This post is a personal reflection on organizational culture and leadership in the developmental services sector and informed by person centred practice and Social Role Valorization principles.
We gather people around tables we did not build for lives we do not own. The least we owe them is to show up together.
There is a person at the centre of everything we do. They are not a file. Not a funding envelope. Not a strategic priority line. A person – with a name, a history, a set of people they love and things which frighten them, and reasonable expectations that the people paid to support them will be there for them.
Their expectations should be reason enough for unity. And yet, sometimes, in developmental supports as in so many other human services, division finds its way in. Teams fracture and well-intentioned goals fall short. Funders compete for recognition. Advocates argue methodology. Families are left to navigate a maze of egos, silos, and competing loyalties while their loved ones wait on the sidelines. We all need to do better if we are to avoid division. Not because unity is easier. It is not. But because division has a cost and the person at the centre of the plan is the person who pays it.
Division rarely announces itself. It arrives quietly. It does not wear a name tag. It does not identify itself as dysfunction. It is subtler than that – and by default – more corrosive. It looks like a planning table where the family feels outnumbered and outvoiced and the person who is the focus is reduced to a topic. It looks like staff who have stopped believing leadership is paying attention. It looks like an organization with excellent values on the walls but mediocre ones in the hallway.
Division is competitive scarcity thinking – the belief there is not enough recognition, not enough resources, not enough credit to go around, so we better hold ours tight. It produces an organization where people win and the mission loses.
Unity is not harmony for its own sake. It is not the flattening of disagreement or the performance of consensus. Genuine unity in developmental services requires something much harder: it requires everyone in the room to agree at least, that the person we are here for matters more than any of us. This agreement can change everything downstream. It means when two people disagree about approaches, they resolve it in a way that does not leave anyone supported in the gap between them. It means when one team member raises legitimate concerns leadership listens because fractured trust dilutes the experience of people supported.
The supported person can feel organizational tension. They may not be able to name it, but they can absorb it in disrupted routines, staff and leadership anxiety, and in plans falling apart.
At Montage you will soon hear and learn about Social Role Valorization (SRV). It asks us to think seriously about what it means to hold a valued role in society and about what conditions make this possible or impossible. One of the most underappreciated conditions for SRV to transition from belief in the concept to implementation is this: people with developmental disabilities need the humans in their lives to be functioning,coordinated, and purpose aligned.
An organization at odds with itself cannot produce valued experiences for the people it supports. It can produce internal infrastructures intended to stand by people. It can produce compliance. But the texture of a life, the relationships, the belonging, and the contribution required of the people around the table are genuinely oriented toward the same thing.
Division is not merely an organizational inconvenience from the SRV lens; it is a direct threat to the quality and continuity of social roles for the people we support when networks splinter or roles collapse. When agencies compete instead of collaborating, community integration suffers. Once internal culture fractures, staff turnover rises and with it the relational continuity making any of this meaningful.
For those in direct support or leadership roles in developmental services, unity is something that cannot be delegated – you are either modelling it, or you are eroding it; there is no neutral ground. It means holding your own ego accountable. Wins must not come at the expense of a colleague even when winning looks efficient in the short term. It means naming and calling out division when you see it in meetings and memos, in the hallway or when conversations shift when someone walks in. And it means building practices making unity the path of least resistance rather than the path of most virtue. It means being honest when unity has broken down.
An organization drifting into competition and fragmentation does not heal through a team-building afternoon; it heals through sustained consistent and sometimes uncomfortable untitled leadership attention through accountability that is clear and care that is genuine.
Why is unity worthy of defending or feeling discomfort when division must be confronted and of showing up? Because the alternative is a vocation that gradually forgets why it exists. Someone decided at some point that people with developmental disabilities deserve a good life not warehousing, not charity, not the margins. A good life built with them and surrounded by people who know their name and want to be in a supportive relationship with them. This aspiration requires organizations that have earned the privilege of having people who want to be part of them. Belonging needs teams trusting each other and it requires people who believe in something beyond their own survival.
In a word unity – not as a slogan but as daily discipline.
We gather people around tables we did not build for lives we do not own. The very least we owe them is that we show up together. This is what we shall always do at Montage.