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23 JANUARY 2009
NO 1391
Leadership in a therapeutic environment
Frankly, in my view the last thing the world needs is another paper on leadership that is full of complicated and largely abstract ideas about theories, styles, strategies and skills. Of course such contributions are not unimportant and entirely without value. However, there are so many of these texts already available that their volume alone can come close to overwhelming us. At the same time the question `what does it take to lead a therapeutic community?' is an important, indeed central matter for us to address thoughtfully and rigorously. Only by doing so will we have any chance of developing and maintaining an environment that offers to very troubled children at least some hope for healthy recovery, change and growth. Therefore, this question is the focus of this paper.
It may be of interest to know that in Latin `focus' means fireplace, or more specifically `domestic hearth'. Hence it was not entirely accidental, for example, that shortly after his election in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt gave a series of `fireside chats' to a nation hugely anxious about its survival while in the grip of what was for many a remorseless Depression. Whatever he said each week in his talk, the underlying message was always the same, `Things may be terrible in families, towns, cities and the countryside across our nation, but at its hearth (and its heart!) things are calm, thoughtful and strong. So we will endure and recover to better times'. So, too, today a leader of a therapeutic community must attend to `the hearth and the heart' in ways that preserve and develop further the good and goodness within the community itself and within its members, staff and residents alike.
Therefore, I offer a very personal account of and reflections on some of my own experiences while the Director of the Mulberry Bush, a residential therapeutic school in Oxfordshire for children, aged 5 – 12, suffering from severe early emotional disturbance and deprivation. Inevitably it is impossible to cover all the important themes in one paper, but I do believe that the ones I shall touch upon have a general application across a range of therapeutic environments and will resonate for many involved or interested in leadership in such settings. I believe from my own experiences and from the influence of others (e.g. Greenhalgh, 1994; Obholzer, 1994; Ward and McMahon, 1998) that there are numerous vital aspects to this task of leadership. However, its unifying `focus' in therapeutic communities is upon identifying ways of creating and maintaining a strong containing environment that holds/endures and that will help people develop relationships and ways of living that will facilitate emotional growth and learning. That is the Primary Task of the leader in support of the Primary Task of the entire community.
RICHARD ROLLINSON
Rollinson, R. (2003). Leadership in a therapeutic
environment "What a long, strange trip it is". Introduction.
Therapeutic Communities, 24, 1. pp. 23-24.
REFERENCES
Greenhalgh, P. (1994). Emotional Growth and Learning. London. Routledge.
Obholzer, A. (1994). Authority, power and leadership. In Obholzer, A. and Robers, V.Z. (Eds.). The Unconscious at Work. London. Routledge.
Ward, A. and McMahon, L. (1998). Intuition is Not
Enough. London. Routledge.
