Community
and Cohesion
"Community and Cohesion" - ideas that could impact on the
direction of community cohesion strategy by introducing a new approach
to community leadership training.
This page presents our ideas about the current debate on the
development of community cohesion. We introduce a novel approach
to an adaptive style of community leadership training.
Want to skip this article and go straight to "How to?"
Take a look at this articles on community leadership training.
There we respond to an imaginary community cohesion brief. This enables
us to explain the how the benefits in increased participation arise
from the Community Circle process.
And
there will be other articles linking from this page in due course,
making this page the main community and cohesion and community
leadership hub for our site.
As a bridge between the "Who are we
page" and our interest in community leadership, Robert has written a
personal account of his own views on, "What is community cohesion?"
We
feel that by working alongside community cohesion practitioners, in
community settings, we can start making a difference - with mixed
groups of professionals and community members - from the earliest
opportunity.
We also believe that a commitment to mentoring
and coaching enables us to transfer skills in a way that can be easily
repeated at neighborhood level, enabling good practice to cascade.
This
creates a flexible, user-friendly community leadership programme
readily moulded by local people and professionals - to meet the needs
of particular neighbourhoods.
This approach has ancient roots - and has been used by some of the
world's largest, most forward thinking corporations.
Let's first sketch out some of the community and cohesion
debate. Arguments are well rehearsed elsewhere. Here we limit ourselves
to highlighting issues where we believe we have a measured,
well-reasoned, fresh and effective response.
Community and cohesion: the problem with
hierarchies
The nature of the way our society is organized - at least in formal
structures and institutions, and within those structures and
organizations - is hierarchical.
This influences the tone of the debate about community and cohesion.
A recent report details many accounts of the negative
influence of "top down" policy making.
Summarizing a report she co-researched and co-authored, Karin Gavelin,
Research and Project Manager at Involve, said recently:
Many of the people we
spoke to welcomed
the significant investments
that government is now making to support cohesion and
integration, as set out in the government’s response to the Commission
on Integration and Cohesion.
However, they also raised concerns
about
the ability of national government to succeed with an
agenda that is
ultimately about building
relationships at the neighbourhood level. [emphasis added]
and:
... a local authority
initiative to build community cohesion through
public participation can come across as contrived. The idea that
community cohesion can be built through public debates about
citizenship or moral values was met with particular scepticism ...
she continues:
... an activity will fall flat
simply because the local authority has yet
to learn that just opening the doors to the town hall will not be
enough to draw in the crowds, or indeed make much difference for wider
community relations.
The full report - available
on this site under a creative commons
licence - is called Everybody
needs good neighbours? A study of the link between
public
participation and community cohesion.
Community and Cohesion: 'strong' leaders are not
adaptive leaders
Many - if not all - of the organizations seeking to make a difference
in
the "Community and Cohesion" debate are steadfastly hierarchical in
their history, culture and working practices.
Traditionally leaders have plied their craft within these hierarchies.
This leads to a focus on a particular kind of leader, and a particular
style of leadership.
We
argue that this is not appropriate to community leadership as defined
by a number of recently published reports that focus on community and
cohesion.
Hierarchies depend on a particular notion on leaders and leadership.
Leadership
has been seen as a quality that one is born with. This view emphasizes
a person who is comfortable exercising authority over others. Often
strength of character, determination, charisma, single-mindedness
(bloody-mindedness?) and the capacity to influence others have been
seen as necessary leadership qualities.
Leaders may have had authority conferred by their position - and the
tendency has been to define leaders through their ability to gain and
retain the influence that seniority of position.
In these circumstances, strong leaders may be experienced by those they
lead in the following ways:
- privileged individuals who know how to play the
system;
- people who separate themselves from
community/team/department;
- remote individuals who deal with isolation that
comes with authority;
- as conduits of information or commands from a
yet more remote place;
- purveyors of policies or strategies from
elsewhere;
- one of 'them', not one of 'us'
These - somewhat caricatured - labels encourage or sustain a
perception of leadership as anything but a partnership activity.
Increasingly, these views
of leadership are being questioned. They no longer seem to offer an
appropriate response to modern leadership challenges.
Community
leadership challenges usually arise within a complex web of
relationships between local organizations, groups and
individuals.
The old "command-and-control" approach will continue to have a place.
It is
appropriate where
'technical' or simple operational responses to relatively simple
management
problems arise.
However, society's most pressing problems are no longer technical,
simple, cause-and-effect or linear in nature.
Let's look at the leader from the perspective of the
led. 'Strong' leadership fosters relative levels of passivity and
compliance in
those
who follow. It can also mean the early exodus of talented people (from
organizations) as
they seek more meaningful challenges that enable them to develop.
That "exodus"
in our communities is seen in any number of expressions of
alienation. Some steps on a scales of increasing severity might look
like this:
- lack of availability to others: a kind of
internal exile;
- withdrawal
of goodwill and co-operation;
- passive-aggressive acts;
- anti-social
behavior;
- domestic violence and hate crime, for example.
We simply cannot afford the waste of knowledge, talent, insight - and
the capacity to drive appropriate actions - that comes with that withdrawal and passivity.
Corporations can't ignore it. Communities can't ignore it.
Some of the most urgent and insightful information we can expose
about the community and cohesion issues will be locked away in individual
decisions to close down and withdraw - and indulge in more active
expressions of
alienation.
Community leadership must first address the issue of
creating a safe space where people can explore their reasons for
withdrawal, for giving up on participating in their neighbourhoods.
To
express a need is to expose a vulnerability. Remote leaders simply do
not create the contexts in which this vulnerability can be fully expressed and contained
safely.
Community and Cohesion: leading into passivity?
There
is another problem with 'strong' leadership that impacts om ideas about community and cohesion: a culture of dependence
emerges. That may hold organizations and communities together during
relatively straightforward times.
But what happens when things
change? We probably can all recall examples of different groups (teams,
departments, organizations) that have imploded when problems outgrew
the level of sophistication offered by that style of leadership.
Not sure?
"What this problem/community needs is strong leadership!"
"What this (the same) problem/community needs is a weak membership!"
Don't these statements amount to the same thing?
We find
some of the rhetoric of command-and-control entering the debate about
community and cohesion and the issue of community leadership, as this
passage from the Home Office's Cohesion and Faiths unit (2005)
demonstrates:
"Leadership
and commitment are essential to the development of community
cohesion. Someone needs to take responsibility for managing and driving
through the changes required to build a more cohesive community..."
"What is
clear ... is that someone
needs to exercise leadership and demonstrate commitment
(whether
the local authority, the police, faith groups or the voluntary sector)
and that often once this happens, other partners will come on board."
Community and Cohesion:
seven steps. A practitioner's toolkit
The report as a whole is not this single-minded - I don't wish
to imply otherwise. However, it is far simpler, it would appear, to
articulate leadership practice in command-and-control terms.
The very language of leadership often contains assumptions which we
need to be wary of.
The
development of a leadership capability throughout communities and
neighborhoods requires leaders who listen, who nurture self-belief and
who value the growth and empowerment of others.
Again, this is not a new problem. Lao Tse summed up the issues this way:
“A
leader is best when he is neither seen nor heard; not so good when he
is adored and glorified; worst when he is hated and despised.
"Fail to
honor people, they will fail to honor you."
But of a good leader, when
his work is done, his aim fulfilled, the people will say, "We did this
ourselves."
Community and Cohesion: a vacuum in ideas about
community leadership
A different leadership style is more appropriate to leadership
required in complex, rapidly evolving situations - precisely the
territory to which community and cohesion practice needs to adjust.
If
the withdrawal of goodwill - and all that may follow - begins with a
sense of alienation, then a key leadership activity is the restoration
of a positive sense of self.
Sue Goss,
Director
of National, Regional and Local Services, Office of Public Management
(in her Introduction to Chesterman and Horne, Local Authority? How to
develop leadership for better public services, 2002).
discusses many of the arguments in relation to local involvement in the
development of public services.
[Click here to down load a copy of this contribution to the debate on community leadership.]
She writes:
"Command-and-control cannot
work,
since to achieve social
goals people
with very different interests and experiences have to
learn to work together, to compromise, to pool resources. We need new
models of
leadership, if we are to break out of old behaviours."
and continues:
"Everyone in
public service is an explorer, trying to find new ways to
improve people’s lives. Good leaders sustain and nurture this process
of exploration. At the moment they are trying to do so within delivery
systems that are outdated and over-controlled, and without
a theory of
leadership which properly understands either the problems they
face, or the capabilities they are developing to respond."
In the next section we take our first look at
what a new theory of leadership might look like.
Community leadership: adaptive leadership
"Policies
have created partnerships as products, rather than organic processes
and within partnerships individual leaders have been developed rather
than collective leadership processes.
"The goal of joining up services
has been overtaken by the desire to be seen to join up services. The
goal of increased local leadership has been overtaken by the desire to
see local leaders."
Chesterman and
Horne, ibid.
p. 14
Adaptive leadership is a term coined by Ronald Heifetz in his
book Leadership without easy answers.[Boston,
MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1994].
He addresses the values implied by the terms leader and leadership from
the outset:
"Imagine
the differences in behavior when people operate with the idea that
'leadership means influencing the community to follow the leader's
vision' versus 'leadership means influencing the community to face its
problems.'
"In
the first instance, influence is the mark of leadership; a leader gets
people to accept his vision, and communities address problems by
looking to him. If something goes wrong, the fault lies with
the
leader.
"In
the second, progress on problems is the measure of leadership; leaders
mobilize people to face its problems, and communities make progress
because leaders challenge them and help them to do so."
"If something
goes wrong, the fault lies with both leaders and the community." pp. 14 - 15
Heifetz summarizes leadership as a process aimed at winning
over hearts and minds. He's very clear that it is a value-laden term
and that we need to be explicit about the values that inform leadership.
In
our view he articulates a vision of leadership that fits the community
and cohesion / community leadership debate. That is, he explores a
leadership style that could meet the community cohesion agenda.
He developed his ideas further in Heifetz and Linsky,
Leadership
on
the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading [Boston,
MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002].
They open with a moving story.
Every
Tuesday evening Maggie looks after Lois' children. They are neighbors
on a native American reservation. After a while she wonders what Lois
is doing and so one evening she follows Lois.
"We looked through
a window into the lodge and saw a big circle of chairs, all neatly in
place, with Lois sitting in a chair all by herself. The chairs in the
circle were empty.
"I asked her, 'Lois, what are you doing every Tuesday night?'
" '... I've been holding AA meetings.'
" 'What do you mean you've been holding meetings? I went over
there tonight with the children and looked through the window. We
watched you sitting in that circle of chairs, all alone.'
"Lois got quiet. ' I wasn't alone. I was there with the spirits and the ancestors; and one day, our people will come.' "
Maggie recalls how Lois never gave up; how she was there for two hours every week.
"No
one came to those meetings for a long time, and even after three years
there were only a few people in the room. But ten years later the room
was filled with people. The community began turning around. People
began ridding themselves of alcohol. I felt so inspired by Lois I
couldn't sit still watching us poison ourselves."
Heifetz and Linsky explain:
"Lois
and then Maggie worked on becoming sober themselves, then challenged
their families, friends and neighbors to change and renew their lives
too.
"Leading these communities required extraordinary self- examination, perseverance and courage."
pp. 9 - 10
Community and Cohesion: community circles as community leadership training eventsSelf-examination, perseverance and courage ...
How can these be given a central place in the development of community and cohesion within that community?
Our
interests and experience include: teaching communication and coaching
skills, personal and professional development, practitioner
supervision, deep therapeutic work interventions, facilitating dynamic
group work
team building.
The "Wisdom Circle" is becoming an increasingly important and powerful part of our armoury of interventions.
It
enables any community of individuals - we have worked with up to fifty
representatives or community members - to discover the hidden
knowledge that is buried in taken-for-granted experiences. This
knowledge is carefully exposed and examined, revealing new insights as
a basis for planning new interventions. Our
own approach to community and cohesion - and to developing community
leadership training - puts a Community Circle at center stage.
The unfamiliarity of our process and ground rules are a great leveler. The 'rules' are simple and immediately transparent.
Essentially
we want to hold open a safe and challenging space for members of
communities to expose and explore their own hopes, fears and dreams;
and to plan and - whenever possible take - the actions that will
realise them.
We
also want to create a space where people who may be unfamiliar with
speaking out and committee-type procedures (agendas, minutes, officers'
roles, etc.) are given the best opportunity to participate fully.
The process is revealing. It validates community members' experiences. It includes, involves and empowers.
You'll be wondering: "How?"
As
there is a strong leadership development element in the process, we
explain in our next article, which focuses on the Community
Circle's role as a community leadership training process. It's much briefer than this one!
Our
ideas (and our pages) on community and cohesion are developing quickly.
Please sign up for the blog/RSS feed if you'd like to be alerted when
pages are written or revised.
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