Why you should give responsibility to frontline practitioners

In children’s social care we are absolutely hamstrung by procedure and rules. Due to a number of high profile child deaths, the response has always been, 'Well, we will tell you what to do. If you can’t do it and children keep dying, then we are going to give you an instruction manual and you better follow it.’ Well, that just doesn’t work, but what we’ve built up over that time is this huge national guidance, regulations and legislation which tells us what to do on a day to day basis and is very hard to unpick and one of the things that we did was to delegate our decision-making as close to the front line, to the most junior members of staff that we could in the organisation. The best example of this, which was such a fantastic learning point for me, was about money. We had heard for years that we give social workers responsibility for some of our most at-risk children and yet we won’t let them spend £20. In some of our evaluations that we did in our organisation, it was highlighted that it took one social worker an hour and fifteen minutes to get a bus fare for £1.15 approved and that’s how it is in a lot of places today. We had to argue really hard with the authority to say ‘you’ve got to give us delegated decision-making on money’ and they thought we were insane, giving social workers spending authority, all hell will break loose! After arguing that it already had, we were already massively overspent and we’ve got these big bureaucratic structures to try and manage our money and no-one can actually decide anything, eventually they let us do it and we have a budget called Sector 17 budget which we can use to support families in the community and we spent less with that budget than we had ever done in that service because when you give the responsibility to frontline practitioners, they know the story better than anyone about what needs to be spent and why.

The rub of this is that when you delegate, those people take on more responsibility and this is why this sort of process takes time because people are fearful, with good reason, of responsibility and triggers a sense of blame if you’re not used to it. You have to take time to build people’s confidence and I think that there’s a really important relationship between building trust and building loyalty. Having these two things in the organisation are really important. If you’re a senior, whether you’re a team manager, a director or the chief exec, you have to model taking responsibility and you have to show people that when push comes to shove, you will have their backs.