Mike Chitty

Helping realise development since 1986

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Be A Better Leader – Ruby Ubhi

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If you prefer to watch your podcasts then this is for you!

I met Ruby at the NHS Leadership Academy in Leeds where we both work on various programmes. Ruby is a talent and leadership developer an executive coach, facilitator speaker and pracademic – practitioner and an academic!

We come from different generations, different backgrounds, different cultures, and different cities. In this podcast we explore what has shaped us and what continues to shape us in our leadership practice.

We talk about doing and being, collusion, Born to Run, race, gender and what growing up taught us. We also talk about social mobility, straddling two worlds and the pain that can involve…

An Open Letter: To those who would engage us…

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We are already engaged…

To, Those who would ‘engage’ us,

We are already engaged.

We may not be engaged with you, or in what you think we should be engaged with but we ARE engaged. The things that we are engaged with offer us what we are looking for, perhaps consciously, perhaps not. Our chosen ‘engagements’ give us some combination of love, power and money.

There is a fourth thing that some of us get from our preferred engagement, and that is freedom from pain. Freedom from the pain of hope denied. Freedom from the pain of optimism dashed. Freedom from the humiliation of yet another ‘failure’. This pursuit of freedom from pain is what you label ‘apathy’.

We may choose to engage with you, and your agendas, if you offer us what we want. Unless we see possibilities for this our engagement with you is likely to be short lived and will change nothing. It might be enough for you to tick the box called ‘community engagement’, but little more.  Love and fun might attract us for a while, but it is making us powerful that keeps us engaged.

Many of us who you find ‘hard to reach’ or ‘difficult to engage’ have ‘been engaged’ with people like you before. We have been sold false hope and have suffered the pain of having that hope dashed when you let us down, or when you run out of funding. Your reputations go before you. Sometimes even your promise of cash can’t persuade us to engage…we know that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

You might pay us to move our muscles, or answer your questions, but you cannot buy our hearts and minds.

If you want to encourage us to change what we engage with, then you need to understand us, understand what we are looking for, and understand where our engagement is likely to take us. It is this ‘where it leads’ that is often the hardest part of the story for us to explore. Some of us have learned to live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. But, if you can really offer us something that provides us with a genuine shot at a better future…

Often your approach appears to us to stand on the premise that you have the right to engage us in what you believe to be good for us. You impose your sensibilities and priorities. Or you impose the policy objectives of those who pay your wages. You force us into a parent child relationship.

Imagine that a powerful outsider came and tried to persuade you to live your life differently. To give up some of the things that you enjoy. To ‘persuade’ you to work on a project of their design.  How would you respond? With enthusiastic compliance?

Perhaps instead of seeking to engage ‘us’ in your decision-making processes, or in co-creating your services, or in spending your budgets, you should instead seek to engage yourselves in our agendas, our decisions, our opportunities. You should put us as individuals and communities at the heart of your endeavours.

Before you seek to engage us in your agendas, perhaps you ought to spend a bit of time trying to engage yourselves in ours? Not by pushing your way in with your authority and your money.

But by winning an invitation. By being ‘helpful’.

So, the next time you sit down to write your engagement strategy, just think about what you might need to be like for us to invite you in.

Me and White Supremacy – Part 3 – Tone Policing

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Police - taking the knee? Or preparing for conflict?
Taking the knee? Preparing for conflict? Setting the Tone?

Tone policing is the subject of ‘Day 3’ of Layla F Saad’s “Me and White Supremacy”. The book is designed to be read, by white people, one section a day, but I am progressing at less than a section a week. There is not that much to read, but there is lots to think about – especially when I have over 50 years of ‘lived experience’ of my own ‘whiteness’ to reflect on. Also, times are so ‘heightened’ with C19, and the statue of Colston having just been deposited into the harbour where his slave ships used to dock.

There was a lot of anger and violence on display this weekend – at least – a lot compared to the usual reserved ‘Britishness’. We usually prefer our violence to take place on foreign shores or sports fields and to be state sanctioned and ‘lawful’ rather than ‘civil unrest’. There was the anger on the streets and the anger in the media that it provoked in response. Accusations of ‘criminal damage’ as graffiti on his statue labelled Churchill a racist and Colston was ‘got in the sea’.

We had discussed whether to join the protests in Leeds and decided on balance that we wouldn’t. Partly because we don’t want to risk contributing to a second C19 wave, but also partly because after many years of marching and protesting and so little to see for it I wondered if my energy and experience might not be put to better effect? To work on changing me rather than raging at the machine – again. And as I watched the news coverage of the protests unfold I do remember hoping that things remained ‘dignified’ and ‘lawful’. Tone policing in my own head? Yes. But also hoping for the promised land of a peaceful protest that leads to lasting change.

About as likely as hen’s teeth and unicorn poop.

For several years I had watched the campaigns in Bristol to rename Colston Hall and remove his statue, or least add a plaque to it describing the role of slavery in enabling his commercial and philanthropic largesse. But, as I understand it, a form of words could not be agreed. So nothing happened. Until this weekend, when neither tone nor direct action were policed.

I have not been comfortable with conflict. I avoid it. I minimise it. I believe it does not ‘help’. As a physicist I learned that every force is met by an equal and opposite force. Anger and hatred from one side induces anger and hatred from the other. No matter how righteous or justified the emotion is, it is unlikely to be helpful. That was perhaps the nature of my inner ‘tone police’.

And perhaps I am uncomfortable with conflict because I never really had to engage in it? Home was generally a calm and non-violent place. It wasn’t until I was well into my 20s that I witnessed police brutality at first hand and saw in the coal fields of Yorkshire what conflict really looked like. And this perhaps is a part of white privilege. For many of us, most of the time, not having to fight to be heard? To be fed. To be housed. Being ‘reasonable’ was enough. We had to work hard. But for black, asian and other minority ethnic communities working hard and being reasonable was nowhere near enough.

Much of my work these days, especially in the Reciprocal Mentoring for Inclusion Programme is about discomfort. The discomfort of learning things about the impacts of our white British history. Who paid the price for our libraries and concert halls. And who continue to pay the price.

Over the last couple of weeks I have listened to the horrific stories of three muslims and a Sikh. All work in the NHS. All with awful experiences of racism in the NHS and in the communities where they live. These stories were difficult to hear – because I too want to Love the NHS – and hearing how ill it makes some of those who work for it is tough. I came away from the first two of those conversations feeling ashamed, powerless, unclear about what to do next. Not knowing how to help. The privilege of thinking I might be able to help…

As the third story came to a close I shared how I was feeling and how I had felt after the other two conversations. The shame, the powerlessness, the helplessness. And I was told that I would never understand how much it helped just to listen to these stories. To let them be told and to hear them without judging or denying – just accepting. Can that really be enough?

And I took that into my fourth conversation…