Recently, I had the priviledge to interview Simon Benjamin on The Secure Start Podcast.
For two decades, Simon experienced a wide range of care models in disability, mental health, special education, out-of-home care and Aboriginal childcare services.
This included caring for deeply traumatised children in both community-based and state-run residential care homes.
More than 10 years of this time was spent immersed in the well-established therapeutic milieu workplaces of The Mulberry Bush School in the United Kingdom, and Lighthouse Foundation in Australia, having been CEO for more than five years at the latter.
Simon now draws on this rich career experience, together with the latest research and evidence-based approaches, to empower organisational leaders, teams and frontline workers to better manage their own wellbeing and deliver optimal outcomes.
While his work supports a broad range of clients, Simon specialises in Out of Home Care, Mental Health, Homelessness sectors.
Simon’s vision is to see people, organisations and the human services sector deliver the care that vulnerable people need to enable them to reach their potential.
Simon’s Website: https://blueskies.net.au/
You can listen here.
You can watch here:
Transcript
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
That for me is the key of how therapeutic practice really works is the stuff that you would do with a child actually happens through the whole organisation. The senior leadership team had a reflective space, a clinical supervision space that was held regularly, I think it was monthly, and that was held right through even the administration team had a reflective space.
I think that was the key thing in maintaining a therapeutic environment, the alignment has got to be through the whole system from top to bottom. And the way I often describe the need for this in a leadership team is, if you don’t, especially for a group supervision for a team, if you don’t provide the space for it, people will talk somewhere. They’ll talk with their spouse, or they’ll talk by the photocopier, or, you know, have a private Zoom with each other, the conversations will happen.
But it’s best you bring them into an environment where they’re contained, and you can have them as a group, and you know, get everyone’s perspective. I know then being as a CEO, the distance you feel when you’ve got suddenly a board to report to, budgets to meet, financial pressures, and you’re not in the day to day is not in your mind as much. A leader having supervision enabled time to reflect on work things that’s just for you.
It’s not, you know, because you can talk with one direct report, and you’ve got to be mindful of what you’re sharing. You talk to your partner or whoever, and you’ve got to, you can’t share everything, but this person can share whatever you want. And it’s just, yeah, it’s a bit of a release valve, and many other beneficial things, I think.
And it also connects you a bit with the work. You then have it, you see its benefits, you think, actually, I need to have this through the organization, because everyone needs this. Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is an experienced leader and consultant with cross sector experience. Before I introduce my guests, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands we’re meeting on. For me, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and for my guests, the Jagera Yugera and Turrgal people.
And I’d just like to acknowledge the continuing connection that the living Aboriginal people feel to land, waters, culture, and community, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. My guest for this episode is Simon Benjamin. For two decades, Simon experienced a wide range of care models in disability, mental health, special education, out of home care, and Aboriginal childcare services.
This included caring for deeply traumatized children in both community based and state run residential care homes. More than 10 years of this time was spent immersed in the well established therapeutic milieu workplaces of the Mulberry Bush School in the United Kingdom, and the Lighthouse Foundation in Australia, where he was CEO for more than five years. Simon now draws on this rich career experience, together with the latest research and evidence based approaches to empower organizational leaders, teams, and frontline workers to better manage their own wellbeing and deliver optimal service outcomes.
While his work supports a broad range of clients, Simon specializes in out of home care, mental health, and homelessness sectors. Simon’s vision is to see people, organizations, and the human services sector deliver the care that vulnerable people need to enable them to reach their potential. Welcome, Simon.
Is there anything you’d like to add to that summary of you? Oh, no, that’s quite a good roundup, I think. I probably need to condense it a little bit more, but yeah, no, that sounds fine with me. Yeah.
I probably would add actually, just I’m thinking of it, just my main focus in my consultancy working with kind of social organizations and social care is therapeutic practice. Yes. It’s the recognition of the importance of therapeutic practice and how to adopt it and integrate it into regular service delivery, regular interactions with children, youth, and families.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, let’s get into it.
And so the first question I have of you is probably a fairly large one. So hopefully it doesn’t feel too much, but just wanted to ask you what led you into a career supporting leaders and teams deliver best outcomes for their clients, including in the social care sector, and who and what were your major influences? Okay, well, look, it started for me around 23 years ago. I was new to Australia, well, new-ish.
I was just got, I just got married. I just got my visa to work here. And so I’m from England originally.
And I was looking at different options. I had an honest degree in psychology from the UK. And I just felt right moving into a career where, into the care industry, basically.
So I started out as a home carer for my local council working, supporting families who had children with a disability. It started with house cleaning. So here I was with my degree and everything else, cleaning houses, which my father thought was just a disgrace.
But that soon progressed into becoming a respite carer for the families. And then I also started working in disability. And then after a couple of years of doing that, I went into youth mental health, and then adult mental health in day programs and residential facilities.
And it just started progressing from there. And then it worked into a subacute unit where adults who had been in a psychiatric facility, they went into this place for about four weeks to kind of begin the transition back into the community. So I had a kind of varied experience.
And then it was when I started working in residential care in Melbourne predominantly, that I kind of started to feel I found my niche. And I then moved over to Perth for a year and worked in their first therapeutic group home that was run by the Department of Child Protection. It’s still running.
That’s the same home. And we had a team leader there who was from the UK. It was quite recent, and he’d worked in therapeutic facilities in England, and actually was kind of consulting, went around helping group homes that weren’t functioning too well.
And so that was where I kind of had my first taste of therapeutic interactions, one-to-one with, you know, children who were, these were children up to age 12, quite violent presentations. And I was in that for a year. And then from there, I went to the UK and worked at the Mulberry Bridge School for four and a half years, which really was an amazing experience to see how a well-developed, well-established therapeutic organisation works and where their practice is from the receptionist to the CEO and everything in between, all fully aligned.
And that gave me just a, you know, just a great experience. I was actually working in the team that worked with the families. So while a lot of work was done with the children while they were at the residential school for 38 weeks of the year, then they went home.
And sometimes they went home to a family where the dysfunction originated from. So my work was to work with families to help them make progress also. And then when I came back from there, I worked, I went, spent a year at the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, and then I went to the Lighthouse Foundation.
And so, yeah, I think it was, I think the thing that got me into it was when, was working in, working in that relationship with children and youth, where you actually build trust and take them on the journey or walk with them while they’re experiencing their own change and self-discovery about their own things that have impacted their lives. So then when I moved into a CEO role, it was quite different. I was no longer, you know, interacting or, you know, supervising carers or directly working with youth and children.
And I then, you know, we went as a leading organisation, it’s a whole different set of skills to learn. And coming out from the other side of that, I mean, it was a great experience. We grew the organisation, it kind of doubled in size financially.
We went into, we started a foster care programme that was new to the organisation, adopting a therapeutic approach that was new to the sector, it had some variations to existing programmes. And it was when I left that role, and that I saw how the, the core work of therapeutic practice, which is about, you know, the interactions, really, the interactions with children, youth, and then within teams, is based on things like establishing trust. So you need to establish trust with the client or your participants, or just the child or youth or family.
And then to do that, you have to have a level of vulnerability yourself to demonstrate in a professional capacity. And then from that trust, you can then engage in and go through difficult experiences with them where they push your boundaries and vice versa. And through that relationship, there’s trust built, and then things can be start to overcome.
And what I loved is, you know, is translating that into a management situation where I work with leadership teams now to help them be vulnerable with each other, to help them build trust, so that they can actually thrash out the things they need to thrash out and make good decisions. Because the work you do with, with, with children, youth or families is, is grey. It’s, there’s no clear answer as to what, you know, you’re personally working with needs in that particular moment.
And, and so you need to have build that relationship to help them. So you know what you can do to be of assistance, and you know, they know what they need from you and vice versa. And it’s not, it’s difficult to articulate.
The same is true of the leadership team of an organisation. They have to work in the grey, because they have to make decisions where there’s no, not necessarily a right or wrong answer. And they need the same set of skills to be able to work with each other.
And that’s why I work in two different spaces that seem unrelated, but actually have dissimilar challenges. So that’s kind of how I’ve got to where I work now. Fantastic.
Quite the varied history. I mean, really, basically, if in a journalistic world, it would be from the, I guess, from the floor up that, you know, the, the, the male, the male person or, or whatever, right up to the editor of the newspaper, and then freelancing after that would be a similar kind of metaphor. You mentioned two in there, two very, probably well known, particularly the Mulberry Bush School, and also the Lighthouse Foundation, which is well known to many of our listeners and to me.
You told me a little story a bit earlier about how you came to work in your first two jobs in when you returned to Australia. I don’t, I think people would be find that a little bit interesting to hear that story. So I was at the Mulberry Bush School, the team I worked in was often the team that showed people around when we had visitors, because the care workers or the teaching staff were often engaged with the children, obviously.
So I showed many visitors around, but two visitors in particular, I firstly, I think, halfway through my tenure there, I showed around Susan Barton, who’s the founder of Lighthouse Foundation, and one of the executive directors at the time. And, and they said to me, because I, you know, through conversation, I was with them for about an hour and a half that, you know, I’d been living in Melbourne for eight years, 10 years, and I was intending to, intending to return at some point. And they said, look, whenever you come back, please get in touch, would be lovely to see if there’s an opportunity for you to work with us.
So that was that. Two years later, when it was actually, I put in my resignation, I was, was due to be leaving in a couple of months to come back to Melbourne. And I then showed around Adele Holmes with a friend of hers, Hannah, she’d been to the Mulberry Bush before, but she was having a second visit.
And I said to her, oh, you know, I found out she was from Melbourne, I told her I was returning there. And then she said, oh, look, do you have, have you found a job here? And I said, I haven’t started looking. And then long story short, I ended up working with Adele for just under a year at the Victoria, Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency.
So yes, there’s two people who I showed around and ended up working for both of them. And of course, Adele has already been on the pod. And yeah, so through that, that, that process of, of work, of acquiring experiences and working in some really quite interesting places, were there any particular influences over your development that you, you know, that you would be happy to share with us both, you know, the work environments that you were in and their approach to the work or thought leaders, I guess, in the sector? Sure.
I think probably there were some workers that impacted me that, you know, I don’t remember some of their names, just their approaches. But there were, I think probably the first one to impact me was the house supervisor in the house in Perth where I worked. And he just had a very matter of fact kind of approach.
And I think gave me confidence in what I was doing. I’ve been working, I think this is one thing I’m going to say is probably quite key for some residential care workers. Because when I first came into residential care, I didn’t, as I hadn’t been a parent at that point, I hadn’t had my first child.
And I think actually being a parent puts you in a good state to some degree. Because I didn’t know what normal was, what’s it, what should a normal, what normal child be doing? And, and how do I engage with this person? That’s a basic level of training that I didn’t have, I had no training, actually. And, and he really helped me develop my person to interact, which really was to encourage me just to be me.
And I think that because I saw these other kind of youth workers, and they were really hip and really cool. And I thought, I’ve got to be like them. And I just, I just wasn’t me, I just, you know, wasn’t quite hip and cool.
And, and I then found in time that just through his encouragement, that actually, they just needed a person who, just a person who is predictable, reliable, and it really encouraged me to be myself. So he was one influence. Danny Burnett was his name in Perth, give him a shout, because he was, he was excellent.
I think he’s still a year or two ago, he was still there, from what I recall. I was just gonna jump in, I was just gonna jump in and authenticity is really still, I guess, talked about as being very important in this sector, because the kids see through fakeness very, very quickly and easily. That’s right.
Yeah. Yeah. And I completely agree.
Let me think. I think, I think, from there, when I worked at the Marlborough School, I can’t really point to any particular individual, but just the whole approach of that school really resounded me, resounded with me, and gave me, again, even further confidence to be who I was, to, to, to raise my voice in forums where to challenge ideas, because, and that’s what they did really well. There was one situation, I remember, there was one particular child that was causing amongst, you know, thirsty children that were all high complex presentations.
One was really pushing the boundaries of, you know, the different things the school was trying to do. And I remember the director of the time calling a meeting with some key individuals to kind of say, we’re calling for different approaches as to what people think. And it was really amazing that, you know, the senior people actually kind of saying, we want everyone’s input here, because this is a difficult situation for us to manage.
And that really gave me like, wow, this is a great way of just, of just coming up with ideas, brainstorming, decision making, really shows the nature of therapeutic practice to everyone’s involved. We want everyone’s skills on the table, everyone’s ideas. And so that, that was a good experience, a good influence there.
Adela was, was also, I think, helped refine my approach a little bit. I think I love her, her dogged passion for the work. And how, you know, it was, it’s, it was much more than a job for Adela and others in particular.
And I think I probably found the same in Susan Barton as well, like, you know, incredible commitment, and would fight, you know, for the kids, tooth and nail if she had to. Yes, and the others on the journey, but they’re probably some of the main ones, there’s a few more names, but I’ll leave it there. It’s interesting, because you mentioned everyone being, making a contribution and kind of like a, an open and flat structure in a way in terms of putting heads together.
And my most recent past podcast guest was Graham Kerridge. And he’s had a long and distinguished career in healthcare management internationally. But he started his professional career at the Cotswold community, where Barbara Docker Drysdale, who started the Mulberry Bush School, was the therapeutic consultant there.
And what you just said about the Mulberry Bush, not surprised or unsurprisingly, is very similar to what impressed Graham about his work at the Cotswold community. So there’s an alignment between those two places and their practices that, you know, when you think about it, you were exposed to that, I think, in around about the year 2000, or thereabouts, early 2000s, is that correct? For me, it was at the Mulberry Bush, 2009 to 2014. Well, even, I mean, there’s 30 years difference between what Graham’s describing at the Cotswold community.
It really speaks, I think, to the enduring wisdom of Barbara Docker Drysdale, really, and others who, through those two seminal ventures, the Mulberry Bush School and Cotswold community. Yeah, yeah. And if I can pick up on that, I think, just to pinpoint, because the articulation of, I think, what the keys are there, is a confidence in the approach to kind of say, I don’t know.
I don’t know what to do. I need to consult with others. And that’s what I loved about that was really encouraging in the Mulberry Bush was there was a lot of teamwork, where people were being really honest and vulnerable, I don’t know what to do, or I’ve tried this.
And even people who experienced, people at Mulberry Bush have been there like 20 years, but would still consult. And that, for me, I saw some of the best teamwork I’ve ever experienced, where in one of the teams I was in, it was actually at the point when I knew I was leaving, and I was in the midst of thinking, oh, I’m going to so miss this, because you had real, people have a lot of experience just pondering and discussing ideas, and how are we going to do this? How are we going to break it through? And, you know, there was so much thought that went into the children’s lives, that it made such a difference. It was incredible.
So I think, yeah, that vulnerability of to be confident enough to say, I don’t know, that’s consult. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s, it’s wonderful. I love for people to be thinking about what they’re doing.
Too often, too often, they, you know, in the pressure of these complex work environments, people are looking for the procedural response, or, you know, the easy solution, or the straightforward solution, suggestion. And John Whitwell was funny. And I know you listen to his podcast when he said, when he made the transition from being the principal at the Cotswold community over to the UK’s first therapeutic foster care program, and in his initial experiences, their staff would come to him and he would start with a question.
And he would say, well, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. And the staff were like, well, you know, you’re the CEO, we should be able to come to you for an answer.
So yeah, it’s, I think, I think adopting that stance that all humans, all young humans and all situations deserve a bit of thought about, you know, in terms of how we’re delivering a service to them. Yeah, that’s right. And unfortunately, it flies in the face sometimes of a government funding system that wants detailed outcomes of what will happen if they invest in a certain thing.
And it can be and the meeting those two is another point of discussion. Yeah, sure. Simon, we’ve heard about your work in a number of organisations, including those with an overarching therapeutic model or approach.
I’m really interested to hear from you about what challenges you encountered or saw in maintaining a consistent therapeutic approach or practices across organisations and how these were overcome. Sure, I think the challenge is really, is really if you have buy-in at the top. Organisations that, so the Mulberry Bush and at Lighthouse, it needed the leaders to say, this is how our organisation is going to roll and to maintain it.
I think probably the strongest, this was done probably strongly at the Mulberry Bush, where they had detailed policies written up that described how they would do things, even to the point of at the Mulberry Bush, they were able to, certainly in my day, I was their physical restraint of children, if need be. And they had detailed policies to describe how and when they would use this and why. And the policy read beautifully, like it was a very well thought out, and it was if it was like someone speaking to you, giving you guidance and training, that’s how the policy was written.
So you can tell it had been formed after a long time and been refined. And another practice that they had was that the senior leadership team had a reflective space, a clinical supervision space that was held regularly. I think it was monthly.
And that was held right through, even the administration team had a reflective space and they had no, they were doing no clinical work, no therapeutic work. They had interaction with the children because the children would walk through reception. So they were, even the way they interacted had importance, which is why they were part of the supervision process.
So that structure was right the way through the system. And the policies are right the way through the system. And I think that was the key thing in maintaining a therapeutic environment.
The alignment has got to be through the whole system from top to bottom. I’ve seen in other organisations where I’ve worked, where it’s just the programme is the therapeutic programme and the rest of the organisation doesn’t have the therapeutic parts to it. That doesn’t work so well.
And I’ve seen one example I can recount, I won’t name names, was I was a therapeutic advisor to a residential care programme and I didn’t have the final say. I was just the advisor. And I gave some advice on a situation that was of a young person and there’d been a number of them leaving the home and it was getting a bit more dangerous and different things were being tried.
I made some recommendations that they should do this and not that and blah, blah, blah. Someone two levels more senior than even the person I was working with vetoed that suggestion and went with their direction on things, having not really much contact with the day to day. And what I said would happen if they did that ended up happening.
And that for me is just an indicator of what happens when the whole organisation is not in alignment and in the same systems. I know then being as a CEO, the distance you feel when you’ve got suddenly a board to report to, budgets to meet, financial pressures, and you’re not in the day to day is not in your mind as much. And then so you have this pressure and you kind of think, OK, I need to make this decision.
And then I found then having that reflective group where we’ve got the director of care and the therapeutic input in the room helped ground my thinking and bring me back to the key of the work. And I can see how you’ve got great workers on the ground, great social workers who then become senior leaders, how they lose touch. And I know that some of them, you know, one CEO I met, he was going to a residential care home every month at least to go and have dinner with them, to stay in touch, which I thought was just fantastic.
But that that can ground you to a degree. But I think having a regular thing through the system is the thing that actually holds it. And the challenges are you get very busy.
And often the first thing to go when you get really busy is the reflective practice because no business is being exchanged other than just each person’s well-being, which is very important. And so it’s the first thing to go. Now, what we had at Lighthouse is one I instituted the leadership team having a regular space.
It was recommended to me by my director of care and I completely related to it having been in her position not long before. So I agreed and I maintained it the whole time I was there. And it was mandatory space, even for our director of fundraising, even for our head of finance.
And for them, it was an uncomfortable space at the beginning because they had no idea what it was all about. But, you know, essential. So even when they were signing off, you know, large invoices, they had an understanding as to what was going on because they were a bit more in touch with the work.
So I think and just to give one example, when things got more difficult, like especially during COVID, I was CEO during, you know, during the first part of COVID, we actually doubled our reflective practice as a leadership team rather than reduced it because we had some more critical decisions to make. And we knew it was important that we were having the buffer effect of having a space to think properly as a team. The way I describe it to people is like this.
I describe the work in social care, especially in child protection type work as it’s like you’re working in rougher terrain. And you wouldn’t take a normal road vehicle in an off road environment. And effectively, the kind of work is off road environment, you would have a vehicle that’s got a four drive with high suspension.
And I find what happens is if you don’t have things in place like reflective practice through the whole system, ongoing training, not once in a year training, ongoing training, as mandatory things that for your team, then you’re basically stripping off the increased suspension, you’re stripping off all those features, and you’re sending a road car into an off road environment. And what happens, it gets bashed up, basically. And people leave, and they get burnt out.
And they don’t tell you that’s the reason they’re leaving, they give another reason. But that’s often the case. And I think that’s there’s so much in there in your response there, Simon, that I also have had very varied experiences.
And I have been involved in delivering as a consultant, external consultant in therapeutic care. I’ve also been involved in the delivery of a therapeutic care program. And I just want to maybe get you to expand a little bit more, based on my experience.
And my experience would be that management wants something, they want a program to be rolled out, a program of training and for staff. So it comes from management. But that’s where that’s where it ends.
That’s where you don’t hear further, really, from management, you then, and in my case, I’ve been left to just roll out the program, the therapeutic caregiving training and implementation with a particular program. And that just didn’t work, from my point of view, didn’t work out well at all. So it needs more than just to be management approved, it needs to be as you described, it needs to be part of the whole structure that rolled out across the whole structure of the organization at every level.
And I was just gonna say, I’m not sure in the bigger organizations, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how management might be more involved in the rollout of a particular endeavor, or program, given that some of our bigger organizations are so multifaceted, you know, especially our statutory child protection organizations. Well, I know, look, I don’t know great, a lot of the detail behind models, like, for example, the sanctuary model, I know that their process has a lot of change management features in where they, they consider it a change management process, which is actually really what it is. So you’re effectively bringing in a cultural change to an organization of the way it works.
So it kind of requires the leadership to drive it. And if the leadership aren’t really involved, then, then for me, I just, you know, make very clear what will happen if they’re not involved, that it will be an investment that will peter out after a certain amount of time. And they’ll end up canceling decisions that they kind of initially went ahead for, and not see how they’ve got from A to B, but they’ve got there.
So yeah, it’s, it is very much because it’s a different way of working. It’s a retraining. It’s it really is.
And I think the intention is often good. We want, we want these children healed, or we want them on a better life trajectory, or to start a better life trajectory. So go and do that.
But there’s often sometimes the, you hear this a lot for people that don’t know the implications of things is there’s sometimes a notion of can you just go and fix these children, and this program will fix them. And, and it’s, and it’s just not to do that. Like, you don’t go to the doctors to get fixed.
You go there to be healed and treated. And that’s actually the, you know, like, we kind of use that kind of language. And, yeah, so I think there’s a lot more involved, it has to come from the top.
And I think, I think sometimes, you know, in terms of engaging with an organisation, it’s if a consultant, I’m not saying I do this, or others should, you could say, if your leadership don’t buy into this, I won’t work with you, because there’s no point, it’s a waste of time. Exactly. I and that was exactly what you were reading my mind.
I was thinking, there’s no way I would go in and as a consultant to or even to roll out a program without the leadership participating in it again. Yeah, because you put you put so much of your, your wisdom, your knowledge, your acquired knowledge, your and you put so much heart into the endeavour. And when it when it doesn’t work out, that is that that’s very painful, I guess, certainly was for me to have that experience in this in this sector.
Yeah. And I think also saying no, when they want you to say yes, is, you know, is in some ways, you know, when you say no to them, it’s kind of saying actually, no, this this takes you to even if it takes another six months or a year to decide if you will probably want to do it, it takes your full commitment. Otherwise, you know, it’s not going to work.
I think, yeah, I think they’re really awesome points. Yeah. How do you reconcile that? Sorry, these are questions without notice.
But I, you know, there’s also, and I’ve been guilty of at times, a school of thought that is that you achieve change bottom up or that you you try to. And I kind of try to do that in my work. I try to I try to capture the hearts and minds of the work of the workforce in this sector through not just podcasts like this, but YouTube videos that I make writing books, you know, that sort of thing, and try and facilitate something, you know, embryonic bottom up, ground up progression towards a more trauma informed organisation.
Well, I think I mean, look, it really depends on the organisation. I think, you know, if you don’t have the buying from the top, you start working on the ground, it could be that the whole organisation starts to shift in that direction. It’s just whether the leadership provide the authorising environment for the said programme to do what it needs to do.
And I think then it then needs the people in that programme to be able to articulate what they’re doing in such a way where it’s properly communicated and received to the leadership. So I think, yeah, I mean, you know, I wouldn’t turn away if someone said, look, we want to train this thing, because I think like you say, there’s a hope that it will start to progress through. And it really would be on things being properly, you know, documented, recorded, and, and there being, you know, there being some not results, but some progress in the lives of the children, we’ve actually we’re seeing like instance reduced, we’re seeing people, the school attendance picking up, you know, if that’s been an issue or different things, and then kind of go, okay, what is this? Well, how is this turning around? And then it could be that that will start to infuse the more senior levels? Yeah, yeah.
Nick, another one. You’ve you’ve had a I mean, across your career, which spans decades, you’ve worked from all the way from down at cleaning homes, right through to CEO and consultant, to CEOs and organisations and leadership teams. I’m just wondering if you with all that wisdom that you’ve gathered, is there something that you would like to see happen in a cross sector way that will help to realise that the ambitions of all involved of better outcomes for the young people that we deliver services on behalf of? Sure, I think, you know, I think when I’m being a CEO, I was fortunate enough to be recruited in Victoria to like a working group of 12 leaders.
At the time, it was 2016, it was under, there was a roadmap to reform to reform the child protection system. And it was originally designed that we were like a co design, it was actually probably in the end, we were more consulted as opposed to designing but and it gave me I was on that for a number of few years, a number of years, and it gave me an overview as to why the sector looks at different things to different models and everything. And what I kind of realised was that therapeutic care is not really understood.
In, in, in among even among CEOs, there’s a people that kind of sit through the training kind of, they might say that, you know, that we’ve got trauma informed programs, and it’s trauma informed and the whole thing. And I think that’s, that’s become a, I’m sad to say a bit of a cheap word now, because any most people can experience a bit of training and say that there’s trauma informed. It’s whether they I mean, I know there are other organisations who’ve broken this down, I think it’s been good that you know, you can be trauma aware.
But then are you actually, you know, trauma practised, and those different things. And I’ve, you know, I did some work myself on what actually does therapeutic mean? Because one forum I was in, the government minister at the time wasn’t in the forum, but I was told by someone who connected with them quite frequently, that they government ministers didn’t believe therapeutic practice worked. And I thought, how has that happened? But obviously, what’s been represented to them, it must not have been genuinely therapeutic.
And what that shows to me is, among many other things I’ve seen, is there needs to be some agreed standards of what therapeutic care is. What I did like in England at the Marlborough school was there was, the Marlborough were involved back then, I’m not sure if they are still now, it’s called the therapeutic communities. And I think it’s called the community of communities.
And they basically peer reviewed each other on a regular cycle, to check their policies, to check their different parts of their practice and everything to actually be accredited as a therapeutic community. I think that needs to be happening, certainly in Australia, and probably internationally, where there are agreed standards that if you’re not following these standards, then you’re not therapeutic. Because for me, therapeutic, and not just trauma informed, but therapeutic, and by therapeutic, I mean, it’s kind of borrowed from, my understanding is borrowed from the medical term relating to medication.
When you have a medic take a medication, it reaches its therapeutic level, when it’s starting to impact and it has an impact on the disease or condition it’s treating or fighting. So and that that therapeutic level is dependent on how much you weigh and different things. I could take the dose of a child for a particular medication, and it won’t have its therapy, won’t reach its therapeutic level for me.
It’s the same I believe with when working with people who experience trauma, are they receiving enough of the good care experiences to actually start to impact their lives, where they start to, you know, there’s repair of their attachment style. There’s repair of their experiences where they don’t respond in the same way as they learn new ways of responding. That’s when the healing starts to take place.
That’s when the therapeutic is having an impact. I think a lot of places that call themselves trauma informed or therapeutic, if they go to the level of calling themselves therapeutic, aren’t actually reaching that what I call therapeutic level. And I think that’s what’s needed, because then you’ll have a minister who’ll start to see programs that are actually working and bringing change, and will then say, okay, it’s worth investing in.
So I think there needs to be across the board, some standards that are set. And then I think the number of organizations or programs that are called therapeutic will drop off and the real ones will emerge. I love that idea of the that you were talking about with the community of communities in the UK, getting together, and probably collectively agreeing some standards against which they reviewed each other.
Yeah. And kept each other accountable in the process in doing that. And kind of that allows me to segue, I think a bit into you’ve mentioned a number of times already about leadership, having the opportunity to have their own reflective practice groups.
I’m just wondering what you would see as being the key benefits that are derived from leadership of social care organizations having their own supervision, group supervision, reflective practice supervision. You’ve talked about the benefit for the program in terms of implementation and alignment through the organization. But what do chief executives and others get out of supervision? I think it provides a mirror.
I mean, can you imagine going through weeks and weeks and weeks, never looking in a mirror to see how you look to see how you’re responding, how you’re doing things? Because for me, clinical supervision is someone reflecting back to you what’s coming out of you and to have that reflected back for you to then go, is this the way I want to be making decisions? Is that, you know, and, you know, I’m pleased to say a lot of the time or some of the time what was reflected back to me, I thought, oh, I’m quite pleased with my approach on that. But it also allowed me to refine some things. And I think that’s probably what’s missing.
I would say for a CEO who’s come from more the business world and comes into an environment that’d be, hang on, what’s all this, you know, fluffy stuff I need to get involved in. It’s probably similar to them having a coach. Because a coach, I’ve had, I had a coach as a CEO and incredibly helpful because they get to, it’s like a sounding board and it’s many different things.
And I think probably the clinical space is similar in many respects, but also gets down to, you know, you being in touch with what’s going on inside with you, especially when it comes to decision making. You have a lot of tensions to hold, your communication has to be very measured in different forums. And you’re holding on a lot of stress that you’re often not aware of, or you are aware of, but not how much it’s impacting different things that you’re doing.
And the way I often describe the need for this in a leadership team is if you don’t, especially for a group supervision for a team, if you don’t provide the space for it, people will talk somewhere. They’ll talk with their spouse or they’ll talk by the photocopier or, you know, have a private Zoom with each other. The conversations will happen, but it’s best you bring them into an environment where they’re contained and you can have them as a group and, you know, get everyone’s perspective.
And I think the same, it’s as a leader having a supervision enabled time to reflect on work things that’s just for you. It’s not, you know, because you can talk with one direct report and you’ve got to be mindful of what you’re sharing. You talk to your partner or whoever, you can’t share everything, but this person you can share whatever you want.
And it’s just, yeah, it’s a bit of a release valve and many other beneficial things, I think. And it also connects you a bit with the work. You then have it, you see its benefits, you think actually I need to have this through the organisation because everyone needs this, yeah.
That’s, yeah, that’s really a very important point that if modelling the model is a term that is used, I guess, in our work a lot, that idea that you just presented that of supervisors modelling the model. But if they can see and feel the benefit for themselves, then perhaps, hopefully, they’re more likely to say this should be happening all through the organisation. And again, I say there’s a tremendous benefit in people just having the opportunity to think about what they’re doing.
Yeah. And the other thing that I really liked in what you said there was about that people will talk anyway. But what people probably need is the benefit of a containing space is that you have that person that structures and manages the interaction in such a way that people can be vulnerable.
And hopefully, it doesn’t invoke defences that mean that they shy away from deep and accurate self-reflection, as well as reflection on the work. Yeah. Love it.
So my final question to you would be, if you were asked to give advice to an organisation that was just starting out on developing a therapeutic milieu and a therapeutic model and practice in it, what key advice do you think you would be wanting to give them? Um, okay, the first thing, based on what I said earlier, was just to ensure that leadership are on board. And so, yeah, was to be very clear on the leadership, you know, and I’m on board with this and just to make sure that they understand that the investment is obviously going to take time and probably to kind of educate them a bit on what it is like to change a culture. And to do a bit of work on change management practices, because, I mean, one thing I saw on change management once, I attended a masterclass on it once, was actually to, was to, would be to the organisation, was for the leadership to go to the organisation to kind of say, we need to make this change and, you know, explore why to get their buy-in and then kind of go to how do you think we should do this change and open it up.
Obviously, there’s going to be parameters, there’ll be things that we suggested that will be no’s, but they need to be explained as to why, because then you’ll be taking the organisation on a journey with you and they’ve been able to contribute to the process. And I think, and because in doing that, you’re actually modelling the way you’d interact with a child, which is really the way that, that for me is the key of how therapeutic practice really works, is the stuff that you would do with the child actually happens through the whole organisation. And so you would say with a child, look, there’s this, you know, I’ll give an example of a challenging behaviour, there’s this behaviour that’s going on and we can’t keep doing this, do you understand the reasons why? Oh yeah, because thingy gets hurt and you’re doing things you don’t want to do.
How do we help you with that? And it’ll be the same thing you do with the staff. We need to make this change. How do we go about doing this in a way that’s going to work for everyone as best as we can do it? And be honest, not everyone’s going to like this.
Some of you may want to leave and that’s all right, but how can we leave in a really good way if you are going to leave and just talk it through and then start to introduce the things you need to introduce. Look, we’re going to need some training, we’re going to need to rewrite some policies, we’re going to need to do a whole change and it’s going to take time and we’ll check in with each other as we go and just take it on that kind of journey. And that’s really like just a thumbnail sketch as to some of the things that are involved, I believe.
But it’s, I think, also in the same way you work with a child, you meet as a consultant, meet an organisation where they are and take them where they are and map out the steps and make it realistic with a constant review process. Great. Well, look, there’s so many takeaways in there for me and I hope for the people who are listening to this podcast as well.
Thank you very much for your time and being gracious enough to accept the invitation. Before you go, I do give everyone these days, I did the first couple of podcasts, but then I thought it’d be a good thing to do, give you a chance to ask me a question without notice. I’ve asked you a lot.
So I’m wondering if there’s a question, curly or otherwise, that you might want to ask me before we finish up. I think probably the, I guess one thing is I like to learn off of people is what’s the the greatest thing that you’ve learnt in this sector? So it could be an error you made or something like that. What’s something that kind of really, a situation you went through that you learnt, wow, this really taught me a huge thing.
What did you learn? There’s quite a few different things. I’ve learnt about what I think is fundamentally important and I’ve talked about that in previous podcasts. I think that the way we manage a person’s felt self-worth is really important.
But I think the thing that is really jumping around in my head and I’ll speak it is that not all problems can be fixed, but at least they can be understood. So what I mean by that is that, and particularly when you’re working and interacting with our children and young people, we can’t, we can’t even, we shouldn’t even pretend. And when you said earlier about people who say, well, you know, I’ve got this program or whatever, and it’s going to fix the trauma, as I said, I always tell people to avoid those ones like the plague.
But yeah, there are, when you’re working with children, young people, there’s a number of challenges that they have, not least of which is the challenge of going to school every day, that we can’t just say, oh, well, we’re just going to remove that from your life. You don’t have to go to children. There’s a legal, there’s a legal impediment for us doing that.
But at least we can acknowledge the experience of the child, of how their experience of going to school, the challenges that they face. And we can turn our mind to how we can respond therapeutically to those challenges. I think, I think what I’ve, the greatest intervention, I think, is to be able to communicate understanding of the person in our thoughts, in our actions, and in our, sorry, in our words, in our actions, and in our expressed emotions.
I think that that’s what I’ve learned, that acknowledgement, validation, empathy, therapeutic actions, they’re the things that I think that I’ve, you know, learned are the most important. Yes, I think, just to maybe put it in a bit of a reframe, I think what you’re saying is just for people to be felt, that they’re, they feel they’ve been properly experienced for the true people that they are, and understood that they’ve been understood that school is difficult. And, yeah, I, there is somewhat mischievously, because I’m a little bit of a mischievous person.
I, I liked, I started thinking of acronyms in relation to the content that I, not a long time ago, but the content that I write. And I was thinking about the term aura. And aura has got a whole kind of new agey vibe about it.
But the actual aura really, in the dictionary sense, is means it’s that distinctive quality or atmosphere of a place or a person. And, and I think when I, when I, when I do my next edition, or do another book, if when and if probably a big bit of more of an if, I will, I will probably structure it more around at least the therapeutic care side of things more around this acronym of aura. So I’m not only is aura the felt experience of a place and the people in it, but it means to that those people are accessible.
So they’re present, they’re with you, and then they are, they’re facilitating feelings of being heard and understood, acknowledged, important, a person of worth in their words, understanding in their actions, their responsiveness to the experience of the young person, and in their outward expressed emotions in and through attunement, facilitating attunement experiences. So I think, yeah, aura probably encapsulates a lot of the responses. I also am the author of the AAA model, which is a published model and is is about my my learnings about the inner experiences of the children.
But I might talk about that when I get a similar question in another podcast. So but yeah, that’s probably enough at this stage. So again, thank you very much for graciously accepting the invite to be on this fledgling podcast.
And yeah, wish you all the best and maybe our paths will cross again another time. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. It’s been great.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s good to talk about stuff.
Attachment and Resilience 