Leadership and development is vital in frontline managers

For seven years, my task has been to make the organisation work every day for the 150,000 children we must advise a court about, and suggest how their lives can be made better. It is rollercoaster management – you can be up at 10am and down at 3pm.

Care demand has increased by more than 50 per cent in the past three years, so the biggest challenge is to manage an increased volume of work and ever-greater complexity, both in cases and in our operating environment – the family justice system. We need more stability in the system, but the need for change is even greater.

When I was a director of social services, I remember being told by an inspector from an Ofsted predecessor organisation that I should know what was happening on duty – right now. I agreed, but pleaded that I had 17 duty desks, each with their own dynamic. That inspector made me determined to appoint the right people to run frontline teams. Frontline management roles are the most important since they supervise direct work, using proven techniques like practice observation.

Every organisation should prioritise leadership and development for frontline managers to allow them to carry out the vital task of supporting often vulnerable newly qualified social workers.

Leadership cannot be taught. Sometimes, poor leaders are highly competent managers, and that is good enough. Able managers organise teams,
set up systems that work, ensure things don’t get lost or fall between the cracks and give staff regular, if not inspiring, supervision.

In a lifetime being managed, you may only meet one or two genuine leaders who inspire you, but you will inevitably come across several reasonable managers.

The nightmare scenario to avoid, and to whistle-blow about, is when someone in a position of even the tiniest authority is neither a great leader nor a competent manager. Staff carrying out complex work in a hostile environment deserve more. Service users deserve more still.

The leadership task in children’s services today, whatever your role, whatever your organisation, is much the same as it always was, despite fashions in policy coming and going. We know so much more now about the needs of vulnerable children and adults than we ever did and in that time we have changed many thousands of children’s lives for the better.

I am in touch with some of those children, now adults in their thirties and forties. They say that a little support and direction back then means so much to them now. They were not always easy – some threatened to kill me or my team-mates – they were that desperate.

Most want to make their own children’s lives better than theirs were, and most have. They have overcome numerous demons in their partially recovered lives. All say strongly that they want other children now coming into the system to have a better time than some of them did.

Leadership today is a determination to fulfill their dream. It is why we return to work every day, however tough and overwhelming it was the day before.