Learning, leadership, being vulnerable and developing shame resilience

Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.  The people who love me and will be there regardless of the outcome are within arm’s reach.  They weren’t in the bleachers at all.  They were with me in the arena.  Fighting for me and with me.  This realization changed everything.
– Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Building on my last post about understanding, living and working with shame, I thought it might be helpful to share some more of my personal story.

I’d never actively thought about shame before If I’m honest, it was for a long time a word I’d rather not mention or associate myself with but I was acutely aware that I experienced it often and those feelings and emotions directly affected my actions and responses.

It wasn’t until, supported through work, that I started an intensive learning journey and as a result of that my curiosity directed me to Dr Brene Brown.Through her work (books, audio, video etc) I found a way to build an understanding. An understanding that allowed me to create a new awareness of what was happening to me in my life and my work.

The first and most important part of my understanding was to get clarity on the difference between shame and guilt. In its most simple terms how I now understand the difference is that shame is a focus on self and guilt is a focus on behaviour. For example If i hurt your feelings, guilt would make me feel that my behaviour was wrong whereas shame would make me feel that I was wrong.

That realisation and clarity profoundly helped me process a range of emotions and situations in and outside of work. It particularly helped me develop and grow more compassion for leaders who I had previously believed were bad leaders making bad choices (essentially shaming them), however this new frame allowed me to accept that those leaders are doing the best they can with the knowledge and understanding they have and my role as an interventionist is to help make things visible in ways that cause a sense of guilt or cognitive dissonance which would then drive a behavioural change in that leader.

So what I found was that I used to think that judging leaders was ok, I now know that developing compassion and understanding shame and guilt I fundamentally believe that all leaders (in fact anyone) has the capacity and capability to change their behaviour.  To do otherwise would be to give up on them completely and that didn’t feel very compassionate…

I want to say for anyone who might be reading this, that I am ok. I really am.  I’m happy, in fact very happy and peaceful with the imperfect person I am today and that has taken some time and yes I wobble a lot but I’m more consciously aware of what is happening so am now able to talk to the people I trust to get support and unpack situations around shame in ways that are productive and help me grow as opposed to forcing me to feel trapped, alone, fearful and inferior.

I also want to say that the journey I’m on was not a reaction to a particular situation but a desire and internal commitment to grow, develop and learn more about myself so that I can consistently show and be more compassionate, understand how to hold my integrity and let go so that I may find humility.

I’m privileged to be able to go on this journey and present myself as a whole person. The developmental journey within my role as an interventionist has been an incredible one and it allows me to understand how I can support others too.

To be in a position today where I can openly talk about shame with a supportive group around me has been as a result of a number of factors and practices which you may find helpful to know and understand.

In listening and reading Dr Brene Brown work and her story, she talks about strategies and tactics to help develop and cultivate shame resilience – from what I have learnt so far, my current understanding is that the purpose of developing shame resilience practice is to help people who feel shame, feel empathy and connection instead.  There are four components to shame resilience practice, which I will start to explain below.

1. Recognise, note and acknowledge the causes/triggers of shame. This is about learning the physiological signs, mental signs – they are often the same as trauma, high stress. For example one of my signs is my body tingles and I feel sweaty…I’d been developing a practice of noting for over a year now since I started a mindfulness practice through the Headspace app. So further expanding that practice to include and recognise the causes and triggers of shame took a little while and is still developing but was not a new practice to me. I’ve found that noting as a practice is incredibly powerful to help me work towards a more still mind and to develop more awareness so I can be more present.
2. Practicing critical awareness.  This is about reality-checking the story you tell yourself and the expectations that arise as a result. What external factors are influencing this, are they realistic? Is this the version of yourself you want to present as your authentic self?
3. Reaching out and telling our story. This is about connecting and experiencing empathy. For me this has been the most powerful element and took a while to achieve as I found that you need to find a trusted group of people who have earnt the right to hear your story in order to support you without judgement
4. Speaking and naming shame. Dr Brene Brown states that shames requires 3 things grow exponentially – secrecy, silence and judgement.  Shame can not survive if spoken and treated with empathy. Therefore if we recognise, note and acknowledge shame, practice critical awareness and reach out and share our story, we can grow our resilience as we practice.

This has been and continues to be an ongoing journey for me, one that helps me and reaffirms to me that I am worthy.

Understanding and working with Shame

I want to start with saying that the purpose of the team I’m part of is to help develop leadership capability in order to create a Devon where people can live their life well, however for me this has presented some personal challenges.

Some of the challenges for me have been around my own capacity and capability to learn and grow.  Without understanding this I would not be able to support leaders to learn and grow effectively.

This is why alongside learning more about how to achieve purpose within my role, I’ve had to consciously develop and understand myself. This has led me to understand a number of things which have been quite painful but incredibly liberating and transformative.

One of the areas that has been the most transformative for me is understanding and learning about shame.

Yes shame…that feeling you are not enough.

Lets just hold the space here for a minute. I’m conscious that even talking about it can trigger it in other people…so I understand if you need to park this and come back later.

When I talk about shame in this post, I am referring to the understanding shared by Dr Brené Brown (twitter)

I want to acknowledge straight away that I am incredibly privileged to be working within and alongside a team who allow me to show up and be vulnerable every day. So a big Thank you to Roxanne, Sara, Kelly, Louise, Kevin, Martin and Lewis. Without their support I would not be able to even write this post.

I wrestled internally about whether to write this post or not but I feel so passionately about this that I want to share my experience, it is likely to be through a number of posts as I am finding the process of writing about this somewhat healing and therefore I will find value in writing more than one post. I also hope that others may be curious to learn more or want to share their experiences too – I’ve learnt that shining some light on this stuff helps. I hope that people feel able to share this post wider.

In my learning about shame, what hit me the hardest was when I started to look back on my reflections and learning in this blog and what I started to see through a different level of understanding was that shame was and is pretty much in every single post I wrote and the underlying shame trigger behind my posts was “I’m not good enough”, there is a number of variations of this, I’m not tough enough, I don’t fit in, I don’t belong etc.

What I know is that along with reflecting on myself, I started to think about all the people I connected with over the years, all the people I’ve worked with over the last 20 years or so in Local Government/Central Government.  I now understand that many, many, so many people were struggling with and dealing with shame – it is sad and hard to say, but it is endemic.

Some of the areas I started to think about and reflect initially on were around some of the connections with people from outside my organisation.

I’ve learnt that all of my behaviours when involved in Local Gov Digital were driven from and in response to dealing with shame and that created unintended consequences for myself and others around me, such as controlling situation and not letting go, to mentally running away and not engaging and some variations in between.
In some way the network itself was a shame club, a group of people who didn’t feel good enough, in particular around not being valued or good enough within their own organisation. The group has achieved some very positive things but in what we never did was address the reasons why we came together in the first place – “shame”.
The very first meeting had been full of stories of shame and yet we didn’t know how to connect to it or even understand it…I’m looking back at those times with compassion and I know that my actions were not always from a place of integrity and If i ever caused people shame then I apologise as I did not possess the critical awareness to have made different choices.

I also realised that the tension I felt between internal and external was caused by shame. I know that when looking back, the biggest shame I suffered came as a direct result of winning the Guardian Leadership Award and subsequently the accolades in the LGC 100…at the time I was humbled and proud but those feelings were somehow empty and un-fulfilling, on reflection it had triggered a significant shame trigger and shame spiral which I’ve only recently managed to resolve.  The tension I felt was a shame of never been good enough as an internal employee as opposed to the perceived success of validation I received when engaging with other organisations.  I spent so much time and effort trying to prove myself that I often forgot about who I actually was.  I am now asking why is it that cultures do this, why is it that we use shame as a tactic on other people?

This lead me to think about and reflect on the cultures of organisations and why starting a conversation about shame can act as a catalyst for cultural and societal change. So I hope this short post and subsequent posts can or in some way might help.

I know that this is incredibly hard work and that it takes discipline and practice to help understand, work through and develop resilience techniques, but I also know and am learning that it is healing me and helping me grow so that I am capable to continually learn.

I’m only at the beginning of my journey into understanding and being open about understanding and working with shame.

What I know most of all now is;

As I am today, I’m enough

and that, that very simply fact, makes me happy

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are curious to know and understand more about shame then i would highly recommend watching the following Ted talks

 

 

On being a School Governor

I’ve been a School Governor now for about 5-6 years and continue to enjoy the experience. I am currently a Chair of Governors at a Primary school local to me as that is where both my children attended. My oldest son has already moved on to secondary school and my youngest is in his last year and will be making his transition to secondary in September.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to share what I have learnt, what I’m thinking and some of the questions I have.  Over the last few months I’ve started to reflect on my time as a governor in the following areas and have unpacked these further in this post, they are: the purpose of primary schools, the role and effectiveness of governors locally and nationally and the opportunity for professional and personal learning within schools as a governor.

Are we clear on the purpose of a Primary School or is this being compromised?

In my time as a school governor I’ve seen first hand that schools are challenged to meet multiple demands and multiple expectations and on the whole, the staff do amazing work in trying to balance all the pressures of daily school life which are on top of actually providing education for children.

In the School where I am a Governor, we define our purpose as “help and support every child to be the best they can be”  This has helped us to define our priorities and our approach including, thinking about how we use and deploy staff, how and  where we invest money for impact and intervention and importantly how we know we are doing the right things.

Schools are doing so much more than just providing education (in a traditional sense)  – they are active in providing social work, health intervention, family support, community development and now in increasing financial austerity fundraisers and business managers.  I’ve witnessed that all these things are absolutely critical to get right especially as all children’s lives (indeed everyone’s lives) are complex and to ensure that children are ready and able to learn you need to invest time and energy in the other areas to help and ensure children can be the best they can be.

For a number of years now there has been an even greater focus on austerity which has led to some instances of decisions being driven by money as opposed to being driven by what is the best outcome for the children. This by default makes the purpose “manage the money” as opposed to providing education…the significant drive and focus on money is so strong in the current climate that it makes it extremely difficult to stay focused on the true purpose.

It is clearly fundamental to ensure you stay financially stable but a trend in forcing schools to operate more like businesses is creating additional pressures and work which schools are not necessarily resourced for and this simply puts direct pressure on Head Teachers, teachers and support staff which in turn increases the pressures and stresses in the system.  So I ask myself how much activity and work is actually focused on meeting the primary purpose as opposed to meeting false purposes such as managing money?

In addition a wider question I ask myself is – if you have these multiple pressures and demands then does this affect the purpose of a primary school or its ability to meet its purpose?  My experience and observations tell me this is the case.

Adler suggests that there are three objectives of children’s schooling: (Adler, 1982)

• the development of citizenship,
• personal growth or self-improvement, and
• occupational preparation.

The interesting thing to me is that the main external high-level measure of success is focused on the Key Stage 2 SATS results (Maths, English – reading and writing etc). This is often directly related to whether a school is rated highly within the inspection framework.  So I ask myself how do attainment results tell me that a school is meeting its purpose and how does the inspection framework tell me a school is meeting purpose?  Unless the purpose is ‘make the attainment results come true’ or ‘meet the numbers’

The importance of measuring success and being clear about what good looks like is critical if we want to see primary schools developing the foundations of learning, the disciplines of personal growth, self-improvement and personal mastery. If we want to see schools creating environments where tolerance, respect and equality are promoted as the basis of being good citizens and if we want to support and invest in the future by stimulating the minds of children so they are curious, courageous and compassionate to face the challenges of the future in relation to our society and economy.

I guess what I am saying is I’m not seeing any evidence that the current external measures of success in schools tell anyone whether we are creating those things stated instead I see measures that focus attention on money and test results?  Before I become a governor my only really measure of a school was an inspection report and grade, but now after being a governor, I have developed a deeper knowledge and understanding of what really happens and understood the purpose in a different way. There is a big disconnect here which is driving the wrong behaviours!

The role and effectiveness of Governors and how do we know we measure success effectively

Sometimes in my time as a governor, I have felt like a proxy inspector as opposed to an effective and active part of the school leadership. This behaviour is not explicitly encouraged but becomes implied when you understand the inspection framework but this is counter productive as inspecting the school as a governor does not promote or create a culture of continued and mutual learning.  I see the role of a School Governor as the following:

1. Being clear on Our Purpose – This is a clear, simple statement(s) of what we are here to do as a school.
2. Being clear on Our Measures and understanding what good measures look like. These are the mechanisms by which we judge our effectiveness in meeting our Purpose. This will inevitably include understanding how the external measures contribute or not to helping us understand our effectiveness.
3. Agreeing and having clarity on Our Principles. These guide how we carry out our work and help to make real the shared leadership and the shared vision.
4. Setting a framework for Our Policies. These set out what we will do in carrying out aspects of our work and must contribute to helping those in the work meet the purpose.
5. Being accountable to and being clear on Our Key Tasks. These are actions that we have to perform on a regular or ad-hoc basis (as detailed in the Annual Cycle).  This is where we ensure we can be held accountable to our legal responsibilities which include staying financially stable and secure.  This is also how we triangulate our understanding and knowledge of whether we are meeting purpose and measuring the right things.

The inherent pressures of inspections and the inevitable price that is paid by people (mostly Head Teachers) when the inspection reports are not as good as the inspectors would want to see is unfair and simply promotes a culture of fear and drives activity to “cover your back”. This is made even worse in the context of the academies agenda as the pressure to be seen to be meeting the targets is creating perverse behaviours and the consequences of which are directly affecting children we should be focusing on. In the current landscape if your school is seen by the inspection framework as failing then the likelihood of that school being forced to become an academy is increased significantly and in most cases, this is the only action to be taken.  The assumption underpinning this action is that Academies are better at delivering good or outstanding schools. I’m yet to see the evidence that supports this.

In reality, the evidence I see and can validate is that school leaders, teachers, support staff and everyone working in and around schools is lots and lots of hard work to try to create new and different experiences for children on top of all the activity which is expected by the current system drivers of “meet the numbers and targets for testing.”  But what I can’t say with confidence is whether all of the work they are all doing is meeting purpose and is contributing effectively…What I need to understand is what really gets in the way of a Primary School meeting its purpose and what can I do as a governor to remove the barriers and blockages.

This dilemma and conflict can only really be resolved by leaders and this is something I find fascinating.  The question I find myself asking here is, ‘does the system know who the leaders are, what are current leaders doing to understand and build their knowledge of why the current system is the way it is and are those leaders connecting with each other?’

Personal and Professional Learning and the opportunity to develop insights into organisational change and culture.

In my day job, I work in Organisational Change and my role is to support leaders to see and think differently so that services are designed around understanding what matters to citizens and clarity of purpose.

The opportunity I have as a school governor to develop my practice and learning is incredibly rich and diverse and this as a side benefit of wanting to help and support my local school keep me motivated and determined to be the best I can be.

The learning, however, is not simply one way. I had originally held an assumption that I would be offering my time and energy and wouldn’t really learn anything other than “school governance”. However the more I understand the thinking and approaches being used within primary schools the more those models become more visible to me in an organisational change context.

An example of this is the way in which primary schools have mainstreamed reflective practice and focusing on mastery of self. In my previous role as Digital Lead, I used to think that the most significant impact on organisations in the future would be technology and the disruption of that technology. Clearly, those disruptions will be present a fundamental challenge, but for me, the behaviours and values being promoted and recognised which underpin the approaches in Education will have a deeper and more profound impact unless organisations recognise the deeper cultural shift that is symbolised by the age of the internet.

Another example is promoting a growth mindset for children, the shift in the school now is that it understands that unless adults model and understand the growth mindset aswell children will not believe it as they will mirror and model the behaviours of the adults…this is exactly the same dilemma in organisations where leaders are not living the values and behaviours they promote.

On the whole, being a school governor has helped me develop and practice skills and learn new and different ones too. Schools and in particular primary schools are a fascinating place to be and I would highly recommend connecting with your local school and asking whether you can help in some way. if you are passionate about the future of our society, primary schools are a great place to learn about and experience what the future looks and feels like.

 

 

 

 

 

Can Intrapreneurship actually happen.

Recently someone shared a link on twitter to this post on Medium by Jeff Gothelf > Intrapreneurship is a lie. So I became a consultant.   Initially, I was in two minds about whether to click on it and read it but I was intrigued enough that I did.

After reading I started to reflect about whether I shared the same views that were expressed in the post and I realised that about 12 months ago I did. This time last year I would have said this post resonated with EXACTLY how I felt…But I understand that now I think differently and believe that there are some interesting lessons that I have learnt, some of them were very painful to accept.

I used to think of myself as an intrapreneur and thought that I was a pretty good one too, I mean I even won an award and was also nominated in the LGC most influential list. So the feedback loops around me were saying that I was pretty good, but I have continued to struggle to make sense of how all of this could happen and yet I was failing to create a lasting sustainable change in my council…so much so I wrote a post about that disconnect in relation to the difference between internal influence and external influence.

So revisiting the post on Medium – it is a 6-minute read and worth it, so suggest you take a moment if you haven’t already. There was so much in the post that did and didn’t resonate that I wanted to share my reflections.

In some ways, Jeff’s post for me makes an assumption that entrepreneurial spirit is and will likely sit with a few people and that in itself creates some challenges and problems when trying to replicate as an internal person as Jeff points out “big org realities kick in”. For me and this is something that I think I have made many mistakes around in the past, is that being entrepreneurial isn’t necessarily something that a person can do in isolation, it is more about the conditions and the system you operate within that allows the innovation and creativity to flourish.

In the past, I have assumed that I have the power to change things but am only really limited to change on the edges of the organisation, this has made me feel better inside in the past that small things happen but the failures to reach the core of the organisation for lasting change is something I simply tolerated and perhaps ignored as I didn’t want to face up to what the real issues were that were stopping that. What I have learnt over the last 6 months in order to be successful you have to ensure you have the right conditions and the wider system alignment to ensure lasting and sustainable change actually happens.

So the question I started asking myself more was – why is there a difference in the perceived impact between external and internal people and what are the causes of this variation?

Moving on for a moment What I’ve also learnt is that until new organisational models exist, ownership and power lies within the formal hierarchy.  There may be some people who disagree but from someone who is on the inside this is very much the case and is one of the lessons I’ve learnt which I will share more on in this post.

Incentives to change or improve the work people do doesn’t sit within the teams who do the work but with managers or change teams who sit outside of that work. So at what point can someone take real ownership of any change as the majority is imposed upon them.   So where is the incentive for those people who actually understand what is happening, who see the consequences (intended or otherwise) and yet are blind to the assumptions and thinking that led to the design of the work?

In the section of the post which talks about integration with the rest of the organisation, the question I have in my head is – Why is the responsibility for ideas disconnected from the people who implement them or even do the work, what creates this separation and what assumptions drive the design of that flow of work?

The challenge here and the underlying assumptions I believe sit beneath this are that you need to have people who have particular skills and traits that do “their bit” and then you can successfully move that along a pipeline to someone else and they do their bit and so on, until the change you anticipated or something like it pops out the other end.  The issue I have with this is that this is flawed in its design as to why you would not help the people who do the work develop the skills, knowledge and understanding to respond to the problems they have and allow them to do it. Or even allow them to pull expertise into their work at the time they need it!

The element of the post that resonated the most with me is the section about external influence always trumping internal opinion.  This was the bit that has aligned to my own personal experiences the most and has been the cause of most of my own struggles. However, I’ve started to realise where I went wrong and how in pushing and pushing and pushing to do the things I thought were right but never saw come to fruition is because I was trying to push and push and push. The irony is that I’ve learned to now operate and work in an on-demand model where I and the team are pulled to work with people because they want and value our input. This shift is a fundamental and yet profound change in how you can be successful as an intrapreneur – this will be at the heart of how intrapreneurs can design themselves to be successful.

The biggest irony in all of this is that we have on in the past pulled external people in to say exactly the same thing as the internal people do?

Finally, there is a fascinating comment towards the end of the post that states “there will never be a way for the kind of results both seek to be achieved unless large companies can make the cultural shift to spread innovative thinking throughout the company while finding ways to reward this work in a way that retains top talent.”

My only comment on this is that any size and shape company essentially needs to do one key thing – Understand and make visible the thinking and assumptions that create and lead to the design of everything in it. Knowing this allows you to better understand how to move forward…

The 3 leadership qualities I value and want to develop in myself.

The other day I read a fantastic post by colleague Kelly Doonan “Eight Steps to Good Leadership” It is well worth a read, so if you haven’t read it, please take some time now or after this post to check it out.

After reading it I was inspired to write this post as I haven’t blogged for a while, although I have many “draft posts” sat in here waiting to be finished…

Recently I was asked by colleagues to do a 10-minute talk/presentation on “Leadership” in the Chief Executives office as part of a set of recent Leadership Events in the council.

So my usual approach was to think about what leadership really means to me, what I thought the leadership challenges are and considered my personal experiences and observations, in particular, those people that have inspired and challenged me over the years and still do.

I made some detailed notes, which is unusual for me but given that I only had 10 minutes I thought I better try and stick to time so wanted to ensure I focused myself. This post has essentially been created using the notes for that session with some post edits as I pretty much ignored my notes when presenting, even though I held on to them during the entire presentation – I believe I stuck to time though 🙂

The reason for not sticking to the notes was that the two previous speakers who were great, made me think about how things feel and what it means to talk about those things more openly…this basically led me to change the first half of the talk and draw upon my thinking in a previous blog post “Love of Fear – Which one rules you”  I felt that it would better suit the flow of the whole session. I was happy to adapt it and actually felt more comfortable simply speaking from the heart as opposed to reading from a script.

A part of the design of my talk I started to think about what problems I saw, what caused those problems and how I thought particular leadership qualities could rebalance or directly address those problems. Reflecting on my experiences, observations and understanding over the years, I came up with the following:

• increasingly isolation of people and organisations
• a lack of clarity and understanding as to why public services exist
• an acceptance or even tolerance that things are the way they are and can’t or even won’t change.

So I distilled three leadership qualities that I believe are either missing, in short supply and/or will provide solid foundations for the future. The qualities are clearly for everyone and anyone but I firmly believe that these are essential for people in legitimate leadership positions right now across all public services and wider. I also want to further develop these qualities in myself.

In thinking about the session I was pondering how these problems came about, how they are allowed to continue existing and I started to think about the blind spots that the sector has around leadership capability. So I decided to call my session “Why I think public sector leaders are undermining the opportunity for improving the sector – and they don’t even know it?“

The 3 Leadership Qualities

Firstly – Curiosity – the desire and drive to discover and explore the deeper meaning and purpose of all things. To know and sense that there is always more to understand, more to learn and unlearn about ourselves and the world around us. That what we know today will be challenged by what we learn tomorrow and to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Secondly – Compassion – developing a meaningful connection to all things – to truly understand the lived experiences and lives of others and all living things and to be purposefully driven by that connection to take action – selflessly and for the benefit of others not individual gain. In doing so leading by example, not through rhetoric.

Thirdly – Courage – to find and connect to the inner strength in us all and to step forward and lead when everyone around us is simply stuck in the comfort of the status quo. To be authentic and to choose our own destiny and path in life and to acknowledge our responsibility to future generations.

I believe that these three qualities can reduce the isolation, help us find meaning and purpose and challenge our assumptions that things can improve

The event was filmed so I have included the link to the video below.