Reflective Practice & Staff Support Groups
Staff Support Groups for Leaders/Managers
Managers and Leaders routinely execute their roles within pressurised fast-moving environments, with little time and space to think and reflect on what has happened. They also act (knowingly and unknowingly) as emotional containers for the team/s worries as well as wider organisational dynamics bearing down.
The impact of these powerful elements of management and leadership are often ignored, conceived of as irrational, unhelpful. However not dealing with these difficult thoughts or feelings may negatively affect effectiveness, team and management good-will and wellbeing, as the need to do something and make a decision often overwhelms individuals and teams, detracting from thinking or being curious about why they decided on this particular solution now?
Who can benefit?
These groups can work well for Managers, overseeing staff not necessarily responding primarily to people in distress but who still do so on a reasonably regular basis or manage staff going through a change or re-structure, hybrid working or for example where a group is without it’s usual line management support or responding to high demand with constrained function in a highly competitive environment.
Aims
It provides a safe confidential setting where managers, leaders are supported to consider how their professional and personal experiences get mixed in with their current work role. Thought can then be given to how those themes connect with their staff; the wider organisational structure, positions taken up by team members, purpose and culture and the external environment relevant to their roles.
Managers and leaders are supported to explore a new sense of their team dynamics, staff and culture, and to how such factors might cascade across their work and shape how they sit in role take up their authority and leadership. Insights can then inform new ways of thinking that encourage and sustain higher levels of performance, improved staff engagement across areas of responsibility to develop a more cohesive team.
Using an external consultant enables an ‘outside observer’ position to support more rigorous thinking and challenge, using the space for difficult material to be unpacked and given some new meaning.
Reflective Practice Groups
Who can benefit?
For staff working in emotionally demanding roles in any organisation, a regular (usually) monthly group can be supportive, allowing another perspective to be found. Roles where this could be helpful can include those directly related to mental health, such as Student Wellbeing Services, where uni or multi-disciplinary staff, such as Mental Health Advisers, Disability Advisers, Wellbeing Practitioners and Operational Staff can notice and share concerns.
They are also useful for staff who are not mental health professionals such as Student Services but who nonetheless work directly with people in distress handling issues like complaints, appeals, crises, financial, welfare difficulties or living through a turbulent time such as housing issues. Equally workplace mental health champions or first aiders, HR staff who deal with employee casework and conflict, staff in contact with issues like harassment, sexual assault, champions of any kind, personal and senior tutors, residencies, careers, libraries, security.
How does it work?
Staff are supported to develop their professional practice through reflection and support from others, using a model that differs from formal training.
Regular sessions facilitated by an external practitioner offer staff a safe, confidential space away from the usual constraints of management processes and operational procedures to process how aspects of their day-to-day work impact them emotionally and open consideration of how teams are working among themselves, with service users, stakeholders and the wider organisation.
This outside but inside position allows for a different spotlight to fall on organisational dynamics and patterns of behaviour that work counter to productivity and can be distressing. This enables the staff experience to be considered, gathered in and communication to be improved. From this new perspectives and more creative and rewarding ways of working can be found.
Core aims:
Confidential and supportive space, for staff to share aspects of their day-to-day work that has an impact on them emotionally and personally
To encourage staff to reflect on how their own life experience might connect with aspects of their work and consider ways of processing or managing this
To support staff well being and mental health in an embedded way, as a core and ordinary part of their work role
To enable staff to discuss and share skills and thinking, and to consider how people in similar roles might think about and approach their work differently but more effectively
To encourage ordinary workplace thoughts, feelings and behaviours to be openly discussed and made sense of rather than potentially played or acted out, which can lead to workplace conflict and unhealthy work culture/s
To identify systemic issues that might be relevant to the wider organisation and management in terms of supporting staff and delivering high quality experiences for staff and service users
Delivery
Maximum of eight members per group work best, and group members should remain the same each month, apart from individuals joining or leaving from time to time. It can work with either similar or different roles in one area of the organisation, or similar roles in different areas of the organisation.
Groups can run face to face or online within your organisation.
Groups typically run three to four times per year or perhaps monthly for a fixed period of time. Group size varies depending on nature of the work
On organisation premises or online via Zoom
