William Blake- 'The Fly'

How do you create a great Social Work Team? Or any kind of great team? By Tony Dougan

A recent Social Work Essay was invited by the Recruitment Company-Liquid Personnel with a £1000 first prize so I entered.  I was not shortlisted but here are some of my less bizarre thoughts on the subject below.

“The average ‘career lifespan’ of a social worker is just 8 years.  What can be done to increase engagement among social workers and keep them in the profession for longer?”

My title is:

How to lead, care for, and inspire great work in a social work team.

Mirror a loving family under pressure.

Train, support, develop, stretch, and trust.

Use authority with great care and sparingly.

Continually recognise and celebrate good work and achievements.

Make lots of space for laughter.  Share food a lot.

Make lots of space to meet and share.

Continually emphasise-service-to service users and each other.

Resist cultures of overwork and presenteeism.

Always accompany a negative criticism with a positive solution.

Insist that negative feelings are shared and talked through.

Continually emphasise personal and professional safety.

Grow and invest in your workers over time.

Be clear about the team’s Mission Statement.

Have whiteboards everywhere-magnetic ones!

Encourage familiarity and pleasure in research.

Create the practice of always cascading training.

Insist upon loyalty to the team as a basic expectation.

Sometimes play music in the office.

Shared lunch is positive but never obligatory.

Encourage your social workers to take breaks and go for walks.

Have regular group supervisions on complex cases.

Train your social workers to be at ease with authority in safeguarding cases and to project it with confidence but also with compassion and understanding.

Make supervision an exciting, challenging but ultimately affirming experience.

Be a leader-servant.

Encourage the keeping of a professional journal and file-including all training, qualifications and Continued Professional Development hours.

Treat all bullying and disrespect, racism, sexism and oppression as if it were a disease from whatever source.

Have Friday lunch together in the pub regularly.

Treat all students as custodians of the future of the profession.  They are treasure!

Create gold stars and Employee of the Week Awards but with much humour and laughter while subversively celebrating outstanding work.

Stand up for Social Work as a profession for heroes and wounded healers.

Have at least one suit for court-the best you can buy-Navy blue is best.

Teach yourself and your team to become the best possible writers.

Read and critique each other’s written work.  Remember the best writers are always the best readers.

Always, always carry a notebook and pen.

Learn to be and teach everyone to become, great note takers.

Become an expert in using technology.

Use Evernote.  Scrivenor.  Devonthink.  Ulysses.  Todoist.  Wunderlist.  Word.  Mindjet.  Pages.  Powerpoint.  Keynote.  Excel.

Always ask for the other point of view, likewise advice.  One of the most common things to hear in a social work office should be ‘what do you think?’  Director or Social Worker-No matter what your role.

Meditate every day.
Physically exercise and take care of your body through fitness and nutrition.  Have a hobby that you love!

Every social worker of eight years experience should be a highly trained and confident:

·     Meetings chair

·     Minute-taker

·     Report writer

·     Counsellor and therapist-Child or adult or both

·     Events organiser

·     Coach

·     Trainer

·     Presentations specialist

·     Theoretician

·     Self-organiser

·     Possessor of brilliantly developed interpersonal skills

·     Court Expert

·     Mediator and negotiator

Pessimism is not a good mind-set for a Social Worker.  Be always open to the almost miraculous potential for humans to undergo transformation.  Always be compassionate before your analytical brain kicks in-use both.

Practice the facial expressionism of a good actor so that from the back of a Court you leave a judge in no doubt of your feelings!

A successfully managed worker is one who is excited about coming to work in the morning.

Be proud of being a Social Worker.  Encourage pride in the profession.

Consider your Senior Leadership Team as having the best of motives.  Understand the hugely difficult decisions they must make in this time of Austerity.

Senior managers!  You need to communicate Austerity much more effectively.

Be a master and mistress of Email courtesy.

Too high caseloads mean low quality work-understand it is an inevitable equation that will lead to the loss of good people.

Review all your professional priorities at least weekly.

In order for doing to be effective it must be preceded by thinking and planning.

Never, ever, sign your name to anything you don’t believe in.

If anyone ever tells you Social Work is about covering your arse, they don’t understand it.  You can ignore them.

Regard vulnerable children and adults as priceless works of art are regarded by museums.  Not problems but the reason for your professional existence.

Avoid management-speak like the plague.  Use language to be clearly understood.  Avoid acronyms and abbreviations.

Social work skills are gradually accrued over years of practice and study.  At about eight years a social worker is coming into their power to make excellent independent decisions.  If they leave the profession at this point you lose not only them but all the knowledge that is in their heads when they walk out the door including the mysterious value of their intuition.  It is irreplaceable and to lose it is to fail as an organisation and as a profession.  Staff retention needs the profession’s best minds. NOTE: staff retention needs a better title more descriptive of its various elements.  How about- ‘The joy in the job Project?’

Social Work is not about processing forms-it is about transforming lives.

Regard an Ofsted Inspection as an opportunity to show off!  Celebrate it!  There’s nothing worse for social workers than to be contaminated with the fear of a Senior Management Team on the brink of an Ofsted visit!

Let us articulate as a whole profession what we see as our future role in our society.  Let’s be a bit more pushy about it!

Join the British Association of Social Workers (BASW).  Get involved!

We don’t do this bizarre and wonderful job for the money.  Certainly not for the prestige.  Not for the popular acclaim!

Maybe we just want to do something valuable and worthwhile? To give back something?  Maybe we love humanity?  Maybe we have traces of brokenness in our own lives that spurred us on?

A myriad of reasons and maybe no reason we can articulate yet.

But it’s a damn fine, even heroic thing to do, this Social Work!  

We should be proud of ourselves!  We should be proud of each other!  If you are a social worker reading this and resonating with it, then I am proud of YOU!

Quite simply, when we speak the truth of what we do, that is how we will keep on doing it. 

Go well, dear hearts, and shine brightly!

Tony Dougan 

December 2016



Comment me do!:  heartofbalance@gmail.com

A WALK IN THE WOODS

WHY I LEFT FACEBOOK AND WHY YOU SHOULD TOO (Published here but still in production)

Carole Cadwallader

Last year I read an amazing piece of investigative journalism in 'The Observer' written and researched by Carole Cadwallader  (https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla)  The extensive article detailed the ways in which the billionaire Peter Thiel had funded the Brexit movement in using Cambridge Analytica to harvest millions of facebook users data to micro-target mailshots during the American Presidential election and the brexit referendum in the UK as well as possibly interfering in the Kenyan Presidential and subsequent possible interference in the election of the monstrous Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philipines.

Charmath Palihapitiya

I have long been concerned about the relationship between Facebook and it's users where the user IS the product and while recognising the social glue it allows between 'friends', I am also disturbed by its apparently cynical manipulation and  its business model.

Yet another former Facebook executive has come out and expressed his guilt and concern over the role he had in developing the hugely popular social media giant, Facebook.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the vice-president for user growth at Facebook prior to leaving the company in 2011, said, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works. . . . No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

These remarks were made at a Stanford Business School event in November, but were recently published by tech website The Verge earlier this week.

“This is not about Russian ads, this is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

Interestingly, Palihapitiya is not the first former Facebook president to come out and expose the truth behind this corporation. Sean Parker also said in a press conference that he was “something of a conscientious objector” to using social media. These words were echoed by Palihapitiya, who says he is now hoping to use the money he made during his time at Facebook to do good in the world.

When a former president of such a massive corporation has such strong words to say about their employer, I would say it’s certainly worth considering. He is passionate about not using Facebook himself or even letting his kids use it, so there must be a good reason.  

He called on his audience to “soul-search” in regards to their own relationship to social media, saying, “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.”

What a powerful statement. I think many of us are aware by now of how addictive Facebook can be, but the idea that, with its pernicious algorithms it can influence our voting behaviour and thoughts and actions and harvest our data for the ends of shadowy billionaires and alt right think tanks is like dark science fiction turned into reality.

All together now-Aaaah Ti-mo-thy-Mor-ton (repeat)

Slow Reading Slow Gaming

This is really slow reading-the first word of The picture of Dorian Gray!  I choose the first sentence because I am not from Hegel land.

What am I reading?  Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.  What is the first sentence of the book?
We begin with a quote from Novalis thus:

'It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely
The moment another soul will believe in it.'

The first sentence then:

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

This slow reading is quite amazing!  Is Conrad describing a man or an Exocet missile.  Imagine such a being approaching you, getting closer and closer.  You feel that this time out in the world it appears you may be assaulted for no reason by this crazy bull of a man, when he stops suddenly and enquires of you the time of day.
This is our first immediate encounter with our flawed hero, carrying the burden of one act of cowardice.

They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say-Lord Jim.

My reason for reading Conrad presently is in order to fully absorb Maya Jasanoff's extraordinary text about issues of globalisation arising from at least three of his books- ('The Dawn Watch  Joseph Conrad in a Global World.  William Collins 2017)  These being 'Nostromo', 'Lord Jim' and, of course, 'Heart of darkness.'  Maya's thesis is that Conrad predicted the phenomenon of globalisation, terrorism and the colonial exploitation that has left enduring psychic destruction in its wake thus accurately navigating us to our present sea of dillemmas and discombobulations in the first quarter of the Twenty First Century CE.
Having just finished 'Nostromo' described as Conrad's big book,  I can vouch that it explores the issues of the poisonous creep of greed, the issues of exploitation, the mannerisms of the colonisers and the furious passionately bonkers politics of South America.  Additionally, in the character of Nostromo himself we have a studied representation of a manly hero, a true free spirit shackled only by the obsession with his own honour.  Very much in the way that, in the Illiad, Achilles takes the matter of his own warlike legend as a matter of simple fact.  Either heroic short-lived warrior or long lived and contented family man dying slowly into his eighties-an equally simple choice. 

Some words from the heart about Grenfell by Stormzy recently noted in Croydon on my morning commute