Social Value and Social Care

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Perhaps you wanted to be a train driver or a nurse, maybe you wanted to be a famous sports star or singer, or even, possibly, you wanted to be a princess or a pirate.

The chances are that the idea of being a social care worker did not enter your head.

Then as you got older and you discovered your talents and abilities your dreams will have changed, more professional ambitions may have come to mind, accountancy, medicine, architect, law etc. Perhaps, you were more vocationally minded, and liked the idea of a more hands on job, beauty therapist, mechanic, hairdresser, electrician etc.

The chances are that the idea of being a social care worker did not enter your head.

The fact that social care is well down the list of career choices is also backed up by the facts. The Skills for Care National Minimum Data Set (NMDS) shows that 60% of social care workers are aged 35 or over with just 10% under the age of 24. Social care is a job that people enter into later in life.

The issue with social care is how we value it in society and even though they provide essential front line services for vulnerable people, social care workers are low on social value.

Part of the issue is invisibility in society. Yes we have seemingly endless negative reporting, but generally speaking adult social care only becomes important to individuals when they, or a loved one, needs care services. In popular media social care is often portrayed negatively and infrequently, when fictional programmes portray social care as either inefficient or outright failing. Even where we have had mainstream fiction about care (i.e. Waiting for God) the care staff were not portrayed particularly well.

High social value needs positive role models through mainstream media and fiction often carries more weight than factual programmes. Fiction carries archetypes that embed themselves in social awareness (you’d be surprised how many people think the ‘medieval’ stories of King Arthur are true!) and in order to raise the social value of social care we need more positive archetypes of social care work portrayed through fiction.

That does not mean that non-fiction media doesn’t have a role to play. We increasingly need positive social care stories to underpin the social value of social care. Unfortunately the mainstream media seems adverse to the positive side of social care, which is strange as more and more of their viewers/readers will need social care services or know someone who needs social care services and the relaying of the negative horror stories and experiences, that are not suffered by the majority of care users, undermine the whole system. Yes it is important that these are exposed yet the overall impact has a detrimental effect and probably puts a lot of people off the idea of working in social care.

Social care is important in today’s (and tomorrow’s) society. Increasing longevity combined with a larger population means that social care services are needed more than ever before and more and more people are needed to provide that care. We need to raise the social value of social care, raise awareness in society of social cares importance in society and we need positive role models to encourage people to consider a career in social care.

"Don't Swear In Front of the Children" - Leadership Thinking

                Leadership has become a common theme in social care and the need for effective leadership is important in all areas of business but what does effective leadership actually mean?

                A search on Amazon for ‘Leadership’ bring up the option of quite a few thousand books and among these will be many different theories and techniques on leadership but one important aspect of leadership is only given cursory mention and that is acting as a role model.

                Anybody who has studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) will be familiar with the concept of modelling. The theory here is that it is possible to replicate the excellence of others by observing and replicating what they do (in terms of behaviour and physiology), how they do it (such as internal thinking etc) and why they do it (beliefs, motivations etc.), if these can be replicated then it should be possible to achieve the same success.

                This theory is very revealing especially if we look at it the other way around!

                At an instinctive level how do we learn? For the moment ignore all the different theories on learning styles etc and think about the basic, primeval way in which we learn. We learn by observing and replicating behaviour. This is how we do it from the moment we are born. We emulate the behaviour of our parents and we often develop the same beliefs and ideals that surround us as we grow up. As parents we often try to control the way that we behave in front of the kids to ensure they do not emulate some of the less desirable adult traits or use of language.

These instilled values, beliefs and behaviours may change as we interact with others at school and as our interactions with others influence our lives, we seek the best models to emulate to improve our lives.

                As a simplistic illustration how often do we see people who have been bullied become bullies themselves? Obviously this is a vague generalisation and certainly not true in many instances but it always seems to make sense because that is how, at a basic level, we understand learning behaviour and the idea that a successful behaviour (e.g. bullying without being caught doing it) can reap benefits in our lives.

                It is this basic, instinctual level of learning that is so important in the workplace.

                Effective leadership means acting and behaving in the way that you want your staff team to act.

                The ‘do as I say don’t do as I do’ style of leadership is inevitably doomed because of the unconscious instinct to replicate the behaviour of those in immediate authority.  When a boss tells staff to do this and that and work harder then disappears into his office for a rest what do the rest of the staff do? Chances are that they, too, stop working or at least slow down the pace at which they work.

                Whereas a leader who is enthusiastic and seen to be working hard is likely to inspire the same in their team with little need to actually express that ethic in words.

                Effective leadership is leading by example, being a role model to all staff and if we are to improve leadership skills across the care sector we need to focus on imparting the skills needed to be an effective role model  across the many and varied organisations that provide care.