Tuesday 24 July 2012

The holidays are nearly here for most of us and thank goodness the sun is out. I got very sun burned on Sunday at Castle Combe watching some terrific saloon car racing so be warned – take your sun cream with you!

Today I shall be in Monkton Park all day for a series of meetings with members. Cabinet is up first where they will take a major decision regarding which supplier provides our highways consultancy service for the next five years. This is the team that do the engineering design and programme development of all our highway related activity and is a contract worth around £4m per year.

Other decisions relate to the major incident plan – our emergency plan should anything big happen anywhere in the county requiring a major response from the public sector and the annual governance statement, our statement of the major issues and risks affecting the organisation over the last and next year.

This afternoon we have a meeting of the Cabinet Capital Assets Committee – the group that decide and approve where our capital funding will be spent to secure the objectives of the council. We have an important paper summarising the achievements so far versus our plan for the Transformation Programme. It’s well worth a read and I’m very proud of what we have all achieved over the past four years.

Speaking about transformation I recognise that many of us are moving office over the next few months and will be starting to work flexibly more often. We are doing this to save significant revenue costs – the money that we free up is being used to invest in services for children, adults and other priorities across the county. This can be a worrying time for all of us and I am reminded of the following quote:

“Change is not an event to be managed but a psychological transition to be led”.

I have no idea who originally said this but it’s important to me nevertheless. The role of managers at a time like this is to lead people on the journey, aware of the transition to be made. Helping, encouraging, understanding, questioning and above all supporting staff. This is also the way we achieve the cultural change that we want.

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

Thanks for reading. Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Thursday 12 July 2012

This week has been full on for two days of Olympic celebration in and around Salisbury. The torch came back into the county on Wednesday, visiting Ludgershall, Tidworth and Amesbury amongst others and entering Hudson’s field, Salisbury last night where the Olympic cauldron was lit in front of 30,000 people. It was a long day for the 500 plus staff involved in making this event such a huge success, starting at 7am in the morning with a business breakfast for over 200 representatives from businesses across the county. We had some great live music all day and many other performances from communities across the county. The firework finale was breath taking.

This morning, Thursday, I was up at 3am with Jane Scott to attend an event at Stonehenge where Michael Johnson, Olympic 400m Gold Medallist and world record holder showed the Olympic torch and flame to around 80 journalists from the worlds press and TV. These iconic pictures went round the world at 5.07 when the sun came up and lit the stones, Michael and the torch. I took the photos below to share with you. It felt like a real moment in history!

We then attended the Cathedral for the official start of the torch journey today, moving on to Wilton, Barford St Martin, Fovant and then Ludwell where it left Wiltshire for the very last time. It was sad to see it go.
I would like to thank all our wonderful staff who put so much effort into making these events such a success. I had so much feedback from excited residents, visitors and businesses over the last few days, and all of them pointed out how great our team are. They’re so right! I know that many staff had to continue to deliver our important services during these events, and couldn’t be directly involved. I thank you all too for ensuring that we could deliver together as a single team.
For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.
Thanks for reading. Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton