How I lead my service

Joanna Grudzinska-Dmowska, Support Services Manager at The Grange, talks to us about how she leads her service to get the best results.

Before I came to the UK and entered the care sector, I only planned on staying for one year. Having just graduated with my bachelor’s degree in physiotherapy, the idea of travelling, working and earning some money before returning to my home country to complete my master’s degree really appealed to me. Now, I’ve been living in the UK permanently for several decades and leading a care service for over 14 years.

At The Grange, we specialise in supporting people who are living with a learning disability. We have nearly 100 members of staff who are supporting 90 people. Good leadership is crucial in ensuring that we maintain a happy and effective workforce that delivers the standard of care that our supported people, their families and loved ones expect from us and that performs well at Care Quality Commission (CQC) assessment. I wanted to take some time to discuss my approach to leading my service to deliver the best care possible and retain a happy workforce.

Supervisions (planned and unofficial chats) are one of the most important aspects of leading a service in my opinion, as many opportunities to improve your service stem from doing them well. Not only do they allow you to quality assure the work that is being done by your team, but they’re the perfect opportunity to spend dedicated time on improving specific areas of each team member’s performance. However, what I think a lot of care providers get wrong is the way they frame and approach supervision. Too many care organisations deliver them in a way that make them an unnerving experience for their staff.

Done right, a supervision is nothing more than a focused learning opportunity for your organisation and employee. I’d encourage care providers to be as transparent as possible when scheduling these sessions – discuss beforehand what you’re going to be looking for and invite them to mention any areas they feel less confident in. We need to adjust the way we supervise based on staff needs. When feeding back on staff performance, it’s important to deliver your criticism and advice in constructive way. If I’m feeding back in a supervision session, I like to invite the supervisee to discuss what they perceived to be their good and bad moments. I’ll also pick up on any topics they disclosed to me before the session, to ensure we address what they had in mind beforehand. This makes it feel like we’re working on a solution to an aforementioned challenge, rather than simply pointing out problems.

For feedback to be effective, it should always be followed up with an action plan. Staff need objective measures to work against which can be reviewed in the future. These action plan objectives could be something as simple as learning to use a piece of software better or achieving a better relationship with the person they’re supporting. These objectives make future observations much easier and make progress opportunities for staff much clearer.

To facilitate objectives, we always look to develop a learning plan. Each supervisee is invited to tell us what direction they’d like to head in their career and if any of the optional learning opportunities we have available would help them do this. Most of the time this is dependent on the person they are supporting. So, for example, we’ve arranged autism-focused courses for people who are supporting an autistic person.

Another critical part of leading a service is ensuring staff want to come to work, and culture plays a big part in this. To ensure a positive culture is maintained, we like to practice the simple things: some treats for staff meetings, an ice cream van in the summer and a small celebration after CQC assessments. However, what I’ve found to be most effective is to encourage teams to develop their own celebratory practices amongst themselves. For example, we have one team who do ‘celebration Friday’, where each member of staff writes small positive notes about team members and then they’re read out during a Friday meeting. We’ve found that smaller, more personal events like this can be more effective than company-wide initiatives in many cases.

To avoid burnout, we encourage staff to work in different teams as we’ve found that a change of scenery can be really effective in reducing the repetitiveness of work. I often ask team members who are looking to do overtime to do it in other departments to facilitate this. We’ve also previously done wellbeing weeks where we invite people to share their hidden talents. As a physiotherapist, I was able to share my massage abilities, while others did reiki and reflexology for staff.

Involving staff in company decisions is another key way of ensuring that things run smoothly and staff remain happy. By providing visibility of challenges and decisions that need to be made you can be sure that they don’t feel blindsided by changes. For us, this is normally done through staff surveys and frequent use of staff communications channels, which are used a minimum of once per week. We also have our regular staff meetings, one to ones and an open-door policy which ensures staff are able to feedback on decisions or share their opinions with us. We also recognise long service by offering financial rewards for staff who have been with us for an extended period. As departmental team leaders, including myself, we lead by example, regularly stepping in to work weekends, sleep-ins, and more. It’s important to us that we understand what it’s like 'on the floor' so we can be the best leaders possible.

I believe leading a service well is all about being able to identify the strengths in people and bring them to the forefront. Every person has strengths, sometimes they take a little coaxing to emerge, but they’re always there. A team that works well together is simply one that’s able to combine various strengths to deliver great results. As a leader or manager, it’s your job to find these and capitalise on them. For me, that’s what keeps my job exciting and what keeps my service running well.

I feel incredibly fortunate to work alongside such an amazing team and have the privilege of managing such wonderful people.

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