Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
28 May 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Oliver Standing to talk about collaboration, systems leadership, and his work as the Director of Collective Voice. Oliver is a 2019 Clore Social Emerging Leader Fellow.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about yourself and your organisation?
I’m the director of Collective Voice, which is the National Alliance of drug and alcohol treatment and recovery charities. We advocate for drug and alcohol treatment and support, and its transformational power that enables people to recover and reconnect with their families and communities.
The majority of the work we do is outward facing policy and advocacy work, so we advocate with civil servants, MPs, and ministers. This means putting in written submissions to government policy consultations, speaking at roundtable events and at conferences to advocate for the needs of people who use drugs and alcohol. Our other goal is to support the drug and alcohol sector itself so that it focuses on collaboration and good practice sharing. We run events and work on projects to bring people together and create shared positions and approaches to topics that people may hold very passionate positions on! To do this, we try to use a systems leadership approach which identifies a common core that we all agree on but leaves space around the perimeter for people to do their own work on issues of particular interest.
What current projects are you working on?
At the moment, we’re running a number of working groups that bring together national providers of drug and alcohol treatment with colleagues from the NHS, public health commissioners from local government, Public Health England, and people with lived experience to focus on a specific issue. One, for example, is looking at benzodiazepine use, which is a family of drugs that present a particular set of challenges and are often used alongside opiates and alcohol. We’re investigating if there is more we could do to support people who use benzos, develop good practice and ultimately reduce the harms that those drugs cause.
In June, the government is due to release an incredibly important independent review of drugs by Professor Dame Carol Black. As the national alliance of drug and alcohol treatment charities, we’re working with other national alliances and people with lived experience to prepare our response to the report and help shape how we believe the system should work and how we can work together. So, we’ll be making the case for what we need from the government, how we want to interact with Public Health England, and how we can be more ambitious to help more people in meaningful ways.
It sounds like you’re in a really crucial position in terms of pulling all of those partners together. Could you share a bit of wisdom about fostering a culture of collaboration?
If you’re an alliance structure, then by definition you’re working on bringing people together and looking for the overlaps in the work that different organisations are doing. In that sense, your role is to generate a safe space for collaboration, peer support, and discussion. I’ve found that collaboration is about relationship building on the one hand, and about a clarity of shared purpose on the other. As individuals, we can model that behavior by being open minded and bringing people in to talk about successes and difficulties. We can also be generous with our time and resources. If you want to collaborate with people, you have to understand them in their role as leaders, clinicians, or commissioners, but also as human beings. That really comes from spending time with people and listening in meaningful, reflective spaces. In my experience, a lot of what makes collaboration work is characterised as ‘soft’ skills or process, but without those relationships to glue everything together, the ‘harder’ things like governance structures or position statements tend to fall apart.
You graduated from the Emerging Leader Programme in 2019. Which elements of the course have stuck with you the most?
When you think of professional development, you perhaps think of pursuing a qualification, and when you think of personal development you think of something more human and emotional. While I attended the Clore Social course in a professional capacity, a lot of the learning was quite personal, and I really benefited from the reflective elements of the programme. I graduated with a greater understanding of my strengths and weaknesses as a leader and a greater sense of purpose, or at least a greater ability to try and develop a sense of purpose. For me the sumtotal of that was greater confidence in myself as a leader but also a human being within the social sector.
The course was also a doorway into the concept of systems leadership, which really resonated with me as a more realistic approach to leadership (this article lays out some of those key principles). Being a leader within one's own system is about working with other leaders and constantly balancing a commitment to one’s own organisation (and one’self) with a commitment to the wider system. It’s about stepping forward at points, but stepping back at others, and being honest about what we know and what we don’t know. I learned that it’s possible to reconcile a desire to be a confident and effective leader with an ability to say, “I don't know, I don't have the answer.” Unlocking other viewpoints is absolutely critical to this approach.
What are you excited to see in the next couple of years?
At the moment, it feels like on almost every level--as family members, as citizens, as professionals--we've interacted with the world through the lens of the pandemic. I suppose like any disruptor, it has shaken things up and caused some real challenges and inadvertently catalysed some positive change along the way.
As an example, during the pandemic, a lot of people have not been able to physically attend drug and alcohol treatment services and get support from a clinician or a counselor, which forced a move towards digital delivery of interventions through Zoom or on the phone. In many ways this has been a welcome change because it increases the convenience of receiving services and opens services up to more people, and I’m excited to see this expand in the years to come. There are lots of people who don't want to walk through the door of a treatment center because they don’t have time, or there's not sufficient motivation, or they feel it would be stigmatising. So, if you can be supported at home in your nice warm flat on a rainy afternoon, talking to someone over a cup of tea, you might be more likely to reach out and make a positive change in your life, which is brilliant. However, the new technology is not without its limitations, and for some people the face to face support is essential, and some service providers are finding it very difficult to connect with some people remotely. So, in the next few years I’m excited to see the sector hold on to the best bits of the progress we’ve made with digital services, without losing sight of the need for traditional support as well. We must move towards a broader, person-centred view of care and support which meets people where they are with just the right intervention and approach to catalyse change.
You can find Oliver on Twitter @OliverStanding and on LinkedIn.
You can find Collective Voice on Twitter @collect_voice and Linkedin.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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