Can I hear you?

Work this week was on the big picture level for me. Looking at budgets, structures, models… and spending a rare evening out (out out?) in Soho wearing nothing from Lucy & Yak and maybe even not having cat hair or a dinosaur sticker on me… That’s a fun week for me, an energising week!

Threading through that is a strong desire to make sure that, as we attempt to lay plans, people’s voices and experiences are heard.

That’s a massive thing — and I’m not the first to think it of course. The organisation has lots of concrete practices to work on this. The Happiness Survey is one of my favourite introductions of the last couple of years — I love being able to look at where there was feedback and action and as a member of SLT I feel like it’s great insight into things that are difficult to tap into.

I think I’m actually thinking on the day to day tangible specifics of feeling like people trust me to respect their feedback and listen to it. For example, if I convene a meeting to reflect on something, what is in place to make people comfortable enough to feed back? This is nuanced and I have a few reflections/things I’ve noticed. They don’t add up to anything concrete, but if you have any ideas then I’d love to hear them!

• Early feedback from staff is so often that everyone is lovely. I think sometimes that means they feel able to express concerns and add ideas — but I also think it sometimes means they feel like they shouldn’t say anything critical. We might be a nicer place to work than your last place, but we can always do better.
• We spend a lot of time as managers thinking about how to make everyone comfortable and bring out the best of people. I think that’s the way it should be. However I also know that not all spaces in the world are like that — do we also have a duty to help people build certain professional skills to speak up in other spaces?
• Lots about our culture is open, nurturing and informal — but each of us brings our experiences of previous work places and hierachies. I think it takes a while for someone joining to trust that we are who we say we are, and that’s fair enough.
• Linked to the last point, I’m trying to be aware of how people find it harder to give me feedback or ask me to do something. I think I’m just a friendly manager bumbling around making cat jokes, but I should be realistic about the privilege of my position and continually model openness.
• What other positions are automatically deferred to in the organisation? All managers? Session Leaders? Hierarchy is useful for responsibility and decision making, but when it comes to ideas I am interested in creating spaces where any deference is set aside.
• Someone said to me it was nice to be told their view mattered as they assumed it often didn’t. Honestly, I was so sad to hear that. I am trying to explicitly frame conversations with why I need all the perspectives in the room — as my implicit assumption that people knew they were invited for a reason had clearly not been enough in the past.