Strengths-based practice for organisations: supporting your staff to work with strengths

Organisations can use strengths-based practice to help the people they care for, or support, to achieve their personal outcomes.

But organisations can also use it internally to:

• improve communication
• help teams to work more closely together and effectively
• create a positive culture that focuses on growth.

These all help staff to feel more supported, which will influence the level of care and support they give.

You can find out more about how strengths-based practises create positive cultures in our guide on the Insight Collective.

To support your staff to use strengths-based practice, you’ll need to look at all the different parts of your organisation and how each of those work with strengths.

Those parts should all work together well. This is called a ‘whole-system approach’.

The parts you should focus on are:

1. leadership
2. vision and values
3. your organisation's policies and processes
4. learning, training and supervision

Good leadership is a positive behaviour that’s shown and followed by everyone in the organisation, including mentors or practice champions.

To support staff to work in a strengths-based way, you should make sure your strategic and operational leaders start with strengths.

Compassionate leadership is a style of leading people by focusing on strengths.

Compassionate leaders can recognise and support the strengths of the people they work with, and this can lead to positive cultures in social care.

You can find out more about leading with compassion, including resources to help get you started, on our leadership pages.

Strengths-based organisations have a clear vision tied to a set of organisational values that inspire and motivate all staff.

We have a guide to the common values we see in strengths-based practice.

To find out more, take a look at our positive cultures guide on Insight Collective.

You can make your policies and processes more strengths-based by:

• working with the people who give, receive, and assess care and support to review your policies and recording tools so they work with strengths-based practices
  • Your policies should be easy for staff to use.
• having leadership policies, processes and systems that support managers to model strengths-based ways of working
  • For example, policies that support supervision can support your staff to really listen to the people they lead.
• supporting positive risk-taking, because it makes staff feel secure and psychologically safe.
  • When staff can explore what positive risk looks like, they’re supported to be the best version of themselves. This can lead to better outcomes for people who receive care and support.

Make sure staff are trained in this way of working, so they understand it and are engaged and invested in it.

Offer continuous commitment to embedding skills through ongoing training, supervision and reflective practice.

We have lots of resources for you to use with staff to get them to start working with strengths.

Take a look at our resources page for tools and training materials.

Training isn’t everything. But commissioning high-quality, strengths-based training gives people the right skills and knowledge to make sure services are the best they can be.

Take a look at our guide to find out what skills, knowledge and values staff need to work in a strengths-based way, and see how training fits into the bigger picture.

We can give you tailored support to help your organisation to start using strengths-based practice. To find out more, e-mail: strengths@socialcare.wales