I was very fortunate to attend the Disability Commissioner Preventing and Responding to Abuse: Guidance for Victorian disability service providers event this week and for me one of the highlights was hearing Peter Oakes Professor of Clinical Psychology, Staffordshire University talk about his work on Indicators of Concern: His work explores the early signs that people might be at risk of abuse in services.
The key messages that I took away from Peters sessions were his statement that organisations have a “propensity to slip towards a pattern of abuse.” This resonates with me as I have been working with organisations looking at a phenomenon I call “slippage” which I discuss in my Visible Values whitepaper.
I am a big believer that people come to work to do the right thing. I believe that if we provide people with the right tools to do the work they will create wonderful relationships and outcomes. If we provide people with enough time to do their work, enough resources, enough knowledge and understanding of the organisation values then we can ‘manage’ less, knowing people are doing the right thing even when we are not watching.
The key, in my opinion to reducing slippage is linking behaviours to organisation values and this was certainly a theme that was discussed throughout the event with a consistent focus on building strong cultures.
The idea of building strong values based cultures was also the topic of a recent study published in Pro Bono which identified that 52% of respondents said culture had not been formally on their board agenda in the past 12 months.
Peter also talked about the importance of treating people as humans and not as “others”. As he described it “other and different is a short step to being less human.” This mindset becomes observable behaviours within disability services where staff treat clients as a set of tasks rather than a person with individual needs, one example provided was the statement “will you DO Malcolm or will I” when describing supporting a person with their personal care needs.
As a society, we all have individual needs but we also have shared needs and wants. Maslows hierarchy of needs identified 5 motivational needs and more recent research has expanded on his theories.
At its most basic, we all want to be happy, be loved, have friends and be safe and when we start seeing people as ‘other’ we run the risk of dehumanising them, treating them as a task and eventually potentially seeing them as a bother.
Building a strong organisation culture, based on the shared values of customers, staff and leaders, will support people to display and observe agreed behaviours. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter author of MOVE: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead says; it is the conversations around values that matter, not just the values themselves “People can be more readily relied on to do the right thing, and to guide their colleagues to do the same, once they buy into and internalise core principles.”