BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 83
Intervention and Leadership
The framework outlined in the previous sections is an attempt to provide
learners with some practical guidelines on how to improve observational and
interpretation skills and to assist in designing interventions. In a learning
setting an intervention can be used to both illustrate a particular concept or idea
or can be used to have a group begin a piece of work that might permit some
behavioural change to occur. With intact work groups or organisations,
intervention can have different goals which range across paying attention to a
groups patterns of behaviour, the “how” they do their work and the way that
this cultural or procedural aspect may be impeding progress or it may bring
attention to some element of substance or content: the “what” they do or want
to do. For example, how do you get a group of public servants to consider the
distributional aspects of a piece of public policy without asking them to
consider how such policy affects them as consumers? Or can there ever be real
distributional policy without the middle class suffering any losses as well? The
intersection between the how and the what can also be fertile ground for
intervention; such as pointing out that the way a group is thinking about an
issue, the fundamental assumptions they have about it will affect the sort of
content they develop and experiments they are willing to trial. An example
from a recent leadership development programme is used to illustrate.
As part of an intensive one week residential workshop a group of sixty senior
managers was asked to work on the following question8:
8
The question was posed after three days of work during which a range of leadership concepts and skills
were outlined and explored though a combination of lectures, discussions, case studies, exercises,
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