Secret Musings of a Change Agent 9 - Claire Tomkinson
What makes ordinary people great at making change happen? What characteristics do they share? What path have they followed? What’s their attitude to failure? And what advice would they give to others? I’m on a mission to understand more. After my pause for reflection (9Secret Musings of a Change Agent - What if? — Kath Smythe Collective) and a break for the summer, I’m excited to pick back up from the learning to date and talk to another group of brilliantly ordinary people who know how to make change happen. Next up Claire Tomkinson, formerly of Macc and now working as Strategic Lead for People and Leadership at Greater Sport.
Claire is unassuming, mild mannered and humble. But mistake that for a lack of passion at your peril. She is fierce, courageous and determined to change things so that services for people in Greater Manchester improve. That desire to change things has always been part of who Claire is and she believes is an intrinsic part of people who want things to be better for other people.
Until very recently, Claire worked for Macc - Manchester’s local voluntary and community sector support organisation - as Strategic Lead for Collaboration. Her role was to improve the relationship between voluntary and community sector organisations and the evolving integrated health and social care system in the City. Claire talks about how she couldn’t do that without thinking about how to be braver, getting clearer on what needs to change, building relationships across the system and galvanising the ability of herself and others to influence change. More fundamentally however, Claire came to see the need for a new and different style of leadership that values and creates space for diversity in all its forms, works collaboratively, isn’t bound by organisational hierarchies and is open to sharing power with communities.
collaborate
Claire saw the need for a new style of leadership that shares power and values diversity
In common with many of the other people I’ve talked to in this series, Claire talks about how being that voice of change can be an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. She talks of the risk of surrounding ourselves with people like us, who think like us, who we can trust and who validate our thinking and our rationale for change. While they are a fabulous source of support, Claire warns that if you don’t operate outside of your allies, you don’t actually change anything. Claire has learned to push herself into spaces where she works with people who think differently to her, to get alongside people and to use her skills to get people to listen. She cites empathy as a key skill, the importance of being able to walk in the shoes of others and understand their experiences and perspectives so that you can make your case for change in a way that resonates because it addresses their motivations and concerns.
I ask Claire about the failures she’s learned from along the way. “Failures, I’ve made a list” she laughs and proceeds to say “if you’re not failing, you’re not learning”. When I described Claire as courageous earlier on, this is what I was thinking about. So many people fear failure. They fear getting things wrong because they think they’ll ”get in trouble” or it will limit their career in some way. Having the courage to try something different that might not work is a really important part of making change happen. If we don’t try, how do we know? And yet, so often, we’re asked for detailed plans, and caste iron guarantees that something will work before we’re able to secure the right “approvals” from within the systems we work in.
Claire talks with real warmth about Mike Wild, the Chief Executive of Macc, and how lucky she feels to have worked for Mike. She talks of how he creates an environment of safety for his team. She gives an example of a time Macc secured funding for an innovation project. Claire’s heart sank when she was asked for a detailed programme plan, timeline, risk log and all the other paperwork that slows down our innovation while we tell people what they want to hear, knowing in our hearts that change is messy, non-linear and unpredictable. Claire knew that all the energy surrounding the innovation project risked draining away if she complied with the requests to produce a pile of paperwork. She made the case to Mike and he was clear that whilst there is a standard process in place to access funding, he also trusted Claire to approach this in a different way and enabled her to take the risk. And this time round the risk paid off.
Claire returns to the theme she raised earlier when reflecting on her failures and talks about how she became aware that she was so wrapped up in her own values and ways of thinking that she realised she wasn’t open to others and actually was losing people because she wasn’t demonstrating an understanding of their pressures and drivers. She gives an example of trying to get a group of GPs on board with the concept of social prescribing. She talked about how it’s not about fixing people but about working with people to enable them to be more independent so they are less dependent on public services. One of the GPs responded by saying “we like fixing - it’s what we do and what we get paid for”. She hadn’t taken the time to understand the motivations and drivers of the group she was talking to and paid the price of not getting them onside.
When I ask Claire whether lived experience has played any part in her journey, she talks about growing up in Salford and living in Clayton, both areas that are classed as areas of deprivation. She talks powerfully about how as a resident you quickly learn what assumptions people make about you and how this has made her really conscious of not making assumptions about others. Claire tells a story of going to a local Surestart centre with her baby a number of years ago. As her baby got older, a member of staff talked to her to encourage her to think about accessing work and had she thought about working towards her GCSEs. No doubt well intentioned, but this person hadn’t taken the time to ask Claire about herself. If she had, she’d have known Claire has a degree and a career which she was fully intending on returning to when she was ready. Purely on the basis of the area she lives in and a choice to access public support for children and families, an assumption was made about her. Claire recognises that the question was well intentioned but also sees it as symptomatic of a desire to fix people. Claire chose to withdraw from accessing local services because of the assumptions she felt were being made about her and as a result became isolated as a mum. Perhaps sometimes as public servants we are so driven by a desire to improve the lives of people that we forget to recognise strengths?
Walking in others shoes
A key skill that Claire has learned to help her make change happen
Claire also tells a story about her first leadership role as a young person. Dissatisfied with a service for young people that she was accessing, she made a complaint. The response was, well you run it then. And she did!! Having no idea what to do or how to do it, she followed her instinct to listen to other young people to understand what they wanted. She involved young people in planning their own sessions and was able to make change happen. The response? Sadly, others didn’t see the value of what we’d now call coproduction and told Claire she was lazy, getting young people to do the work for her and that she was no longer welcome as a volunteer. She also received complaints from the people running services for the older group that they were getting young people coming through with expectations that they should have a say in how their services were run!! Claire stepped back and decided she never wanted to have anything to do with leadership again.
So what changed? Claire was contacted while working at Macc by the force that is Peta Stross. Peta is a visionary. She sees what needs to change and she has a mind that is truly open to doing different. Peta, a very senior leader from the NHS, could see that leadership styles and behaviours needed to change. She was seeking Claire’s help. Claire’s initial response was to say no. But then she took a deeper look and discovered a whole network of people working in the health and social care system who were all about sharing power and a different approach to leadership. The rest is history as Claire has established herself as a positively disrupting voice in the health and social care system in Greater Manchester with a clear vision and a wicked set of skills that enable her to influence change.
Claire describes her superpower as her ability to collaborate and connect people through shared ideas and purpose, trusting that other people have the answers. She sees herself as “the collaborator in the middle, joining the dots and finding the right people”.
“If it feels easy and everyone is agreeing, you’re probably not changing anything”
Claire’s advice to aspiring change agents is threefold: firstly, you can’t do it on your own, you need people around you; secondly, always focus on the why not the process, and; last but not least, if it feels easy and everyone is agreeing you’re probably not changing anything.
It was a pleasure talking to Claire. I love that she’s so impactful and yet so unassuming - a real example of great introverted, non egocentric leadership. I wish Claire every success in her new role. If you enjoyed this blog and would like to understand more about what makes a great change agent check out my blog series for more “Secret Musings of a Change Agent”.
