Selling your opinion: Developing professional assertiveness

1. Selling your opinion:Developing professional assertiveness Patrick Ayre Department of Applied Social Studies University of Bedfordshire Park Square, Luton email: pga@patrickayre.co.uk web: http://patrickayre.co.uk

2. Selling you opinion What would you look for yourself?

3. Selling you opinion What would you look for yourself? • Presentation • Content

4. Oral Presentation Selling your point of view requires: • Courage • Conviction • Clarity • Credibility

5. Oral Presentation The four Cs are founded on: • Comprehension: Knowing your subject • Preparation: Knowing your audience • Reflection: Knowing yourself

6. Handling that meeting • Prepare! • Be clear in your mind about what you want • Arrive early or on time • Speak clearly and confidently • Maintain eye contact with all • Accept resistance

7. Preparing mentally • Before you start, check your mindset (your own biases and assumptions) • Have realistic expectations: • It is reasonable that involuntary clients resent being forced to participate • Because they are forced to participate, hostility, silence and non-compliance are common responses that do not reflect my skills as a worker • Due to the barriers created by the practice situation, clients may have little opportunity to discover if they like me • Lack of client co-operation is due to the practice situation, not to my specific actions and activities (Ivanoff et al, 1994)

8. Working with resistance We need to accept that: • The best we may be able to achieve is honesty rather than positive feelings and a high degree of mutuality • Conflict and disagreement are not something to be avoided, but are realities that must be explored and understood.

9. Why many interactions fail • Failure to consider where other participants are starting from (probably different from you) • Failure to focus on strengths as well as weaknesses

10. Challenge your dodgy thinking • I am only a… and he is a…, so I had better keep my opinion to myself. • I am obviously in a minority, so I had better keep my opinion to myself. • We need to maintain harmonious relations, so I had better keep my opinion to myself.

12. Written Presentation • Make it pretty and easy to read • Neat • Double spaced • One side only • Numbered paragraphs and pages

13. Language • Good grammar • Good sentence construction • Simple sentences • No unnecessary, unexplained jargon • Appropriate tone (formal so no slang, no contractions, no use of first names for adults) • Sensitively phased (but not watered down)

14. Content problems • Facts poorly marshalled • Conclusions and recommendations poorly argued and justified (or absent altogether)

15. The chain of reasoning Facts  Analysis/summary  Conclusions and recommendations

16. What do they want to know? • Who you are • Why you are reporting • The facts of the matter • The conclusions to be drawn from the facts

17. The facts • Tell the story chronologically without too much editorialising • Facts sufficient support your argument and also to refute counter arguments • First hand evidence is best but give source of any information • Make sure that you have put information as fully and accurately as possible (Checklist: Who, what, when, where, how)

18. Bias and Balance • Include information favourable to the other side as well as that favourable to yours • It is your job to make judgements but: • avoid empty evaluative words like inappropriate, worrying, inadequate • Give evidence for descriptive words like cold, dirty and untidy • Beware the danger of facts

19. Bias and Balance Born in 1942, he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment at the age of 25. After 5 unsuccessful fights, he gave up his attempt to make a career in boxing in 1981 and has since had no other regular employment

20. Lies, damned lies and killer bread Research on bread indicates that • More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users. • Half of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests. • More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread. • Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis. • In the 18th century, when much more bread was eaten, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza were common.

21. Analysis • Studies (and SCRs) highlight problems in the quality and level of analysis • Assessments too static and descriptive, resulting in an accumulation of facts that are not analysed in a way that offers an explanation of the situation (Brandon 2008)

22. But what is analysis? You have gathered lots of information but now what? All you need to do is ask yourself my favourite question: “So what?” You have collected all this data, but what does this mean, for the service user, for the family and for the authority?

23. Conclusions and recommendations Problems: • Unsupported assertions or judgements • Inability or unwillingness to analyse and draw conclusions

24. Conclusions and recommendations • Summarise the main issues and the conclusions to be drawn from them. (The facts do not necessarily speak for themselves; it is your job to speak for them.) • Define objectives as well as actions • Draw conclusions from the facts and recommendations from the conclusions • Explain how you arrived at your conclusions (Have you demonstrated the factual/theoretical basis for each?)

25. Conclusions and recommendations • In drawing conclusions be aware of the extent and limitations of your own expertise. • Conclusions may be supported by research (Don’t go outside expertise; be careful with new or controversial theories; be aware of counter arguments) • Your recommendation should usually be specific (not either/or) • Remember: conclusions may be attacked in only two ways • founded on incorrect information • based on incorrect principles of social work

26. Where has our confidence gone? Deprofessionalisation • Part of a wider trend • Managerialism, McDonaldisation and the audit culture • Management by external objectives • Professionals not to be trusted

27. Key themes • Targets and indicators prioritised over values and professional standards • Compliance and completion prioritised over analysis and reflection • The proceduralisation, technicalisation and deprofessionalisation of the social work task.

28. Managerialism on the front line • We learn by doing • What is important in what I do? • What is good practice? • Supervision: qualitative or quantitative?

29. What we need Increased professional assertiveness requires: • Research-informed, reflective, confident and critically-challenging practitioners • Management styles and systems which promote rather than undermine their effectiveness