14 June 2013

A busy week; I’m within a couple of pounds of 4 stone lost and now have 8 chords to my name on the guitar. Progress on all fronts...

Yesterday Carolyn, Maggie and I spent a full day together developing our strategic plans and thinking around the big challenges which we face over the next four years. The new council draft Business Plan will be published early next week to go to scrutiny later in the month and then on to Cabinet next month. This plan reflects the political priorities of our elected members and the findings from our strategic needs assessment – the underlying data and evidence about Wiltshire, it’s communities, residents and businesses and where we need to focus to deliver our vision of more resilient communities.

The other major element of the plan is that it highlights the size of the financial challenge ahead. We think that we will have to identify and deliver cost savings of £120m over the next four years – around £30m per year. This should be set within the context of our projected spend over the same period of £3.6 billion. Challenging but achievable in my opinion.

A prime area of focus over the next few months will be to realign our transformation programme to deliver the above. Key issues for me are how we ensure that every member of staff and every service is involved and also how we align our cultural and behaviour change to this. This is the biggest challenge I think we face – not financial, but thinking and behaving differently. More on this anon.

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 and talk again in a few days.

Carlton

Thursday 6 June 2013

I am back this week after a week off – only four days but it felt like much longer which is always good. And the sun was out every day but one which was a bonus. I bought myself a guitar as one of my regrets in life is not being able to play an instrument. So that’s about to change. A week into the adventure I can now play six chords. Some way to go but I have some lessons planned...


I was reflecting on leadership while I was away, as I tend to do (I know I should get out more) and thought I would share my summary of the key aspects with you. Leadership is going to play a vital role over the next four years in the public sector in general but particularly in Wiltshire. It’s worth remembering that leadership comes at every level in the organisation. The most successful organisations have leaders everywhere. So for me it’s about the following:

Key issues of performance and leadership in the individual:

1. the skills you bring to the role
2. your behaviour as you do the job

The Leadership continuum and key roles:

1. Leaders - "what should we be doing?"
2. Managers - "how should we do it?"
3. Administrators - "why we can't do it?" I’m only joking. Good admin is vital for success

Key influences of behaviour of people in the organisation:

1. What leaders do when things go wrong
2. What leaders pay attention to
3. What behaviour they role model

The role of the great leader:

1. Challenge the status quo
2. Create freedom for people to innovate and experiment
3. Recognise good performance and reward it
4. create a fraternity
5. Give meaningful purpose to work

Finally, to be a leader you need to have some followers. It’s always worth checking out who is following you and why. If you have no followers you’re not a leader. And leadership is not a popularity contest; if you want to lead you will be unpopular to some, but not to most. You have to be comfortable in yourself to live with this.

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 and talk again in a few days.

Carlton