OUR WORKFORCE AND EMOTIONAL REGULATION
Are you perfect? Me neither. Do you make mistakes? Me too. Have your emotions ever led you to respond to either a child in your care and/or a colleague in ways that were professionally inappropriate? Yes. I am not discounting cruel and degrading treatment and criminal conduct as our history repeatedly tells us that that undoubtedly continues to happen. But here I am particularly thinking about those more subtle incidents or behaviours over your career that perhaps only your colleagues, a child, or just you yourself even know about?
Within our legislative and policy frameworks, in order to be great at developing and sustaining effective relationships with children, those in our sector (whether foster carers, foster carer support workers, social workers, residential youth workers, transitioning from care workers, managers or leaders), in my view all require:
training
shared values
particular personal attributes
a capacity for critical thinking and
ongoing leadership, guidance and support.
However, they also need emotional intelligence and to be able to manage their emotions. They need to respond appropriately to feelings, sometimes very powerful feelings, of fear, emotional (and even physical) attack (and pain), embarrassment, anger, and jealousy. Perhaps just as importantly, they also need to manage any feelings of sadness, despondency, and hopelessness. All of this can play out in individual relationships, team relationships or indeed organisation-wide.
And managers and organisational leaders here are not immune from any of this. Shortly before I left Scotland nearly 20 years ago I was shown a dent in one of the partition walls where I worked; it was where a previous director of social work had allegedly gone into a rage and thrown a stapler at one of my colleagues. While I’ve never since heard of a leader throwing office equipment across rooms, inappropriate emotional responses to highly pressured events and circumstances can take many forms.
Are relationships really are at the centre of all that we do? If so, we need to pay much more attention to how our emotions effect us and how they can harm or serve children and their families...while also remembering that relationships are about being human, and not robots.