Wednesday 31 August

Hi all, so here we are on the last day of August. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays and have returned safely. For those of you still to go, have fun.

For some reason I always have a slightly apprehensive feeling at the beginning of a new term. The holidays are over and I know we have to get our heads down to some serious work between now and Christmas. I thought that I would update you on where we are as a team and also some of the key events and tasks that we face over the autumn “term”.

Performance in the team is good. All of our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are where we would expect them to be with no surprises or areas falling short against the plan we had at the beginning of the year. Our budget status is also on target including the savings that we committed to as part of the 11-12 budget – some £4.2 m of savings. I’d like to thank you all for your hard work in achieving both of these elements of performance.

The transformation of ICT is also on track. As those of you in the service will know, we’re coming to the end of the post in-source redesign and restructure over the coming few weeks. This has been an unsettling time for some so it will be good to get back to some degree of certainty as we move forward together. The team are still delivering superior performance and have reduced expenditure by £2m this year. No mean achievement!

Our ambitious transformation programme is running at pace. The business cases for the first three campus (Salisbury, Corsham and Melksham) are being finalised for Cabinet approval later in the autumn; our systems thinking work now extends to at least eight major service areas and is identifying some big opportunities to do things better and with less cost; our ten year asset management plan outlining all our capital expenditure is under development to input into the budget process later this year; we have big staff engagement events planned for the November-January time frame where we want to get out to all 4,500 staff affected by the transformation programme to explain what’s happening, why and what impact the changes will have on our teams and staff; our “shaping the future” work is coming to the point where staff themselves have developed the values and behaviours they expect for all of us moving forward. This will underpin our work on culture development moving forward. Finally you will have seen the building work on County Hall progressing with speed. The first staff will move back into the new part of the building this time next year. These building works save is a significant amount of cost year on year by enabling more people to be located in the building which allows others buildings to be sold. Thanks to all those involved in what is one of the biggest local government transformation programmes in the UK.

Coming up over the next period we have a couple of significant events. Our next Team Day is on 26 September so please put this in the diary. It will be good to get the whole team together to talk about what we’re doing, how it’s going and the challenges we face over the next six months. The other big task of course is setting the 11-12 budget. My best estimate at the moment is that we as a team will need to find further savings of approximately £4.5m next year. This will be a challenge but I know we have the right people to achieve this.

Finally, please feel free to call me or email me or invite me to your team meetings if you wish to talk about any of this, or indeed anything else. I always welcome and appreciate the direct approach...

Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Friday 19 August

Hello all. Just to make you smile and think on a Friday afternoon I thought that I would share with you some of my favourite quotes. There are messages within these that I try to use every day as a person, manager and leader. I hope you enjoy them.

• If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe. Abraham Lincoln


• Everybody wants to talk, few want to think, and nobody wants to listen. Anonymous


• Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. Steve Jobs


• Madness is valid reasoning from flawed assumptions. John Locke


• The role of the leader is to inspire, enable and support - and then ensure they don't get in the way. Prateous


• In order to win, there should be no fear of losing. Anonymous


• Fortune favours the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur


• There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. Douglas McArthur


• All good things that exist are the fruits of originality. John Stuart Mill


• Surround yourself with good people, even if they are better than you. David Pretty (my team are certainly better than me!)


• It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin


• Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people need to be led. Ross Perot


• In times of rapid change, experience is your worst enemy. John Paul Getty


• Many organisations disregard the facts and act instead on belief, ideology and casual benchmarking. Jeffrey Pfeffer


• We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein


• Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. Peter Drucker
  

Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Friday 5 August 2011

Hi all - back from my holidays in Devon which were warm and sunny. Whilst laying on my sun bed and de-stressing I thought about those important behaviours that enable people to keep calm and avoid stressing out staff and alienating people. Be good to hear your views on how we do against these criteria:

1. Don't sweat your assets. If you pile tasks on the best staff and let weaker ones do less, star employees get irritated and quit, leaving you with a mediocre team.


2. If you value them, set them free. It is madness to appoint people then second-guess their every decision. Give staff autonomy or they will move to somebody who does.


3. Smooth running wheels still need oil (I'm still an engineer at heart). Don't spend all your time on problem staff. If you fail to support good people, they won't support you.


4. Don't tell tales. If somebody speaks to you in confidence, don't betray them.


5. Avoid muddying the waters. Give your staff a remit and let them deliver on it. Failing to brief properly leads to muddled projects and low morale.


6. If it works, don't fix it. Be careful before you change a system. You need a very good reason to justify altering a process everyone understands.

Paul Collyer would be proud of these - they're based on the Health and Safety Executive's six stress risk factors.

Talk again in a week or so. If you're off on your hols, have a great time and keep safe.

Carlton