The Open Channel Newsletter September 2012

THE OPEN CHANNEL NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER 2012

We are delighted to welcome you to the latest edition of The Open Channel Newsletter. 

The Open Channel was created from the germ of an idea in February 2011. Since then we have launched our website, set up our regular blogs and social media links and delivered services to clients. 

This newsletter brings you quality content on a regular basis. Do contact us to find out how we can assist you to manage your change challenges. 

Find Out More http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk/


If you are a public body, private service provider, voluntary and community delivery organisation or social enterprise, you will find the services we offer just right for your needs. 

Led by Janet Dean and Steve Loraine, two highly respected and experienced independent public service advisers, The Open Channel has a fresh and highly cost-effective approach to helping you lead and manage change. 
Our approach is based on the view that people and organisations are inherently strong and capable and that supporting strengths in times of change is a positive and more sustainable way to lead and manage.


INSIDE THIS ISSUE
We report on our Leadership Development Programme for Harborough District Council, where we used a mixture of coaching and facilitation techniques to develop the leadership capacity of the Council. 
Find out how we use Action Learning and Appreciative Inquiry with great success and how these approaches can benefit your organisation.
We also update you on our involvement in various new projects. 

Contact Us to Find Out More http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk/


THE OPEN CHANNEL CASE STUDY 

HARBOROUGH DISTRICT COUNCIL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT 
Initially invited to bid for a short intensive programme of support for the Senior Management Team, Janet Dean introduced The Open Channel to Harborough District Council in July 2011. Our involvement has lasted for a year during which the organisation has faced one of the most transformational periods in its history.

Our work has fallen into three phases:
An initial programme of support for a Senior Management Team facing change; we provided three themed workshops, three Action Learning Sets and telephone and Skype coaching for the Chief Executive and six senior colleagues.

In phase two we were commissioned to provide a programme for 30 senior employees including the Senior Management Team. 
Based on Harborough’s Leadership Competencies we delivered four one-day interactive workshops on Managing Change, Leadership, Working with Others and Communication and Strategic Focus.
Between the workshops we facilitated four Action Learning Sets linked to each of the themes, enabling participants to bring practical issues from the workshop to a shared problem solving arena.

Phase three, which uses Appreciative Inquiry to explore leadership themes is focused on the Council’s new Leadership team, which includes senior leadership posts shared with neighbouring local authorities.

This is what participants told us:

‘I felt it gave a common language and a platform from which to challenge (appropriately) others when behaviours could have been better’
‘The Action Learning Sets were the most positive outcome for me and I intend to continue to commit to them.’
‘It introduced me to new concepts with regards to leadership – and I found the appreciative inquiry element particularly interesting.’
‘I feel more confident in my leadership style and the impact I have on those around me.’
‘I found working with others especially useful and I feel now that I have a much better working relationship with colleagues and will be in better position to share issues and problems.’  


THE OPEN CHANNEL APPROACH

ACTION LEARNING

Training your people to support one another through Action Learning
Action Learning is a method for developing real-world solutions and the reflective practice skills of employees at all levels through the shared exploration of workplace challenges. It is particularly suitable for people who need support for the difficult leadership and managerial challenges they experience.

At a time when public services are changing rapidly and resources becoming ever scarcer, Action Learning is a cost-effective method for building the capacity and confidence of your key people.

We offer Action Learning on site or through webinar-style meetings. Sets work best with between four and eight people in the group. We not only facilitate the Action Learning; we also transfer skills to the participants enabling them to self-facilitate their sets in the future. In Harborough DC for example, we provided over 20 Action Learning sets through the year. 

Finding your Strength through Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a view of the world which enables organisations and communities to cooperatively explore what is working well, understand their strengths and address challenges based on the best of what is. It provides a balanced approach to change that does not over-concentrate on weakness or failure, as so many other frameworks and models can. 

Our clients tell us this approach really releases energy and enthusiasm through the appreciative conversations stakeholders have, capturing what works well, imagining their future, followed by creating shared goals. The actions focus on harnessing a community or organisation’s productive energy and aiming it at measureable and positive outcomes. Concrete actions, real results and sustainable change are several of the benefits of this approach.
We provided an introduction to AI for Harborough and then used it as an approach in the Workshops, Action Learning Sets and Executive Coaching. 

Elsewhere, Steve has introduced AI to and worked with clients to realise the benefits of AI in Fire and Rescue Services, city Councils, strategic partnerships, voluntary and community bodies and individuals. We will share the stories from these in future issues. 
 

THE OPEN CHANNEL NEWSFEED

JANET DEAN TO CHAIR COMPASS UK

The Open Channel co-founder Janet Dean has been appointed Chair of Compass UK with effect from the 1st September 2012. Compass UK is a charitable social enterprise which delivers almost £10m of services to families, young people and adults who want to become free of drug and alcohol dependency. Janet’s experience as a commissioner of health and social care, her wide public sector knowledge and extensive networks and her commitment to supporting people to live fulfilling lives will all help Janet in her new role.


KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE OPEN CHANNEL
You can keep up to the minute with The Open Channel through our blogs and Twitter feeds. We engage with our clients and stakeholders at @janetdean and @steveloraine and via Linked-in.

Check out the links in this newsletter, visit our blogs or add us to your favourites lists via www.theopenchannel.co.uk

Great Links for strengths and talents

Here are some great links that you might have missed:

 http://www.strengthscope.com/

Strengthscope have a great profile tool for individuals and teams.We use it extensively with our executive coaching and leadership team clients. It is a highly effective and accurate profiler that provides a high quality report and promotes a new dialogue with our clients around their strengths in a work-setting. 

The language of strengths is new to some, e.g. in one recent piece of coaching with senior managers in a large back-office services company, we noticed it's promotion of and reliance on lean and sigma-based tools with its own clients was so strong that its own managers had little or no vocabulary to describe their strengths and talents. They were eloquent on their weaknesses and almost silent on their strengths!

Adjusting the balance of conversations towards strengths and talents with leaders can radically alter their view of themselves and, critically, their colleagues; leading to fresh insights, improved relationships and enhanced leadership team outputs and outcomes. 

The strengths profile and a personalised feedback sessions are highly cost and time-efficient. We can provide both as a package, over the 'phone and email at a time to suit you.


Miles Downey has a new blog-post with a simple yet highly persuasive idea to get us moving, becoming 'unstuck', through creating multiple views of ourselves rather than having single views that can lead us into becoming stuck in our ways, i.e. I am the way I am.

http://mylesdowney.com/2012/06/12/i-am-the-way-i-am/

At Optimum Interventions and The Open Channel, coaching with clients to help them become 'unstuck' is a key feature of our work. We really do appreciate that leaders can and do reach points in their careers where they are both successful yet at the same time in a dangerous position. They are at risk of becoming one-paced in terms of their style, impact and in the perception of others. They risk being outmanoeuvred by fleet-of-foot competitors and rivals who are actively developing their approaches; risking 'failure' to become more adept and agile in their responses to rapidly changing contexts. Coaching can help to unearth new insights and shape fresh directions or responses at just the right time, in an atmosphere of supporting challenge. 

Check out what we can offer in executive coaching at both of our sites:

http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk

http://www.optimuminterventions.co.uk

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"If the economy was a sick patient, George Osborne would be struck off"

Larry Elliott writes on today's Guardian website:

"Weaker growth has meant the government's deficit reduction plan is well off track, with David Cameron admitting that austerity will now continue for a decade, double the five-year period of pain promised when the coalition came to power. The Treasury has borrowed well over £500bn since the recession began and the figures are worse this year than they were in 2011."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/25/economy-george-osborne-growth-figures?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

John Cridland, DG of the CBI and general all-around supporter for the Chancellor says:

“These are very disappointing figures. They show there has been a lack of growth in the first half of 2012. “When I talk to businesses on the ground, however, the overwhelming view is that right now the economy is flat rather than negative, and there is potential for Britain to get back into growth later in the year.”

http://www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2012/07/cbi-comments-on-latest-gdp-data/

Yep, that's it - after 5 of 7 quarters of negative growth, an economy smaller than it was in 2008 and government borrowing way beyond target, added to which another decade of austerity is forecast with, a 2014 Comprehensive Spending Review which has to decimate the public sector further because there is nowhere else to go if your economy is contracting - the CBI appears to be the only major representative body not to be calling on the Chancellor to 'do something different!' Shameful. Even the British Chambers of Commerce, hardly a left-wing organisation, is calling for public investment in infra-structure and the IoD, definitely a right-leaned organisation, says improved leadership is needed from the Chancellor.

Even the 'red-braces' are panicking, given that the ratings agencies, those small, shadowy completely unaccountable companies who can wreck a nations creditworthiness, are circling the UK's AAA rating. Just watch the fall-out when that happens - and there's no pleasure in that, particularly when we all suffer and our pensions are put at risk (both private and public sector - yes, we are all together in that mess!).

Meanwhile, Osborne is the Government's chief political strategist as well as the Chancellor - glad to see he fills his spare time gainfully.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/25/george-osborne-under-pressure-economy?intcmp=239

Bitter? You bet I am. This is a disaster and the Government can no longer go on repeating, ad-nausea, that it's clearing up the previous Government's mess. It just doesn't wash.

Painting the 'big picture' - leadership & intentional communication

Effective communication by leaders with their organisation's employees helps to create engagement, motivation and a shared direction. What can sometimes happen though is that corporate communications fail to create a clear picture of the organisation's strategic direction, tending to focus more on day-to-day operational matters, exhortations to better performance and trying to beat the rumour-mill to the punch. 

In 2007 HBR research found that a clear minority of employees reported that their managers communicated a clear strategic direction to them. Interestingly, in connected research this year, senior managers when asked believed a minority of their employees had a good grasp of big-picture strategy. So, if managers believe employees don't have the strategic picture and employees believe their managers don't inform and engage them, just what is going on and who is responsible for communicating or connecting with the big -picture? 

In our experience, the most effective leaders tend to paint the 'big picture' readily and ably in their communications. Similarly, we've found that engaged employees connect themselves to the big picture messages and make connections between their roles and the strategic direction. 

HBR went on to suggest that to raise the level of strategic understanding "leaders must learn to be intentional about the way that they communicate with employees. In other words, they must work to align what they say — and how they talk — with a clear pattern of strategic intent." HBR called this "organisational conversation." 

In traditional leadership models the leaders treat employee communication as a distinct entity from the organisation's strategy. HBR suggested that leaders who engage intentionally place a premium on integrating the strategic direction into their regular messaging.

They go on to offer four ideas to help us become more intentional leaders:

"1. Think ahead. Before they can cultivate a strategic conversation within their company, leaders need to develop a conversational strategy. 

2. Paint a picture.  Smart leaders get creative about how they communicate this kind of information. They tell a story.

3. Ask for help. One way to ensure that people have a clear view of their company's strategic priorities is to give them a role in setting those priorities. 

4. Watch what you say. In talking with employees, effective leaders use consistent, well-thought-out language — language that aims to keep everyone's "eyes on the prize" 

The full article with more about the 4 ideas can be found here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/to_resolve_the_uncertainty_in.html

Barclays, banking and failure - how to generate new directions through AI.

The Guardian web has just published an article that shows perfectly where several of the key players stand on the 'Barclays Affair' and other recent misdeads of the 'masters of universe.' 

"The government is to order a review of the operation of the inter-bank lending rate, or Libor, following revelations of its frequent abuse by Barclays and other banks. The move follows Ed Miliband's call for a public inquiry into the "institutional corruption" of the banking industry after a series of banking scandals.

A spokeswoman for Downing Street said the review would be independent but that details of who would lead it have yet to be worked out.

Barclays were fined £290m for manipulating the inter-bank lending rate, and several other international banks are also under investigation.

The review falls short of the public inquiry demanded by the Labour leader, who said tougher rules and jail terms were needed to tackle the immoral culture and practices committed by a "corrupt elite" in Britain's banks.

On Friday the Bank of England governor, Sir Mervyn King, demanded a "real change in culture" as Britain's lenders were left reeling by the controversy."

King's intervention seems characteristically weak. The BoE it was of course that was so surprised by so much of the 2007-09 disaster (did it really not understood how Northern Rock had a such a flawed business model - many others did in real-time, not after the fact), having singularly failed to properly lead the thinking about ethics and practice in it's sector. This meak calling for a change of culture (to what precisely?) just reeks of capitulation, i.e. is the banking and insurance sector now so ethically and morally corrupt that there really is little option but to make vacuous calls for them to change their ways? Fat chance of that happening anyway without some decent-length prison sentences to act as electric cattle-prods. 


I like little about the USA, but the alacrity with which they imprison their financial miscreants is always worth a closer look. They even bring them out of their offices in hand-cuffs and with TV cameras nicely positioned to capture it all. Priceless moments of base satisfaction for the many who have had their financial futures so damaged - and this particularly includes small businesses, public services and millions of individuals. 


As Ed Miliband says, these are and were not victimless crimes; the consequences of casino-banking and all of its derivatives (excuse the pun) are now legion. They have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in all sectors, damaged pensions in all sectors, left a generation of young people unlikely to find fulfilling employment, reduced numbers of university places, increased student debt massively, created gross mistrust and friction between people in all sectors who actually have a lot more in common than they might at first think, and so on.

The Guardian goes on to say: 

"The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said bankers who had committed crimes must be brought to trial.

Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, and Marcus Agius, the chairman, have been summoned to appear before the Commons Treasury select committee on Wednesday.

Miliband pushed for a 12-month investigation to "find out what is going on in the dark corners of the banks" after the Financial Services Authority (FSA) uncovered "serious failings" in the sale of complex financial products to small businesses, just days after interest rate-rigging at Barclays was revealed.

The taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC and several other lenders are also being investigated for manipulating the rates at which banks lend to each other, known as Libor and Euribor, to boost their profits.

Miliband said the inquiry, set up with cross-party support, would be asked to draw up a bankers' code of conduct going beyond the "narrow" professional standards enforced by the FSA.

Calling for the worst offenders to receive prison sentences, he said: "It should be about probity, honesty, integrity. Bankers should be struck off if they do the wrong thing … this is not a victimless crime."

Clarke said there should be criminal investigations and prosecutions where financial crimes had been committed.

"This is still being investigated, no doubt, but once these investigations are complete, if they have committed criminal offences, they should be brought to trial," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The former chancellor said some of the banks' actions that came to light this week were shocking.

"Some of it is distorting vital interest rates, some of it is knowingly selling products they know are worthless to the less sophisticated people you are selling it to – which I regard as obtaining money by deception," he said. "Then there is the total moral bankruptcy of the comments being made by the people who are doing it."

King said he did not believe a Leveson-style inquiry was needed, but condemned the conduct in the industry.

"From excessive levels of compensation, to shoddy treatment of customers, to a deceitful manipulation of one of the most important interest rates and now news of yet another mis-selling scandal, we can see we need a real change in the culture of the industry," he said.

The FSA revealed earlier that Barclays, HSBC, RBS and Lloyds Banking Group had agreed to pay compensation to customers who were mis-sold interest-rate hedging products. Around 28,000 of the products have been sold since 2001 and may have been offered as protection, or to act as a hedge, against a rise in interest rates, without the customer fully grasping the risks.

Serious Fraud Office investigators are in talks with the FSA over the Libor scandal, while the Treasury has started to look at strengthening criminal sanctions for those responsible for market abuse.

Miliband described the Barclays fiasco as "the unacceptable face of capitalism", and called on Diamond to step down.

But Diamond, who was head of the bank's investment arm at the time of the allegations, reportedly told a meeting of analysts at US bank Morgan Stanley that he would not resign." So ends the article.

And you know, these latest high profile, national and international stories not only have a strategic impact, but for some, and I include myself in this, our personal experience over several years have told us at our individual levels what we are now learning in very specific and large-scale terms: that the banking and insurance industry has gone from hallowed, trusted institutions to largely being a necessary evil, to simply being an evil. 


Unfettered 'markets,' the specious claims of new "redefined standards" of "customer service" and the mythical allure of "shareholder value"; the off-shoring of services; the lack of a moral compass being consistently provided by Government and the Bank of England; the ethics of the mafia and many more contributing factors, have all mixed to create this farago. It only takes good people to do nothing that allows evil to flourish. Has the time come to show these institutions and their leaders especially, that this is where the line is being drawn? Yes and the pleasure of revenge aside, how best to do this? 


Well, apart from trial and prosecution, as Clarke calls for, a very different way to begin a moral and ethical recovery is through appreciative and generative ways; from within the very real and negative experiences and the wreckage of once sound institutions, searching for those remaining elements and practices that are positive, ethical, that stand against the predominant orthodoxy of 'money and massive profit above all else'; great and consistent customer services for its own intrinsic value and so on. These might offer a new route to redemption. 


Creating new visions that encompass the ethical, life-affirming and redemptive practices that many other organisations continue to achieve despite all of their current challenges and with none of the massive freedoms and continuing governmental financial backing that the banks and insurers enjoy. Seeing the 'whole system', not just their piece of the system, will encourage and prompt new thinking, fresh insights and may lead to the Design of new, honest and sustainable practices, involving stakeholders in their design, e.g. customers and clients, properly and for the long term, not just via flawed customer-feedback schemes. And so on. 


These are not 'soft' suggestions. They would involve the deepest of self-reflection, sharing and honesty - a thorough process of discovery, involving contact with many of those affected by the failures, yet with the appreciative purpose of seeking to unearth the best of what is and best of what yet may be. It is through these methods that a new culture might be born, not through vacuous calls to people to behave - that train has long since left. The old paradigm of problem identification and solutions, yet more law-making and punishment simply speaks to old thinking. Whilst I might get perverse personal pleasure in seeing the 'red braces' doing 'time,' I would derive much more pleasure from seeing really new and generative processes introduced at this point of maximum crisis.


Just a thought - what do you think?