Where now for Housing Association Leaders?

Where now for Housing Association leaders?

Since the 22nd of June 2016, I think it’s fair to say we have been on a bumpy journey as a country. First Brexit, then Grenfell and now the impact of a global pandemic, predicted for decades but not prepared for, must make us all think about the quality of our personal and national leadership.

Each of these game changing incidents had one thing in common – the vast divide between those in power and those experiencing the consequences of their decisions. Over the last 4 years, I’ve thought a lot about leadership – how people get there and stay there, and the implications of the disconnect between the skills that are perceived in the post-industrial world to be good leadership and those that aren’t.

We are about to go into an epoc-definining moment. The coronavirus emergency response will be nothing compared to what we will need to do to regain the ground lost in the last year. Are we as leaders up to the job, and do we display the empathic traits that will be necessary to understand those that have suffered and risked the most on our behalf in this time?

Like the post war period, an understanding of the experiences of ordinary people will be vital to the reputations of every company in this country. Those who had no power, now do, all be it largely cashed in via the currency of popular opinion.

Like many people, I’ve taken stock of my own journey over the last few months. September 2019 marked 25 years since I got into the London School of Economics. A comprehensive school kid, living in a single parent family on a council estate in Hemel Hempstead. My main motivation for applying had been that I’d seen a documentary where someone threw an egg at Ken Clarke during a lecture there.” I’ll have some of that”, I thought. My experiences growing up in a town blighted by a hefty dose of prejudice against me simply because of my post code, had left me pretty angry.

At the time I’d wanted to be a lawyer, but I’d ended up at a “notorious” school on the estate because the better schools across town required a daily 75p bus fayre. I hadn’t wanted to put my Mum under the pressure to find that money, so I pretended I wanted to go there.  My school only offered 6 subjects at A ‘level, because there were only 15 of us out of 200 that stayed on after our GCSEs. That didn’t include politics or economics, my two favorite subjects, so I did geography instead. “Close enough”, I thought.  My options for seeing the law profession up close were limited, with my work experience options restricted to providing free labor for the local Spar.  I’d complained that my school had offered limited opportunity to us and had been slapped down for asking to be considered for a profession like that.

Belatedly, and largely down to the championing of a single teacher, they managed to get me two weeks work experience for a local solicitor. My time there turned out to be fairly dull, turning me off the law profession pretty fast. Not least because one of the partners had chosen at the end of my time, to give me £20 and tell me he had been “amazed” that “someone like me, had a brain”. So, fueled by youthful optimism and a hefty dose of rage I got into LSE with the hope I’d be surrounded by young Che Guevara’s. It didn’t turn out quite like that, but for the first time in my life someone told me I was bright, and not just bright compared to other “people like me”, but properly bright, you know, like normal people.

LSE taught me lots of things, but the greatest thing it did was put me in touch with people who thought differently, and had different perspectives on life, who challenged my view of the world.  This global perspective, showed me how uniquely privileged I was, being able to access a free education in one of the best universities in the world, despite my background. The level of diversity of perspective that you encounter there, is I believe one of the reasons it’s created so many world leaders. You are forced to try to see a wide range of perspectives that are totally outside of your experience. The way people think and challenge there has continued to be my benchmark for good leadership.

LSE and its founders were instrumental in social reform in the 19th and early 20th Century. It had a key role in the thinking that created the welfare state in the post war period, with social housing being one of its main pillars. Like now, those policies arose as a result in the shift in power, with elites having to listen to the needs and experiences of the people that had dug them out of a hole. We are in a similar era now.

What do the lessons of that era teach us about now. Firstly, it’s that we need to take an unfiltered look at who we have become and for those in power, that means admitting our failures. When I joined housing 13 years ago, I hoped that I’d be joining a sector still at the forefront of radical social reform in the same vein as the LSE founders. In that time, I’ve met some incredibly driven individuals trying their best to force forward aspects of change. But to me, all too often, these people are on the sidelines and more than often patronized and excluded from real positions of power.

The predominant culture today is politely corporate. A combination of closeness to government and a regulation regime which requires a heavy presence of large accounting firms and investment banks has seeped into the culture of what gets valued. Compliance, not rocking the boat, being seen as “stable” and not drawn to outbursts of emotion – i.e., middle class.  Everyone is genuinely nice and well meaning, but real systemic change that can address the in-built prejudice that communities like mine experience requires a lot more edge, and a willingness to upset the status quo to do something about it.

This commercial politeness will not stand up in the post covid world. We are going to go into a phase of significant social upheaval. More people will have experienced unemployment and homelessness than ever before and will give a much more prominent voice to our systemic idiosyncrasies. Sadly, the inequality of the last few decades has been able to thrive because of a lack of perceived legitimate voice of those that are impacted by it. This is itself an indictment on us as leaders in this sector.

But that is changing, as a society we are now experiencing hyperarousal to injustice and unfairness – there will be much more empathy for those that find themselves needing housing support which means we are going to need leaders right across the housing system that can really drive change, and quickly. Sitting back and claiming that we are powerless to help the most vulnerable because of the wider “system” will no longer be possible. If you are not proactively trying to be part of the solution – you will be seen as part of the problem. That applies at both a personal and organizational level.

One of the incredible things of the last year is the agility and innovation that can happen in times of crisis. Vaccine development accelerated to tenth of the normal time needed, the formula one industry designing ventilator solutions in a matter of days. Such opportunity now exists for us to do something similar to create better standards, access, and equality in the housing system. If we needed a burning platform – this, is it.

So, as we go into this period of returning to business what should we be doing as leaders?

1)     Listen to the dissenting voices in our business as people’s emotions are high – that may mean we are going to have to deal with difficult expressions of people’s views – anger is legitimate and important emotion as it is an indicator of how far someone’s experience has moved from your perception, particularly when social injustice is at its root – to be honest, if you aren’t angry about what has happened in the last ten years, you shouldn’t be working in social housing.

2)     Employ people that focus on the people elements of the business – there will be a pull to return to finance led businesses, as we struggle to adapt to the new fiscal environment – This is what happened in the rent cut era – we bought into the knee jerk narrative of scarcity, resulting in a massive cognitive dissonance in our approach to the delivery of “social housing”.  Your employees and customers will not buy it. For them, to have taken risk and experienced the impact of lockdown disproportionately will mean a finance driven narrative will drive significant conflict in your business. This recovery will be as much, if not more about your role as a social enterprise in the truest sense, than anything else. Every commercial business in the country will now need to ensure its people focused values are real, particularly if you are claiming to be providing a public good, like housing. If this sentiment can cause a PR disaster for Brew Dog, imagine what it can do for organisations and leaders that are supposed to be focused on addressing social inequality.

I’ve been on a mission to find people who also lived or live-in social housing that led the sector – there are lots of us, but talking to them, it’s evident how unclear people are about whether they should break cover and talk about it. Many people have talked to me about how they don’t mention how their experiences impact their leadership as this could be somehow seen negatively.

Today we are at a turning point; the gap between economically included and excluded is the biggest ever. Brexit, our national existential nervous breakdown, is a result of generations of inequality compounding in on itself until only those that provide an option to catastrophically break the system can be seen to have any solutions.

We might despise that brand of leadership, but at least it claimed to do something fundamentally different. This is what people want now, leaders that stand up to be counted, that don’t ignore the inertia, that are willing to call out self-interest in the “professions” that support this sector and challenge the merry go round of ideas that get re-hashed every few years.  Our question in Housing is, where are those leaders for us? are we creating cultures that let people do and say things that have been unsayable, that push our corporate buttons, or are we all a little bit too comfortable?

Covid: A hopeful legacy

As we come out of our third and most deadly lockdown in the UK, my reflections on the last year have shifted from transitory leadership learnings to much more fundamental societal perspectives we should take into the future.

For most of us in the middle-class west, our collective reality since the second world war has been relatively stable. In the landscape of history in fact, that period was the longest period of peace and prosperity in documented history. This is probably one of the reasons that this period has come as such a shock, and collective resilience tested to the core.

During the 1919 pandemic my great grandparents suffered the loss of two daughters aged 9 and 15, dying 3 weeks apart. My family kept the death of the older sibling Dolly a secret from the 9-year-old Lily as she lay stricken on her own death bed with Spanish flu. The manifold tragedy of this familial legend is now brought into stark relief in our current reality. I have thought long and hard about why I lacked true reflection on my great grandparent’s loss given the relative short period between my Great Aunts death and my birth only 56 years later. My Aunt carries the name of one of the children that died, a memory of a sister long lost. Despite this it never crossed my mind to look at what happened to them or think about the societal earthquake that caused it.

It seems our connections to generational perspective has been lost somewhere along the way as we too quickly move on from the traumas of the past and imagine they could never happen again. This is probably my greatest concern, soon we’ll all be back at Nando’s and this will be a long lost memory.

The internal reverberations of the last 12 months for generations that have known nothing, but stability is significant. Our collective perspective of continuous growth and progression has been rocked to the core, even though it is a very recent economic perspective. I think this has been at the root of many peoples mental health challenges - the feeling this sort of thing happens in the past, and not to people like us.

The failures of our economic models, and how transitory they appear faced with this reality should be something we take very seriously, acknowledging the reality that so many of our fellow citizens have co-existed with this kind of fearful transience for generations regardless of global events as a consequence of the structural inequality these systems have now shown in stark relief.

Those of us doing well from the system should take note of this. The rhetoric which has evolved through the media, particularly in the last 20 years about those that do not keep up with the Jones’s, the disparaging judgemental enforcement of power through government policy and social systems to those groups, is shameful. We have acted as if resilience and success is about meritocratic cause and effect, we can all see now its much more linked to contextual opportunity than any of us would like to admit.

Without social connection, its now much easier to understand how opportunity and mental health decline significantly. When there is nothing to do and no where to go, we all eat and drink too much of the wrong things to get through the day. We should all remember that when falling into judgement about peoples lifestyles. We can all see much more clearly now that loneliness and disconnection is a killer that comes in multiple forms.

So, what should we take into the future from this time? Hopefully, a little more compassion for the context and perspective of others. To listen to the experiences of those that have gone before us and realise that circumstances can derail the best of us. Sit down and listen to your Grandparents to hear what they have endured, as we have a lot to learn.

Most of all I hope we ensure we continue to remember those who will carry on being trapped in isolation and reduced opportunity when Covid is long forgotten. Whether that is a carer who has no choice than to not work to care for a loved one, or an older person suffering with crippling loneliness due to bereavement. At the end of the day we are all a product of time and circumstances. When our collective global experience ends, lets remember those who remain in an ongoing but much more private storm.

The Power of Resilience

Throughout the lockdown period there has been a growth in awareness of mental health issues in the UK. Those with pre-existing conditions have deteriorated without the support they need, and many, who have never struggled before have suddenly been struck with overwhelming and alarming emotions.

I’ve spent most of my career working in organisations that support people for whom poor mental health has been a component in that persons wider challenges. These are often difficult working environments, where my teams have displayed their own heroic levels of mental fortitude.

One of the things that has struck me in the last few months is the amount of content now coming into the workplace, identifying personal resilience as a key leadership skill. This content, mostly distributed in internet memes outlines the power of resilience as a leadership trait and therefore the perceived lack of it as a negative trait.

The overwhelming intention of the birth of the focus on resilience in the workplace is undoubtedly positive, however, whilst the root causes of mental health challenges remain taboo to discuss in many organisations, comparing comparative resilience and passing judgement could add to the inequity so many people face in the workplace. The inextricable links between poor mental health, poverty, trauma, race, sexuality and gender in all its iterations results in “lack of perceived resilience” adding to the reasons to exclude key groups from leadership positions and promotions.

Resilience is relative and cannot be judged externally either at an interpersonal or organisational level. Outward displays of resilience, or lack of it, is dependent on a vast array of factors. Everyone is carrying different volumes of challenge. Historic trauma, lack of sleep, ill health, loneliness, divorce, caring responsibilities, financial worries, death - the number of factors are infinite.

My fear about many mainstream workplace mental health models is they are often predicated on managers or employees leading the first line of support. A few hours, or a days training cannot provide the kind of understanding and skill to manage the complex factors that are at play when mental health is deteriorating.

Well meaning, ill informed judgement, poor support or advice at this level can result in people’s conditions deteriorating to an irretrievable level. Whether it’s someone we perceive to be prone, in our view, to unnecessary crying, or is often irritable – all of these outward displays have a root in something else. We need to understand that, that “something else” is not a character flaw, or evidence of a lack of leadership skill.

Drug and alcohol services give us an insight into these issues at the extreme end of the spectrum. So many of the people I’ve worked with in a professional context over the years have come into services I led because of their attachment to a particular coping mechanism they are using to manage difficult emotions. Whether that’s alcohol, drugs, sex, food or even because of the consequences of uncontrollable anger. Many of them have been judged harshly by society because of these outward displays of perceived lack of resilience. Spending time with people in extreme pain who are at the mercy of a habit that no longer serves its core purpose to them is incredibly humbling.

In taking time to listen to their stories I am in awe of their situational resilience. A virtual walk in their shoes, I see them as the true giants of resilience, painfully judged for all the things that are not known to the outside world. Extreme trauma, abuse and neglect are invariably at their root cause.

Mental Health England states that 1 in 4 people in the UK experience a mental health issue every year and 1 in 6 people in the workforce have a mental health condition. With many more people in the post Covid period struggling, there is a risk that a growth of comparing resilience levels, unless the concept is truly understood, will drive new inequities.

Understanding people and supporting individuals relative to their context, is a nuanced process. Many workplaces are not currently equipped or informed to take this approach. Ignoring or judging emotions society has deemed as “negative” such as anger, frustration, anxiety or sadness, as displays of low resilience, reinforces stigma.

We need to be much more open to discussing these emotions neutrally with people in the workplace as they are all normal responses to personal context and experience. Reinforcing stoicism as the preferred model of leadership is also dangerous. Many people are suppressing and subverting toxic emotion to maintain the outward appearance of resilience. For men in particular, for whom displays of emotion are seen as particularly culturally abhorrent in many organisations, this celebration of subverting emotion is the fuel of the growing rates of male suicide. Good mental health is an ability to recognise emotion and process it in a supportive and non judgemental environment. Difficult emotion is a just a sign that something is wrong and that should not be ignored.

Whole organisation models, which integrate coaching and mentoring from a people centred perspective for all levels of management and leadership are key. Approaches which limit blame and judgement and provides early supportive conversations about difficult emotions, ensure people experience true equity of support which leads to equality for all of our mental health.

The ongoing Covid crisis places the need for organisational support for mental health issues at the heart of people strategy. Let’s make sure we move beyond the memes and understand the true nuances of our perceptions of resilience.

Why do we need a global crisis to drive workplace change thats good for everyone?

Despite the terrible impacts and challenges we’ve faced in the last few months, I think its fair to say, in workplace change terms, more positive change has happed in the last 8 weeks than the preceding 20 years. So why does it take a one in a hundred year crisis to drive changes which are good for most people anyway?

As someone that has led organisational change for most of their career, the last few weeks has been an interesting, exciting but also frustrating time in change terms. Change professionals can often take on the role of prophet crying in the desert in many organisations. The pace of change is often interminably slow. For many of us that have been the soothsayers of the needs of fourth industrial revolution in our workplaces, we can see the last 8 weeks as our age of enlightenment. A sudden global realisation that workplace structures and cultures have been stuck on a precipice of risk for a very long time.

The fact that Climate Change - a much bigger existential threat than the one we are currently experiencing, has not been enough to stimulate mass change in organisations and markets is something we should all think about when all this over. How do we understand what real risk is? As leaders we shouldn’t need to be slapped in the face with a wet kipper like we are now to make us realise where our organisations will end up if we don’t make more proactive changes.

Aside from this current experience, the global paradigm is evolving at such a rapid pace it can be hard to work out what to focus on, or to judge whether anything we’ve done in the last 20 years still has any relevance.

In this context the role of leadership is more challenging than ever. People continue to look to the top to set a 5 or 10 year strategy, to give a sense of certainty. In reality, things are changing so quickly that kind of certainty is now a complete illusion. Leaders need to make sure they understand that themselves. We are going to go through a long period of simply not knowing how things will work out. Being able to lead in this period is going to be very tricky. Giving people emotional comfort (if not security) but not giving in to the urge to lurch into a pre-defined cul de sac, simply to show leadership will be key.

In this context, what change initiatives should we invest in during this time? For me, I think there are three key elements that will provide the firmest foundation for the future;

Sentiment is everything.

Understanding the powerful emotions and sentiments driving markets and teams will need to be a key focus in our change efforts. We’ve all been impacted to lesser or greater degree by a collective trauma. Much like the post war period, this is driving a move towards collectivism over the individualism so often hard baked into capitalist models. Pretty much every brand will need to re-position itself in this new context. How you connect emotionally with your market and the perceived collective value of your products and services will be key.

Organisationally, a shift to peer support leadership models over hierarchical ones will help re-balance the tricky power shifts that are taking place between leaders and the front line. If you work in an organisation that delivers public goods (in the broadest sense) your customer and employee experience will take on a powerful positive or negative currency.

Organisations will need to focus in the recovery period on fairness and equality of treatment. We may need to accept that loss making activities that promote these principles are a key part of your business model. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Revenue forecasts will need to shift to integrating these costs in the long term.

The potential higher costs of some elements of this model are a challenge as we all try to recover from the hardest recession in history. The counter-balance will be the need for a much more purposeful process of realising value in your systems and processes.

Automated process transition to drive back office cost reduction has to remain a central priority, with much more rapid delivery. Resist the urge to take a short term view of these costs and put them on hold. Pure cost cutting exercises or narratives of scarcity with employees and customers that have seen you through this period will not be recoverable in the long term. This is primarily about empathic decision making within a new framework of what “value” really means.

We’ve started so we need to finish

One of the most positive things to come out of this time is undoubtedly the shift towards greater home working. Its good for most people, and certainly for the environment. We do though, need to ensure that in the long term our remote working becomes strategic, streamlined and thoughtful. It doesn’t work for everyone. Even those companies that had committed to the model before the crisis had to work hard to make it really work at an organisational level.

For those companies that have “fallen” into it, investment in your management styles and structure is going to be really key. If you hadn’t already adopted the approach large scale before the crisis - ask yourself, why not? Was it because you didn’t understand how it could work for you? or were you worried you didn’t have the skills in your managers to lead it properly?

If you had a particularly hierarchical or presenteism based management culture , remote working can be a recipe for workplace anxiety. Whatever those reasons were before, they still exist in your organisational psyche unless you take proactive action.

The first action will be to firstly accept and own what your culture was before and then do the hard yards. Large scale culture change is a very difficult business. There is no quick fix to create the kind of leaders and engagement that support this model of working effectively.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you’ve cracked it in the last few weeks - a few Zoom meetings with a manager wearing a silly hat does not an engaged culture make! In reality, without a purposeful management and leadership development strategy for this transition, we could be facing long term problems of team disintegration and poor wellbeing in our companies.

Innovate, don’t replicate

We are now facing not only the management of a crisis but the tipping point into a new industrial era on a global scale. Just tweaking your existing costs to survive is not going to work in the long term. Everything is changing; market structures, competition and how we will function as a society.

There are a whole new range of human problems that will need to be solved by your products and services. Spending time with people who can help your collective thinking about the future is vital.

Multiplicity of perspectives are what you need right now. Taking time to define and de-risk scenarios in the coming months is a central change activity. Creating a diverse thought leadership approach with a wide range of people inside and outside of your business to really understand what your business will need to look like is a priority. In particular, be conscious of sector based echo chambers - they are full of people with the same perspectives - make sure you also look outside your industry to see what others are thinking.

In innovation terms this is a period of being “comfortably lost” - having to work through how we got here and where we go next with no road map. As a leader this is about marshalling collective effort, empathy, embracing trial and error, being brave, admitting historic failure and understanding the limitations of our current perspectives.

In other words, this is the era of mass transformational change of both companies and people. Successful transformation is always painful. As leaders, we need to ask ourselves, are we equipping ourselves to feel the burn?

Kate Still is Chief Executive of Recensere Associates

Lockdown: Is this the boredom we need to help us pivot?

Lockdown I’ve found is a largely “couch based” exercise. All those online personas of people learning Mandarin or creating family Tick Tock videos with a cast of thousands leaves me slightly cold. My main activities have been wrangling a three year old and eating custard creams.

If I spend too much time reading what others are doing I feel like hyperventilating. The draw to life achievement in comparison to others is one of my main downfalls - so the current diet of millennial vlogs and quasi expert advice on how to maximise your productivity on zoom or get perfect abs in 30 days makes for an anxiety inducing time for the decidedly average. One thing about this daily fire hydrant of options though, is that its given me time to reflect on what I want, and enjoy, and what I really don’t.

For exmaple I’ve always thought I wanted to learn French really well or run a marathon and that it was a lack of time to train or practice that stopped me. Now I have time in theory to do both, I’ve worked out I don’t want those things enough - in fact I don’t want them at all.

What this time is doing for me is helping me to understand, if we are talking innovation parlance - whats my human problem? What is the thing that I am so passionate about that I have to do something about it and spend the next few months or years focusing on that wholeheartedly?

Both personal and organisational innovation is a tricky business. Many initiatives never get off the ground for a whole host of reasons. Two important ones are that the problem wasn’t really important enough to go through the turgid process of reiteration or that there wasn’t enough will to make it happen.

All too often we give up, because staying the same is a lot less work, even if we remain wholly dissatisfied with our lot. Often we start out on an idea full of passion, but it quickly wains and we give up. I’ve found over the years this is often because I haven’t spent enough time ruminating over either what the problem really is, or all the possible ways of resolving it. I’m a doer so I like the time between starting and finishing something to be quick and direct. Unfortunately this is often the death nell of innovative practice. It is essentially a creative pursuit and creativity is frustratingly circuitous.

One of the positive things about this period for all of us, particularly those who like to take action, is that its forcing us to ruminate. We can’t take the actions we usually would. I’m finding the time actually quite liberating. Ideas I would have come up with, not thought about too much and got on with (and then later abandon!), have had to be put on hold. Instead, I’m using the time to think things through more - take ideas in the planning stage through a lot more thought. Really thinking about the nature of problems and trying not to jump to a solution.

What I’m finding is that this process is taking me to some very interesting places. Particularly, one of the things I’m realising is that my initial ideas often start at a high level of complexity. More time to think it through, change and pivot my thinking is simplifying my solutions - ultimately this means I’m getting closer to ideas that, when I do come to actually build, will deliver much quicker outcomes.

Of course, this time is frustrating, annoying, upsetting and anxiety inducing - but it can also be liberating and highly productive in new ways. So perhaps the gift of Covid is that it can give us the time to be bored enough to think about how we can to pivot to more satisfying simplicity at both an organisational and personal level.