The Moon Is Not Bigger Than the Sun - Nor is your Manager bigger than your team!

Tonight, if the British sky obliges, around 91% of the Sun will disappear behind the Moon. In Glasgow it starts at 18:08, peaks just after 19:06, and is over by 20:00. It is the deepest eclipse these islands have seen since 1999, and we will not see a total one from the UK until 2090.

Here is the part worth sitting with.

The Sun is about four hundred times wider than the Moon. It is also about four hundred times further away. That coincidence is the only reason an eclipse works at all. The Moon does not block the Sun because it is bigger, or brighter, or more important. It blocks the Sun because it is closer.

I have thought about that a great deal over twenty years in social care.

A poor manager does not obscure a team because they are more capable than the people they lead. Very often they are less. They obscure the team because of where they are standing. Proximity, not magnitude. They sit between the staff and everything the staff might otherwise reach — the training, the development conversation, the idea that would have improved the service, the concern that needed escalating, the quiet competence of a care worker nobody above them has ever actually seen.

The light is still there. It is simply not getting through.

Ninety per cent, and nobody notices

Tonight's eclipse will not turn the UK dark. At 91% coverage the evening will look faintly strange — a thin, silvery quality to the light that you would probably miss if you had not been told to expect it. The human eye adapts so efficiently that we are poor judges of how much light we have lost.

That is the bit that should worry us.

I have walked into services running at a fraction of what they could be, where everybody had adjusted so gradually that nobody could see it any more. Staff who had stopped raising things because raising things achieved nothing. Good practice that had quietly narrowed to the minimum. A manager convinced the service was fine, and not lying — genuinely unable to perceive the difference, because the dimming happened by degrees.

An inspector arrives and sees the crescent that is still showing. Sometimes that crescent is enough to pass. It is almost never enough for the people living there.

What eclipses have that services do not

Eclipses are predictable to the second. We know when the light goes and we know when it returns.

Services do not work that way. There is no published table telling you that a team has been in shadow for fourteen months and will emerge on a Tuesday. Which is why it has to be looked for deliberately — through supervision that is actually supervision, through exit interviews read properly rather than filed, through asking staff what they have stopped bothering to suggest, and through someone from outside occasionally holding up an honest mirror. It is easier to measure a service's paperwork than its potential. The paperwork is not the thing that dimmed.

The other difference is more hopeful. An eclipse ends because the Moon keeps moving. In a service, the obstruction does not drift off by itself. Somebody has to decide to move it.

I have watched what happens when they do. The staff who were written off as disengaged turn out to have been managed into silence. The ones described as not ready for more turn out never to have been offered any. Within months you cannot recognise the place — not because anyone new arrived, but because what was already there stopped being blocked.

Nothing was created. Something was uncovered.

Tonight

If you are outside this evening, look west-northwest, and use proper eclipse glasses — the Sun sits low and remains dangerous to look at even at 91% covered. Stay out afterwards if you can; the Perseids peak in dark skies tonight, which is a rare double bill.

And if you manage a service, one question is worth carrying home with the eclipse glasses:

Who on my team is capable of far more than anyone currently sees — and what exactly is standing in the way?

If the honest answer is uncomfortable, that is not a reason to look away. The Sun does not lose anything during an eclipse. It just stops being visible for a while, to people standing in a particular place.

Mac Research and Consultancy Limited supports care providers across Scotland and England with compliance, quality assurance, registration and leadership development.

arlene@macresearchandconsultancy.co.uk · macresearchandconsultancy.co.uk