Policy & Practice February 20166 Policy & Practice February 20166

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By Debora Morris

At a Human Services Tipping PointHow Leaders Move from Ideas to Outcomes

February 2016 Policy & Practice 7February 2016 Policy & Practice 7

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The 2015 Human Services Summit: Emergent Leadership—Turning Ideas into Outcomes—brought together leaders whose experiences reveal that human service agencies are at a tipping point.1 To make progress, they must abandon the status quo. This can be ener-gizing, but overwhelming.

This is where adaptive leadership comes in.

Policy & Practice February 20168

Debora Morris is the managing director, Integrated Social Services, State, Provincial and Local Government at Accenture.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LEADERSHIP

Ronald Heifetz, founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, developed the theory and framework of adaptive leadership.

As Heifetz explains, human service leaders—all leaders—face technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges can be solved in short order with technology, policy, or process changes. Adaptive challenges are more deeply rooted. They require organiza-tions to venture into the unknown. The journey can cut into long-held values.

processes—building one type of strength from another. She is exploring how regulative indicators can have a generative eff ect. Take the example of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we’re not timely, how many kids and families are waiting? It’s not the time that is measured, it’s a hungry measure.”

Harness staff power for leadership from within

Adaptive leaders excel at the art of bringing diff erences

together within and outside of their organizations. In Michigan, where Timothy Becker, chief deputy director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, is spearheading the integration of two departments overseeing 140 health and human service programs, staff is involved in planning. Leadership is acting with intention to create a culture where staff members are encouraged to take chances in the service of better ways of working and serving.

At the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, workforce development is a signifi cant part of

Ef� ciency inAchieving Outcomes

Effectiveness in Achieving Outcomes

Regulative Business Model: The focus is on serving constituents who are eligible for particular services while complying with categorical policy and program regulations.

Collaborative Business Model: The focus is on supporting constituents in receiving all services for which they’re eligible by working across agency and programmatic borders.

Integrative Business Model: The focus is on addressing the root causes of client needs and problems by coordinating and integrating services at an optimum level.

Generative Business Model: The focus is on generating healthy communities by co-creating solutions for multi-dimensional family and socioeconomic challenges and opportunities.

GenerativeBusiness Model

IntegrativeBusiness Model

Outcom

e Fron

tiers

CollaborativeBusiness Model

RegulativeBusiness

Model

These challenges require adaptive leadership. It is leadership at all levels that fosters learning and experimentation over time, even amid organizational and cultural resistance.

ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP IN ACTION

Consider these fi ve fundamentals of adaptive leadership in human services:

Honor the positive and build from strength

Adaptive leaders acknowledge what works in their organiza-

tion, and move forward from there. For Raquel Hatter, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services, this principle applies to moving up the Human Services Value Curve.2 With the generative model as the ultimate goal, it is easy for leaders to lose sight of the innate value of the other models. Hatter views the regula-tive state as a necessary foundation, not a lesser pass-through. If organiza-tions get it wrong, they jeopardize everything else.

She is thinking about generative capacity while refi ning regulative

1 2

© The Human Services Value Curve by Antonio M. Oftelie & Leadership for a Networked World is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at lnwprogram.org/hsvc. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at lnwprogram.org.

The Human Services Value Curve

February 2016 Policy & Practice 9

ongoing transformation. This involves mentoring for supervisors, improved compensation, career path develop-ment, and other initiatives. The agency is conducting staff surveys and road shows for leadership to connect with front-line staff .

See the silver lining in unexpected places

Adaptive leaders need to be optimists to seize on the poten-

tial of a good idea. Maria Cancian, deputy assistant secretary for Policy at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), encourages leaders to fi nd ways through barriers.

She works with program directors to integrate across programs, and has faced some resistance. Her initial reaction was to be frustrated by territo-rialism. However, once she considered the intention behind such “tribal” mindsets, everything changed. This shift from pushing back to working through barriers helps adaptive leaders move past pitfalls to progress.

Strengthen partnerships with dataThe human service commu-

nity has long recognized the need to support cross-agency

and cross-sector partnerships to improve service delivery. Joseph Parks, director of Missouri HealthNet, off ers a fresh perspective. This insight refl ects Parks’ experience helping to create the groundbreaking Missouri Health Homes initiative, a unique service delivery program designed to improve care for a targeted population with mental illness or substance abuse and at least one chronic condition.

Developing this model required sig-nifi cant structural changes—recreating relationships among multiple agencies, vendors, legislators, and the private sector. As Parks explains, a shared, data-backed view helped to build rela-tionships around facts, not assumptions.

Experiment, experiment, experiment

Leaders in situations without a roadmap must be bolder,

embracing experimentation. This is

NATIONAL HEALTH &HUMAN SERVICES

2016 SUMMIT

IMPACT.

INSPIRE.

INNOVATE.

MAY 22-25KEY BRIDGE MARRIOTT

ARLINGTON, VA

www.APHSA.org@APHSA1

5

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See Outcomes on page 25

“The only way to change the lives of families and systems is to be inside them. You have to be in there day in and day out, have to be up to the challenge to do it.”

—VIRGINIA PRYOR, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CHILD WELFARE AT THE GEORGIA DIVISION OF FAMILY AND CHILDREN SERVICES

February 2016 Policy & Practice 25

OUTCOMES continued from page 9

staff spotlightName: Emily Campbell

Title: Director of Organizational Eff ectiveness (OE)

Time at APHSA: 10 months

Life Before APHSA: Prior to joining the APHSA team, I worked in the secretary’s offi ce as an area administrator at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. This position followed nearly 20 years in public service, with several years spent working in local health and human service agencies in both the United States and Europe, primarily in child welfare. I also served on the executive team of APHSA’s National Staff Development and Training Association (NSDTA) affi liate as the vice president of Programs. I received my BA in Social Work and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and an MS in Health and Social Services from the London School of Economics.

Priorities at APHSA: The focus of my work at APHSA is to lead the OE consulting practice team. I am also keen to continuously improve and share our OE tools and methods, which were developed through our fi eld work over the years with our members. As a part of the APHSA executive team, I also work to identify opportunities to integrate our OE methods internally and help ensure that our day-to-day work is guided by both our strategy and a real-time understanding of our own capacity to meet the needs of our members.

What I Can Do for Our Members: The OE team provides customized technical assistance to human-serving organizations and communities. We can partner with leaders

at all levels in an organization to facilitate eff ective solu-tions that help improve capacity, culture, performance, and outcomes. Whether your agency is looking to solve a thorny issue or problem, or spread out and scale your eff orts to advance up the Human Service Value Curve, we are here to serve you. We are also here to connect you with your peers and facilitate the exchange of knowledge about the ways in which eff ective organizations can sustain change and con-tinuously engage the human-serving workforce.

When Not Working: I am the mother of three active children, ages 15, 12, and 7, which means that on any given day when I am not in the fi eld, I can be found at the ice rink, gym, and, more often than not, at our local urgent care! Married to a Scot, we try as a family to visit our UK-based family as much as we can. When I have free time of my own, I like to geo-cache, play the hand bells in my church, and do yoga. Each year, I also try to honor a commitment to volun-teering. Recent activities include helping fundraise for public libraries and volunteering with my family to serve breakfast to homeless families in my community.

A Lesson My Mother Taught Me: “Assume good will.” This is a good lesson for people and organizations, too. Most people I meet entered into the fi eld of human services inspired by a mission to serve others and seek to learn what it is like to walk in another person’s shoes. How we work together can make just as much of an impact on outcomes as the work that we choose to do. On occasion, our eff ort and enthusiasm can get misaligned or misinterpreted. By assuming positive intent, we become more open to working with others to achieve a common goal.

what Four Oaks, a private organization off ering child welfare, juvenile justice and mental health services to youth in Cedar Rapids, Iowa did. Eight years ago, the leadership determined that it could not prove that it was achieving its mission. This spurred the organiza-tion to begin a journey of signifi cant business model changes.

Working toward this goal demanded that the organization stretch. Without the willingness to experiment with new ways of working, Four Oaks would not have the successes it has today.

FOCUSING ON PEOPLE FIRST

Adaptive human service leaders also share a non-negotiable trait. They have a passion for the people they serve—and they never lose sight of it. Virginia Pryor, deputy director of Child Welfare at the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, says it best: “The only way to change the lives of families and systems is to be inside them. You have to be in there day in and day out, have to be up to the challenge to do it.”

Reference Notes1. The Human Services Summit was convened

by Leadership for a Networked World and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University, in collaboration with Accenture.

2. © The Human Services Value Curve by Antonio M. Oftelie & Leadership for a Networked World is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://lnwprogram.org/hsvc. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://lnwprogram.org/hsvc