impulse to control and get to purpose. Leaders can find it hard to manage different opinions and conflict, but teams that are able to work their way through disagreement by listening well to each other can become stronger. And leaders who listen can pick up clues, often given respectfully, but which can be easily missed.
Venu shared her wish that leaders would make more space to listen, allowing people opportunities to explore an issue, and thereby place more emphasis on judgement rather than quick answers. To do so would be a sign of a mature organisation and mature leadership, whether in a Board or Executive role.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can people in leadership roles create a culture where others can participate? In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:
The difficulties of listening
We need to name the difficulties people have in listening well, if we are to have a chance to overcome them.
Often we listen because there is an end in mind, and we are listening to clarify certain things, for example, how we can best assist someone in a crisis. This can be valid in itself, but is limited, but often those who are listening don’t have the mandate to listen more widely, or are caught up in a treadmill of activity which prevents listening.
To pursue co-production and radical listening requires trust and courage.
Working to meet the interests and needs of beneficiaries, and listening to them, should be the primary consideration, but this can be difficult, if, for example, this means turning down contracts that would pull the organisation in another direction.
Hierarchies in organisations can affect how we listen to each other. But the real expertise is often held by those working on the front line.
It can be hard to hear certain things, and a message might need to be repeated several times in different contexts by different people before it takes effect.
Techniques to listen well
Action learning is a technique to share challenges with others, allowing people to discover their own solutions, put them into practice, consider what has improved, and reflect on what has been learned.
Appreciative inquiry can help people, whether they are service users, those with lived experience, service providers, or commissioners understand how a system works and how to change it.
Active listening can include a process of feedback to check whether something has been properly understood, and inviting the person to suggest possible solutions.
It is the spaces between the formal interactions that produce the reward. There is value in informal conversation and incidental listening, and it can be worthwhile to engineer opportunities for this.
Listening is more than hearing, it is possible to use other senses to build awareness of what is happening, and even where there are barriers to communication it is possible to be creative to overcome them.
The experience of advice services is that often the presenting problem masks an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, which may not be immediately obvious but which can been be brought to the surface.
Changing the way we lead
Leaders don’t need to have all the answers, they need to be good at coaxing/coaching them out of others.
There are conflicts inherent in the role of managers, who need to take account of their Boards, their team, their users, their community, their funders. It is not easy or always possible to please everyone. There is often no single correct solution. There are dangers of raising expectations that can’t be met, because the resources are not there, or because the change required would be too difficult.
Traditional top-down hierarchical management does not encourage good listening, and we need to shift away from patriarchal management models towards more participatory forms of leadership where listening is part of what everyone does.
Indeed, one implication of the Better Way model for change is that we need to dismantle traditional organisational hierarchies, it was suggested.
Large and small organisations
It was noted that in large institutions a hierarchy of experience can be useful, where if someone is able to solve a problem on their own they will, but if they reach a dead end they can escalate it to someone who has more experience.
In smaller organisations, or in community settings, hierarchies within meetings are usually not useful, because it is more important that people (including those who come from large institutions) have an equal voice and are respected and valued equally.
Shifting the organisational culture
Within organisations is necessary to have some people who are driving the change, putting in place ways of operating that can help people become more confident about listening and being listened to. This includes making time available for listening in its own right, holding back from offering answers even when invited to, and enabling people to take action on the basis of what they have heard.
Empathy, especially with those who have been most marginalised, is aided where organisations are more representative of those they are working with. Many charities have become more like public bodies in their staffing structures and composition, but diversity within staff teams should ideally take many forms including class and education, and this can disrupt traditional hierarchies because lived experience brings knowledge, insight, and empathy, thereby helping to redefine what constitutes good leadership.
Decisions are best made as close to the people affected as possible, with assurance given to people on the front line that if they listen well they will have authority to act. Over the last year in the Covid pandemic we saw more of this, especially in the first lockdown, with some very good results, although more recently this way of operating has become less evident.
Changing the wider system
We need to create a shift from passive service users to active and empowered co-producers of solutions, and this will only happen if we listen and provide conditions necessary for people to generate the outcomes they want (one example of this, it was suggested, is direct payments, where funds are made available to people in ways that enhance choice and control, rather than simply setting up a care package).
Most people do not want to be drawn into the management of the services they use, but they do want to be listened to and have some influence, so that services are run in a way that are responsive to what they actually need.
The pandemic has helped people see weaknesses in their organisational models and the ways in which services are designed, and there is an appetite to develop strategies for organisations to help them do things better. The Better Way model of change can help with this, but changing structures and methods to make them less hierarchical and more inclusive, and which can generate the practice of radical listening, will be a long journey, and will need to engage the efforts of people at every level.
Going further
There are parts of society which appear silent, where there are deeper levels of structural inequality and voices are not reached or heard. We need to challenge ourselves to enter into that part of society and listen.
It can be difficult to listen well across the different sectors, voluntary, public, private, but this is becoming ever more critical.