Thinking about the team as a secure base
My colleagues’ work on the Practice Supervisors Development Programme has put some really useful concepts and resources on my radar. I worked on a few of the open access webinars, and I plan to go back and properly re-watch some of them as an observer as I was concentrating on keeping the show on the road at the time!
Alison Domakin shared Laura Biggart’s work on the team as a secure base in a briefing with us, which is really helpful to understand how we can make social work environments caring and compassionate.
Personally, I’ve been really lucky. But now that I’m line managing staff I’m really interested in how our team can be freed up to do our best work. I’m also interested in how we can play our part in supporting better practice across the organisation. As a member of the events team, it can be easy to focus on our short-term ends, which is the delivery of events. But as an organisation, we try and think about things differently. How can we support staff across the organisation to deliver the best possible opportunities for knowledge transfer? The concept of the secure base gives a few pointers for us to work with.
Availability
I love the concept of making ourselves available. The model gives us food for thought around how we can make ourselves available to support each other.
I love that availability is also considered in the context of diversity, given that all manner of factors affect how we can support each other. It was great to learn more about intersectionality in a social care conference at a Research in Practice conference in the South West, where Jahnine Davis inspired me to learn a bit more about it, which in turn inspired me to watch this TED talk from Kimberlé Crenshaw, who developed the term.
I wonder whether Reciprocity Rings has learning that can be applied to availability too. Reciprocity Rings bring groups of people together. Someone will ask for something they can’t get or do for themselves. The rest of the group then think about how they might help the person and to make as many offers of help as possible. The research behind it shows that people who receive this help are compeled to help other people. If we make ourselves available, others are then more likely to make themselves available.
Sensitivity
I love that sensitivity is a positive here. As a member of the patriarchy, where feeling things is bad, this is very cool. Too often we have to think in terms of cold logic, but sensitivity can help us to deliver better relational services.
Acceptance
Acceptance lines up nicely with our attitude to failure. We all make mistakes, the importance is to learn from it.
This strikes me as particularly important when working in complex environments. In her TEDx Talk, Amy C Edmondson talks about the importance of psychological safety in environments of uncertainty and interdependence.
Edmondson looks at how self-protection can result in missed learning opportunities. In her research, better teams made more mistakes and a climate of openness resulted in more learning and better work. This fits with Good Practice WAO’s work on well-managed risk, and also whatsthepont’s post on generative audit.
Co-operation
It’s easy to say that we should work together, but it can be difficult to do. The focus on strength in diversity and working to strengths themselves is particularly interesting around dealing with isolation. The social discipline window is helpul around thinking about how we can with, instead of for people.
Team membership
The work around team membership is particularly interesting around bringing our whole selves to work. I also like the focus on thanking team members. Do we welcome new and say goodbye to old team members?
Our relationships with others provide us with a secure base when we’re stressed. When the team functions as a secure base, this can help people to cope with the emotional demands of the role.
If we’re in a position of privilege, much of our stress comes from our working lives. Thinking of the team as a secure base can help us to better deal with difficult issues, but we’ve also got to think about wider systemic issues before seeing this as a one size fits all solution. But ‘s a really helpful model for thinking about how we can better support each other to deliver better services.
