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