Abstract
Zoe van Zwanenberg (ed.), Leadership in social care. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010, 224 pp., £22.99, ISBN 978 1843109693.
As the editor sets out in her preface, various major reports in the UK on service failures, which have resulted in tragedy, have raised the profound issue of the leadership required to enable services to innovate and meet future challenges, but also to keep people safe. The highest profile tragedies have so far been in child care, Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter, but ones around people with dementia are surely not far to follow. In all of this, the editor comments: ‘The cry has been for more and better leadership but, without the deep understanding of what that leadership needs to be, how it is grounded, trained and supported and how in our multi-disciplinary and multi-organizational partnership world it needs to develop and grow’ (p. 9).
The word leadership derives from the Anglo-Saxon words for paths and travel. Essentially it is about finding a sense of direction with people, and moving towards the desired goals with integrity, inspiration and practicality. Academic debates about what leadership is or isn’t can be helpful in scoping the field, but can also lead to cynicism; and all words and phrases are vulnerable to degradation – one only has to look at ‘community care’ – and so can become devalued and the target of criticism.
This very practical book looks at leadership primarily in the context of the Scottish experience, following the 2006 Scottish Executive Report, Changing lives, which reviewed social work in Scotland. But it also looks across to a number of other international examples.
Because of the current discourse on leadership, for example, the relationship between ‘leadership’ and management, and how much one should concentrate on values and characteristics, and how much on competences (see Alban-Metcalfe & Alimo-Metcalfe, 2009), it would have been helpful to have had a more detailed overview of the concept of leadership and the theoretical framework before getting into the main chapters. Though in chapter 1, van Zwanenberg's description of the Changing Lives programme, and its accent on personalization, citizen leadership, service improvement and leadership, and her diagrammatic framing of what leaders do and their qualities is extremely helpful.
I also found it helpful to have a more personal perspective as the second chapter, with Harry Stevenson providing a less academic and more practitioner-based view, with a number of enlightening case studies, and the enumeration of the qualities of leadership stressed by a panel comprising service users and carers. The qualities they set out are: dedication, values, integrity, charisma, bravery, motivation and credibility. In a sense these qualities are much to do with trust and relationship rather than an accent on outcomes, but trust needs to be integral before the journey is embarked on.
Other chapters consider the vital issue of supervision, brought again much more into focus by the Social Work Task Force's reports in England; the integration of leadership and management; issues and examples around collaborative working and working in partnership; while Part 3 is around leadership development, including a continuous learning framework, lessons from the health service, current trends and lessons from positive psychology.
Considering Van Zwanenberg's first chapter and Anne Cullen's chapter on combining leadership and management, there is clearly a vital role for those responsible for organizations to foster both the transformational and innovative aspects of leadership, while ensuring that policies, systems and procedures are in place to ensure safe as well as innovative practice. Cullen quotes from the work of Peter Beresford and others on palliative care, in identifying that service users identify the distinctive contribution of social workers as: ‘helping individuals to develop their own expertise and generally working in ways that service users want’ (p. 64). Cullen links the role of supervision in mediating between the mission of the organization and the worker at the front line.
Increasingly, organizations will simply not be able to fulfil their aims on their own, which is why Part 2 of this book, on collaborative working and partnerships, with some fascinating examples, is very timely. It is also true that the many strategic leaders in both the public and the private sector lament the fact that there are never enough leaders at all levels. Many staff simply do not see themselves as leaders, and yet they have to be, and as Ospina and Saz-Carranza make clear: ‘all social actors have the capacity to exercise leadership, but not all do’ (p. 109).
All in all this is a very timely and useful addition to the field. My caveat is that it could have done with a longer and more detailed overview of leadership theory at the beginning of the book, as the theory is developed in a rather piecemeal fashion as the chapters roll out. The best way to use this publication to improve practice would be to utilize it alongside a text which sets out a theoretical framework.