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FORUM on Corrections Research
Some Responses to the Staff Commitment Study
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Results of the Staff Commitment Study were presented to a gathering of the Correctional Service of
Canada's senior managers in December 1991. The following are excerpts from three senior managers
comments on the study. Comments from Dan Kane, Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Operations, Ontario
Region "First of all, I have found that there is not a lot new in the study, as interesting as the study
is, but I do find one thing both new and disturbing, and that is the attitudes of the WP
group.(1) "Historically, this was always the feeder group for senior management in the Correctional Service of Canada, and I think it would be a mistake for us if we did not pay particular attention to that shifting attitude, because I think there is a powerful message there, and we had best be responsive to it. "And it's a difficult issue to be responsive to because, of all the groups in the Correctional Service of Canada that we have responded to, there is not one that we have been more proactive with than the WP group, certainly in the Ontario region. We have paid more attention to that group, that single group, than any other one in our employ, and I think that it is noteworthy that that did not seem to turn the corner in terms of their attitude. "We had a meeting recently in the Ontario region with all of the senior managers in the region, all of the presidents of the Union of Solicitor General Employees and a substantial number of vice-presidents and shop stewards. We sat down and talked about the future of the education of staff in the CSC [Correctional Service of Canada], and it was a very interesting session as we sat together and tried to tackle the issues of the future in unity. "We spent a day talking about training and the front-line staff hammered away long and hard on the need for relevant training and on the need for what can best be called leadership on the part of the front-line supervisors - leadership being defined as: a) earning the respect of those that you lead, b) earning the respect of those that you serve, and c) being able to get people to work toward a common end without creating any resentment or resistance in the process. "As a region we have sat down and given that issue considerable discussion, and we are in the process of trying to focus our efforts and our finest talent, in terms of trying to sit down and say 'How can you turn that around.' "It would appear that for our front-line staff, as they look to the organization, as they look up in the organization, the values and attitudes and vision they have are shaped so strongly by their vision of, and their relationship with, their supervisor. I think this is an incredibly important element that we will ignore at our peril. "I do not believe that we can spend a lot of time proselytizing the middle management and senior management of the CSC, and see a lot of dividends in return. I believe that this group is basically converted to the correctional principles as they have been so well enunciated over the last several years, and then I think that it is not a higher sense of ownership from this group that we need, but a higher sense of ownership from the bottom-line troops that we need. These bottom-line troops end up responding most directly and positively to the front-line supervisors. "I would disagree, here and now, loudly and long, that our staff is not committed. The issue is not commitment - the issue is committed to what? This study has asked our staff to declare a level of commitment to a particular set of correctional objectives, and a particular statement of beliefs and objectives. "I know for instance, that on the one graph that shows the uncommitted portion, and the huge chunk at the top represents the lowest level of commitment to that which we are trying to achieve, we say those people have low commitment. "But it has been my experience that there are members of that group who have high levels of commitment to different things. Within that group you may have people who have low levels of commitment to our goals and objectives, but enormous and disproportionate influence in terms of shaping the attitudes and values of other staff away from what it is that we are trying to accomplish. "The neutral group is interesting because in the presence of a very powerful and influential leadership of this negative group they will remain silent, and we will lose them. They will tell us 'Gee, isn't that awful that people have these attitudes'; yet, given the opportunity to stand up and do something about it one-on-one with some of these individuals, they will choose to do otherwise. "So, I think that it is not a question of commitment. Generally speaking, my experience with the CSC has been that our staff is enormously committed - it is a question of committed to what, and I think this is where we have to spend some time. "The attitude and competency of our front-line supervisors is absolutely critical to the future of this organization. It is simply not good enough for all of us to be able to say 'Rah, rah -Go team go - ain't it grand - aren't we all in accord with this thing,' and assume that this is in fact going to be sufficient to change much if we don't have the front-line supervisors, the sergeants in the army, pulling along with us - in fact, dragging us behind, in terms of marching on to progressive change. "The other issue that I think is worth spending a moment or two talking about is that we have long equated interpersonal skills, a thing upon which we place very high value, with leadership skills. There is a substantive difference. There are those individuals who have superlative interpersonal skills and yet are weak or ineffective leaders. There are also those powerful leaders whose interpersonal skills may be just a little weak. It is an issue that I think we need to spend more time on. We need to focus more attention on this because having a bunch of 'nice folks' who are well skilled interpersonally is not good enough. We have got to be able to march forward and translate those interpersonal skills into powerful leadership skills. "Our front-line staff have been fairly articulate in what that means for them. It means: 'Does this individual know what I am responsible for? Does this individual understand the situation that I have to face on a day-to-day basis? Does this individual have my respect? And does this individual spend any time with me?' "The absent supervisor is getting to be a common theme. You say 'Where is your supervisor?' - well, my supervisor is off at a meeting somewhere, doing all the right things, or perhaps, not doing the right things, but for the right reason. They want to see more involvement of their supervisors, they want to spend more time with their supervisors. "I do believe that the secret to success - the secret to achieving the next level of achievement in the organization - is going to depend very directly on our capacity to provide supervisors that have a) the right leadership skills; b) the right motivation themselves; and c) the right amount of time to spend at the job of supervising as opposed to chasing the other issues in which we are very apt to involve them." Comments from Brian Lang, District Director, Northern-Interior District Parole Office, Pacific Region "After reviewing the study I guess I had a number of mixed reactions to it. Number one was the regional differences, and I suppose the study left me, in a lot of ways, wanting to hear more. "I was surprised and somewhat disappointed about the commitment levels of the case-management staff -I had expected, from my own experience, that it would be higher than it was - and the fact that it falls within the lower range of scores on the scale was surprising, and I was somewhat disappointed and concerned about that. "This is coming from my perspective in a community office. I guess when I left the last senior administrators' conference in May - I'm a relative newcomer to the management group - I was very impressed with the presentation that was given to us on benchmarking. And it seems to me that this particular study would lend itself very well to that type of process, and I would be very interested in receiving more material on this and on the types of organizations or operations that perform particularly well and why they perform well. "With respect to the support-staff group, the study didn't give me the information that I required, I guess in a sense on the differences between institutional and community operations, and I think that there has been an interesting phenomenon which seems to have grown in the past year or so, that I am not sure how to deal with yet, but I think that the Mission Document, in a general way, has created certain expectations among staff: expectations for enhanced performance on the part of management, and there is often a sense of dissatisfaction when those expectations are not met in a fairly comprehensive way. "I can recall in my own small operation - a year ago we didn't have computers. Now everybody has them, and there was a complaint that was made to me recently that someone's computer took four minutes to boot up versus two minutes for another computer in the office, and I thought that was a rather strange development -but it seems as if as we acquire more tools we seem to want more - there's something to look at there. "I guess in many ways the study, in a general way, wasn't terribly surprising. I think that the fact that the percentage of staff who are expressing general satisfaction or general commitment with this organization was somewhat predictable from a subjective perspective, but there are a series of anomalies in there that I am really quite interested in having a further look at, and I hope that we can start focusing in on operations that are performing particularly well, and use the data that we glean from that type of study to transfer that information to operations that might be having more difficulties." Comments from Paul Oleniuk, Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Operations, Prairie Region "In the early seventies, the Canadian Penitentiary Service targetted a recruitment campaign to university campuses. One poster, in particular, that I remember had a picture of an inmate holding onto the bars, and it said on the top 'So you want to change the world - Start here... apply to the Canadian Penitentiary Service,' and so on. I thought that's really a dramatic thing. In speaking to our recruits, as I'm sure most of you do as well, I am always impressed with their enthusiasm, their energy and their commitment. However, somewhere along the line something happens to some of them. After the first year, three years, five years or ten years, something happens to make them less committed, less enthusiastic than when they signed on. "Whatever happens is not an isolated thing. It's not being passed over for overtime or a late overtime cheque or a roster change. It seems to be something persistent which changes their attitudes toward their work. "Our challenge is to find what that persistent irritant is and deal with it, to shape our policies accordingly. "I don't know if the results of the staff commitment research are good or bad. I do know that the number of people who are 'uncommitted' is almost as high as the number of those who are 'committed,' and that, I don't think, is good. "The pollsters say that a large undecided vote is good because they can be shifted. Then I think we are in good shape because a full third of our staff can be motivated to change. "One of the interesting things: I was looking for some kind of correlation between this and some of the other behaviours of our staff and of our organization, and I just took a quick look at grievance statistics - and interestingly, the region with the highest level of overall commitment had the lowest number of grievances, and conversely, the region with the lowest commitment had the highest rate of grievances. Those relationships didn't bear out for the other three regions, but they do for the two extremes. "We have a challenge, and the challenge is to isolate those irritants, deal with them and shape our policies accordingly. I really appreciate this sort of research." |
