Archive for May, 2013
How it feels to be disempowered
I have just been revisiting some notes from one of our echo sessions where we start by exploring the concept of ’empowerment’ so people get a grip on why it is important to work in empowering ways and what this means in practice, it gives everyone the chance to discuss their differing views of the term and come up with ways to explain it.
One way to do this is to turn it around and ask people to think about when they have felt disempowered – what did they feel like? The results can be quite powerful and, on this occasion the group said:
Unloved, excluded, helpless, over-looked, disenfranchised, outsider, low self-worth, silenced, worthless.
They took all of these words, added a few others and turned it into a powerful piece of poetry which they then fed back to the main group to express how it feels to be disempowered:
Have you ever felt helpless, with a low self-worth,a complete outsider, overlooked and excluded?
Organisational silence – they just won’t understand
I’m left feeling under-valued, worthless and unloved
Underneath all this, I am disenfranchised
I need to be heard
What a message to people working with communities, or employing people – or just communicating with people! Of course, we would counter this by suggesting the Community Empowerment Dimensions as a framework to turn this around.
Employee engagement
I come back to this every now and again and today is one of those days. There was an article in the Guardian a year or so ago, reporting on the Global Workforce Survey and evidencing the lack of engagement amongst employees – on a massive scale.
Barely one-fifth (21%) of the 90,000 employees surveyed (in 18 countries) were truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would ”go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of 10 (38%) were mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest were in the tepid middle….
The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including the ability to participate in decision making, the encouragement given for innovative thinking, the availability of skill-enhancing job assignments, and the interest shown by senior executives in employee well-being.
It struck me at the time that the Community Empowerment Dimensions we talk so much about have something very simple and effective to offer. They help us (and employers) to understand how we can work in more empowering ways which:
- build people’s confidence
- include rather than exclude
- are open, democratic and accountable
- build positive relationships, identify common messages, develop and maintain links and promote partnership working
- encourage and equip people to take part and influence
Wouldn’t it be fantastic to try this out, hear and share a few stories? It just seems madness not to!
This people empowerment, improved approaches to working has always been with me and – as an aside – I was given a precious text many years ago by a fellow consultant: The Spirited Business: success stories of soul friendly companies. It is worth a look if you can find a copy!
Community engagement: method, technique or tool
Thinking about community engagement – what it means, how we do it and what we need to help us to do it (bearing in mind that definitions which are too specific can be ultimately unhelpful). We’ve been thinking about this and wondering if we get a bit confused – mixing up community engagement methods, with techniques and tools. Give this a go:
Specific engagement ‘methods’ are the things we invite people to, or set up in order to encourage dialogue, for example:
- structured and semi-structured interviews
- focus groups
- a fun day
Specific engagement ‘techniques’ are the things we use to ‘shape’ the group once we have got them there – the way in which we collect the information, for example:
- brainstorm / thought shower
- carousel
- rounds
Specific engagement ‘tools’ are the ‘gadgets’ that we can use to help us make sense of information:
- pinpoint
- Edward de Bono’s 6 thinking hats
- weather symbols
When I posed this on our networking site, Lorna Prescott observed that
the tools and techniques are the sorts of things which are picked up in generic facilitation skills training and would be found in publications/websites about participatory working, facilitation and so on. So if people are after that sort of thing they should be looking for facilitation skills training, as it’s not just about the tools or techniques, it’s understanding how a facilitator uses them – their relationship with the group etc.
Some of the ‘methods’ category are approaches which I think often require specific training and support to use, such as interviewing and focus group skills. And for which some basic facilitation skills and experience are usually helpful as a building block. ….. It would be interesting to know if people who want ‘engagement methods training’ are trained facilitators or not. And if not, what sort of access people have to facilitation skills training and whether it would be seen by their managers as relevant training
A colleague suggests to us that requests for facilitation skills training are relatively infrequent and yet they have been asked several times to train people in planning and running focus groups when these people, though not fault of their own, lack the basic understanding of and experience in using facilitation skills to be able to confidently run such a group.
Hmmmm ….
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