Thursday 12 January 2012

Week two and it’s already getting very busy. Which actually is a good thing for me personally I think, now that I‘ve had a rest over the holiday period.

Yesterday I met with 120 managers from across the teams for whom I have line management responsibility. We did some work together on our priorities and objectives for 2012 as well as talking about communication within and across the teams. This is a priority for me. We also talked about the role of managers and leaders and my expectations related to this. I am a great believer that stock can be managed, but people need to be led. Here are my “must dos” for myself and other managers:

• One Council, one team (win-win)
• We balance where we spend our time; task – team – individual (it’s 40-40-20 for me)
• We communicate well (Face to face, social media, all the methods)
• We’re visible
• No surprises
• We always meet our budget (we sort our pressures)
• Staff, Communities and Customers are our focus
• Innovation, new ideas, take some risks (have some fun)
• Help and support each other
• Everybody has an appraisal. That means everybody.
• We run this organisation like it was our name above the door
• Management is a profession – we need to treat it as such

Also yesterday, we held our first performance – budget – risk meeting with the Cabinet members for my services. We reviewed our balanced score card of key performance indicators and our budget position. We plan to do this every six weeks or so throughout the year. This will be very important as we’re a group of services totalling well over £100 million in expenditure linked to some key priorities for members and our communities across the county. We’ll need to ensure we stay on track to deliver.

I chaired my first meeting of group leaders last night – the leaders of all the political groups in the council. This was a great experience and something I have been looking forward to for some time. There were some knotty constitutional issues on the agenda as well as some key policy items too. It was good to see so much consensus and a focus on what’s best for the people who live, work and visit our county.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again next week.

Carlton