Observing practice leadership in intellectual and developmental disability services.
A five-minute observation checklist reliably spots managers who create better active-support homes for people with IDD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a short checklist that watches how front-line managers lead practice in disability homes.
Trained observers shadowed managers and scored things like how often they gave staff feedback.
The tool was tested in real homes to see if different raters gave the same score and if high scores lined up with better support for residents.
What they found
The checklist showed solid agreement between raters and good internal consistency.
Homes rated high on the tool also delivered stronger active support, meaning residents got more help to take part in daily tasks.
How this fits with other research
McGonigle et al. (2014) first showed that practice leadership matters, but only when overall management is also strong. The new 2015 paper gives us the actual ruler to measure that leadership.
Bould et al. (2019) later used the same ruler in a big multi-site study and found that strong practice leadership plus trained staff are the two biggest drivers of better support quality over time.
Boudreau et al. (2015) validated a quality-of-life tool for the same population the same year, showing the field is building reliable measures on both client and staff sides.
Why it matters
You now have a quick, free checklist to see if your front-line managers are leading practice or just doing paperwork. Use it during supervisory visits; low scores point to where extra coaching can lift staff performance and, in turn, resident engagement.
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Join Free →Pick one house, shadow the manager for 30 minutes, and score the practice-leadership items; share the results and one action step at the next staff huddle.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Improving staff performance is an issue in services for people with intellectual disability. Practice leadership, where the front line leader of a staff team focuses on service user outcomes in everything they do and provides coaching, modeling, supervision and organisation to the team, has been identified as important in improving staff performance. To date this finding is based only on self-report measures. METHODS: This paper describes and tests an observational measure of practice leadership based on an interview with the front-line manager, a review of paperwork and observations in 58 disability services in Australia. RESULTS: The measure showed good internal consistency and acceptable inter-rater reliability. Practice leadership was associated with staff practice and outcomes for service users. The observed measure of practice leadership appears to be a useful tool for assessing whether leadership within a service promotes enabling and empowering support by staff. It was found to discriminate higher and lower performing services in terms of active support. CONCLUSIONS: The measure had good reliability and validity although some further testing is required to give a complete picture of the possible uses and reliability of the measure. The measure is potentially useful in contexts of both research and service development. The confirmation of previous findings from self-report measures that practice leadership is related to the quality of staff practice and outcomes for service users has implications for policy and practice in terms of the training of managers and structures for organisational management.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2015 · doi:10.1111/jir.12208