Mike Chitty

Vision of the Anointed is the title of a book by Thomas Sowell, an American, right wing, historian, economist and social commentator.   The anointed are usually a small group of ‘professionals’ and ‘political leaders’, or ‘campaigners’ and their work frequently follows a well trodden path:

1. They identify a crisis – a situation that, if not addressed, will lead to disaster
2. They propose policies and interventions to ‘solve’ the crisis that they believe will lead to a positive set of results
3. The policies are implemented and the results are usually (always) mixed.  There will be both benefits and detriments associated with the implementation of policy
4. The anointed defend the success of their vision and the policies and impacts that sprung from it.

We can see this dynamic playing out now with climate change, peak oil, low carbon economics, the benefits culture, anti social behaviour, drug misuse and so on.

This archetype for social change is based on an assumption that the problems of society can be identified by the anointed and can be resolved by their vision.  Where does this leave the ‘unanointed’.  Those of us who aren’t involved in the process of identification of problems and development of vision?  Well we can adopt several positions. We can:

• support the vision and plans of the anointed – become their followers
• attempt to influence the anointed so that their visions and plans take some account of our vision and values
• oppose their vision and plans – become their critics – point out their detrimental effects – and seek the anointment of a different group
• blame the anointed for the ongoing existence and, in many cases, worsening of problems

In each of these cases we are giving power to the anointed.  Even if we oppose their plans, we will argue for the ‘anointment’ of a different group of leaders with different values and different visions.  Power remains with the anointed – whether they are on our side or not.  Their social policies too will have benefits and detriments.  We are relying on an anointed group to take responsibility for our success as individuals and as a society.  We can then sit back and hurl either brickbats or bouquets – depending on our values and beliefs.  WE are off the hook. We call this politics.

In my work I accept that their will always be an anointed and they will always be developing and implementing policies.   Some of which may work for us.  Some against.  With the dominance of the current economic growth paradigm you are more likely to benefit if you are economically active – especially at higher levels.  If you have money to invest you are likely to benefit even more.  Of course we can vote and we can take part in the processes that shape their visions.  The strategic plans of the anointed may be necessary – but they are not sufficient.

We should not rely on them to make our lives better.  They do not hold the keys to progress for us.  We hold them, if we have the courage and confidence to recognise it.  Often though we collude with the anointed as they unwittingly ‘put the leash’ on our enterprise, creativity and civic participation as they envelop us in their plans.

An approach to social policy and change that relies on the ‘vision of the anointed’ is like an ‘old school’ business that says to its employees – come to work, do as your told, work hard on implementing our cunning plans and policies and we will see you alright.  Just comply.  Don’t think.  Just do.  We have clever people in the boardroom who put us on course.  Compliance and order are the key organising values…

Many modern organisations have recognised that in fact with ‘every pair of hands a brain comes free’.  The organisation is turned upside down.  It is employees in the frontline who are asked to be enterprising and innovative in making things better.  The brains in the boardroom find ways to keeping this innovation and enterprise ‘on mission’.  Their job is to facilitate the emergence of strategy from a social process involving many brains.  They don’t have an elite planning ‘cathedrals of the future’ developing blueprints for others to implement.   They instead manage a messy bazaar of ideas and innovation helping all the market traders to promote their ideas and  form allegiances for progress.  They value a culture of enterprise over compliance.  They build chaordic systems.

Person centred and responsive work helps people to recognise the limitations of the anointed and helps them to recognise that the best hope for making things better, in ways that they value, lies less in engaging with the anointed and more in engaging with their own sense of purpose and practical association, collaboration and organisation with their peers.  It lies in their own enterprise and endeavour.  From a collection of enterprising and creative individuals emerges a diverse and sustainable community.

When we talk about encouraging civic enterprise, I think we are talking about shifting the balance of power from implementing the visions of the anointed to empowering the ambitions of the citizen.

If this analysis has any truth to it then the implications for leadership and its development are enormous.

The first thing to say on this subject is that ordinary management and leadership isn’t easy – it can be difficult, complicated and demanding. But it’s ordinary in the sense that it is used to tackle well-understood problems or opportunities using tried and tested methods.

For example to reduce infection on a ward, a nurse manager might pull together all of the people involved with influencing infection rates and agree a set of principles and procedures. Good, ordinary management and leadership is about standard operating procedures, mobilising a known way of operating that is going to produce the desired results. It’s difficult, takes discipline and courage and shouldn’t be overlooked or demeaned.

Then there’s extraordinary management and leadership, where the challenges are often less well defined, there is usually a lot of disagreement about the right thing to do and no guarantee that whatever you do will fix the problem. In fact the guarantee is more likely that it wont fix the problem…

When you’ve got lots of disagreement and uncertainty it takes a different type of leadership to be able to move things forward. Ralph Stacey called it extraordinary leadership. Essentially what you’ve got to do is build consensus around the uncertain, and build support to say ‘well, let’s try it.’ And if it doesn’t work this time, we’ll try something else. You are learning from a very uncertain environment in an iterative way by trying stuff and seeing what happens.

This is an entirely different way of leading because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be, so you have to learn from the action, in the action. What becomes important then is to develop the hypothesis and the actions to try, then try them quickly, learn from them quickly and try again quickly.

Extraordinary leaders need to:

• Help people work through conflict and disagreement well and gain a sufficient consensus to act
• Be creative, politically informed and emotionally intelligent
• Be much more confident in dealing with failure, because often what you’re going to try isn’t going to work

One mistake I see being made is to pretend that something that requires extraordinary leadership can be solved by ordinary management principles. We will plan our way into a better future as if we know that our plans are going to work, rather than accepting that they might not. We lose that experimental way of working. We choose to look at a complex, messy problem as if it were ‘simple’ or complicated.

Just by existing, you’re leading and managing at the same time. So if I sit here with my head in my hands looking depressed, that will have an impact on you in terms of how you’re seeing the current situation. It will have an impact on my ability to take you somewhere new as a leader. Whenever we act; whenever we open our mouths, it can have a managerial impact (the here and now, keeping our show on the road etc.) and a leadership impact (how the future’s looking, etc.)

Sometimes leadership and management are presented as if they’re entirely different behaviours and there’s a set of behaviours that address each. For management it is efficiency, effectiveness and improvement. Leadership it is about taking people into a brave new world.

I don’t experience that; I don’t open my mouth and lead one minute, then open my mouth and manage the next. Both of these things are happening here in the present, right now. The two are inextricably intertwined. Sometimes I need to ensure that what I do makes people focus on the future and on change, which you could argue has a strong leadership bias, and sometimes what I do needs to focus on the here and now which you could argue has a strong management bias. If all you ever get from me is the here, and now I look very managerial and very operational; if all you ever get from me is where we’re going to go and where we’re going to be in the future I look very visionary and leaderful but perhaps a bit disconnected from reality.

Basic management processes with big leadership impact

There are some basic processes that would typically be described as management but that can have a big leadership impact. These give us the solid foundation from which to move into extraordinary management/leadership. They are:

Building relationships

We don’t value enough the time where we sit and talk to each other about what drives and motivates us. We need to teach people that of the hours a week they give to the NHS, a significant percentage ought to be spent on consciously building trust and agreement and building a relationship.

Hierarchies are still alive and kicking in the NHS. If you’re a doctor and I’m a nurse, what might pattern our relationship is our label; not us connecting as human beings and our shared purpose. If we talk about what we’re here to do, now and in the future, our labels can disappear and we can do some interesting work together.

It’s through relationships that we can manage and lead well. If I work with you to build trust and a relationship, I’ll be able to lead you better and you’ll be able to lead me better too. If I don’t, we won’t able to do either.

Giving feedback

We’re not always good at taking the time to give feedback in the NHS because we’re so results-focused. Whether given ‘in the moment’ or through planned appraisals, delivering feedback that’s useful and constructive needs to become part of the fabric of a leader’s regular responsibilities. It’s crucial in supporting everyone’s development and performance. Equally as critical is ensuring that colleagues have the opportunity to – and feel able to – give you feedback about any help and support you can give them.

Delegation

The reason why some people are working 60 hour weeks is because they don’t know how to do their 40 hours and then delegate the rest. If we don’t delegate appropriately, we can’t get our jobs done so we end up recruiting another assistant director, for example, which means we have top heavy organisations and not enough people at the bottom.

Time and priority management

How can you transform the NHS in your sixty hour week if you spend 59 of them maintaining the current operation and one looking at the future and one day a month at a meeting to look at future strategy. Our practice doesn’t reflect what we say our priorities are – if you want to transform the NHS, spend 59 hours transforming it and one hour maintaining it.

The best leaders can do both things at the right time.

Extraordinary leadership doesn’t always make things better for patients 

Extraordinary leadership doesn’t always lead to better care. Quite often, it leads to worse care in the short term. Remember the Mental Health Act when we shut down the large asylums to care for people in communities? Some dreadful things happened because we didn’t know how to do it well. But 30 years on, most people would say mental health provision is significantly better than it was. From caring for 97% of mentally ill people in asylums and 3% in the community, it’s now the other way around.

Suppose we’ve got a large rural health economy with five community hospitals, all small and expensive to operate. So we shut them and build one world class hospital because it makes more financial sense and is more efficient. But when we’ve shut the hospitals down, the people who’ve used them may believe the care they receive is not as good, because it is more distant and part of a larger hospital that they don’t know as well. With something like that it’s very rare to make a step change from good to better. Seth Godin calls this ‘the dip’ and it can be long and expensive. With mental health reform it probably at least a decade for people to say ‘yes, that was worth it.’

Courage is the main thing we need to bring about this change. We need to face up to these big and sometimes overwhelming challenges and acknowledge them rather than only working with what we feel is in our control.

Extraordinary leadership can help people hold their nerve and believe that what they’re going through is worth it and will get us to a better place.