Artful ways of building bridges: Using visual metaphors to shine a light on developing the leadership capacity to listen to and bear witness to staff lived experience

Bolden, Richard; Burton, Julian; Grizzle, Conroy

Abstract

NHS staff and leaders continue to be under significant pressure to plug the gaps in public service delivery that have been exposed and exacerbated by Covid. With increasing levels of workload comes the kinds of stress and pressure that is damaging employees wellbeing, productivity and ultimately undermining service delivery.

Leadership development providers are increasingly listening to the lived experiences of staff to formulate potential reworking of the direction for leadership development programmes that focus on deepening leadership capacities to care for staff wellbeing. Creating space for reflective sense making and listening to the ‘lived experience’ of staff and leaders, can brings us into the daily ‘reality’, the ‘warts and all’, of leading and being led during this unprecedented public health crisis.

Indeed, there has been a growing call for arts-based methods within
management development to inform future leadership development practice (Sutherland, 2012, Edwards et al., 2015), utilizing different ways of meaning making, particularly the visual medium, allowing “graphic expression restores to language the dimension of the inexpressible”[ Leroi-Gourhan (1993:200).

In this practical workshop, we will share an innovative design we are developing that facilitates dialogue around visual metaphors of the lived experiences of frontline staff, and argue that these metaphors have the potential to help uncover hidden assumptions [Kegan,2009] and shed light on new directions for leading to care and self-development for leaders.

This work has emerged from a research project, commissioned by an NHS organisation responsible for leadership development, which involved capturing the lived experience of front line operational and administrative NHS staff. A qualitative reflective sense-making approach was taken, comprising workshops in which participants could explore and ‘bear witness’ to each others experiences of leadership and management through the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research was organised around the question; What has the pandemic revealed about the nature and purpose(s) of leadership in health and care and how effective leadership capacity can be nurtured for the future?

We will draw on illustrations from the verbatim workshops transcripts, that provided many rich and fertile visual metaphors, and articulate how these can assist in creating rich opportunities for challenging or developing our ‘accepted’ views of leadership and its development and offer different perspectives on the issues.

Ultimately, the workshop will demonstrate that that using ‘artful ways of knowing’ (Seeley and Thornhill, 2014) such as visual metaphors, can be useful in representing the lived experience of staff, in a non-threatening way that encourages conversation, exploration and learning. Indeed, it allows a form of reflective sensemaking in asking participants to consider “how we come to know, how we cultivate our imaginative and perceptual capacities and what we allow to inform our decision-making in pursuit of creating more sustainable systems, structures and organisations” (Seeley and Thornhill, 2014: pp). This can give leaders insights into how they relate to staff and themselves in role and create an opportunity to update their own learning developmental goals.

Visual metaphors can be a useful tool to help people give voice to their emotional experiences during change and provide a vehicle for expressing emotions that would be otherwise too difficult to communicate, because they may be “too vague, complex or too intense for ordinary speech” (Barner, 2008: pp). They can also bring more areas of the brain into play, providing a new framework and a different way of knowing for interpreting and making sense our experiences [Burton and Mockett, 2018]

In this practical workshop we will create a reflective-sensemaking space for conversation around the visual metaphors created for this project as provocations to open-up generative conversations, and explore how we can develop and nurture care-based leadership in the public services.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: Developing Leadership Capacity Conference
• Start Date: Jul 12, 2022
• End Date: Jul 13, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Keywords: Leadership capacity
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9948451
• Related Public URLs: https://blogs.uwe.ac.uk/leadership-and-change/developing-leadership-capacity-conference-2022/; ; https://www.uwe.ac.uk/research/centres-and-groups/leadership-and-change