Here we are on Friday again and this week has been excellent. It’s always good to finish the week on a high.

The DTR team met for half a day yesterday to define how we will balance our budget next year and deliver the £5million reduction that we need to contribute to the overall corporate position and investment in front line services. We now have a plan for how we will achieve this and the service directors and I are working on the implications for our customers, communities, the business, politicians and of course our reputation. I am so pleased that we have retained our services in house and are able to do this – redirecting spend into our priorities and front line services. If we had contracted these services out, or if we were in a shared service arrangement, then these savings at these levels would be unavailable to our communities and the rest of the business.

I chaired the Shaping the Future Board earlier in the week where we reviewed the work on our new values and behaviours. This is a great piece of work and will help us to change the culture of the organisation over time in line with the aspirations described in our Business Plan. There has been a huge amount of staff engagement in developing this and I thank you all for getting involved and for setting out the behaviours that will help make Wiltshire Council a really great place to work in. This will be rolled out and communicated progressively through the autumn but will also feature as part of our team away day on Monday.

I spent some time coaching and mentoring two young managers in the team this week. I love this aspect of my job – developing others, and frankly it is the most important part of any senior leaders role. Growing managers and leaders is something that great organisations do and I would encourage others to make the time to do this. The return on investment is massive!

Finally, we have our autumn team day on Monday in Devizes. This is a chance for the whole team to get together; to review where we are, what’s happening, to celebrate successes and talk about our objectives for the next six months. Always enjoyable and challenging, I look forward to seeing you all on Monday. Sharpen your pencils for those tricky questions...

For daily updates, comment and opinion on all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter, @drcarltonbrand.

Have a good weekend and speak again next week.
Carlton

16 September 2011

Well who was it that said a week is a long time in politics – Harold Wilson I think. He was right! It’s been a busy couple of weeks in Wiltshire since we last spoke.

We’ve been working hard on preparing the key elements of next year’s budget – Michael is leading this and has set out clearly what is expected from each service area in terms of savings next year. The council’s 4-year Financial Plan clearly sets out the need for us to save £36 million next year. For Resources and Transformation this means we’re now generating ideas and proposals to evaluate over the next few weeks to enable us to balance our budget for 2012-13. More detail on this over the next few weeks.

I attended the Resources Select Committee yesterday, at Monkton Park, where they were scrutinising the Transformation Programme. I presented a paper and current status of our work which then led to an hour of questions and answers about the detail. Always a robust affair, it was great as it challenged our thinking and will help in developing how we can better achieve our objectives.

Whilst at Monkton Park yesterday, I visited the Elections team. We’re in the middle of the annual canvass at the moment so the whole team were very busy. I also has a quick look at the proposed new parliamentary boundaries. Some big changes in Wiltshire which could move from 5 constituencies to 4.5 – sharing one with North Dorset. Controversial stuff. All comments have to be back to the Electoral Commission by early December.

CLT has met a number of times over the last week. The team is working very well together and driving the organisation forward to deliver the political priorities, policies and actions determined by our elected members in the business Plan. The Extended Leadership Team – including all the Service Directors – met this week also to ensure we were all focused on delivering the objectives that we have agreed and we all agreed that whilst it may be unsettling for some as the organisation decides on its future leadership model, it is business as usual. The Leader of the Council, Jane Scott also attended this session and led a full discussion about our priorities and work over the next few weeks and months and reiterated the need now to deliver the plans we have in place . This was very well received by all attendees.

I’ve got the “Twitter bug”. If you would like more regular blog updates, usually daily and in only 140 characters, you can now follow me on Twitter - @drcarltonbrand. How’s that for good value!

Talk again in a week or so...

Carlton

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