I’m off on my holidays in a couple of days time so this will be my last blog for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to a week at home with the boys, fishing and watching / playing cricket and then we’re jet-setting off to Devon for a week. As I lay on my sun bed in the drizzle, I often like to reflect on the principles by which I strive to live, work, manage and lead, so I thought I’d share these with you today. These are originally from Tony Schwartz, slightly adapted by me and I find them a great guide, especially when things get tough.
1. Always challenge certainty, especially your own. When you think you're undeniably right, ask yourself "What might I be missing here?" If we could truly work it all out, what else would there be left to do?
2. Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction. Getting there requires practicing deliberately, delaying gratification, and forever challenging your current comfort zone.
3. Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you're feeling. Think of the best boss you ever had. How did he or she make you feel? That's the way you want to make others feel.
4. When in doubt, ask yourself, "How would I behave here at my best?" We know instinctively what it means to do the right thing, even when we're inclined to do the opposite. If you find it impossible, in a challenging moment, to envision how you'd behave at your best, try imagining how someone you admire would respond.
5. If you do what you love, the money may or may not follow, but you'll love what you do. It's magical thinking to assume you'll be rewarded with riches for following your heart. What it will give you is a richer life. If material riches don't follow, and you decide they're important, there's always time for Plan B.
6. You need less than you think you do. All your life, you've been led to believe that more is better, and that whatever you have isn't enough. It's a prescription for disappointment. Instead ask yourself this: How much of what you already have truly adds value in your life? What could you do without?
7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn't work. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.
8. Meaning isn't something you discover, it's something you create, one step at a time. Meaning is derived from finding a way to express your unique skills and passion in the service of something larger than yourself. Figuring out how best to contribute is a lifelong challenge, reborn every day.
9. You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.
10. When in doubt, take responsibility. It's called being an adult.
Speak again in a couple of weeks.
Carlton
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Friday, 1 July 2011
Thursday 30 June 2011
It’s been a week of travelling around the county for me meeting teams in the department. On Tuesday I was in Salisbury – Milford Street with the customer services team and then Bourne Hill with the registrars and a number of other teams. Today was Shurnhold with the transformation and rroperty teams and then over to the East Wing with the payroll team in shared services. I always enjoy these opportunities to talk with staff face to face about the challenges we face and how we’re going to meet them. I always learn something new about how we can improve the effectiveness of our business.
The Salisbury team had numerous ideas for improving things in the face to face contact centre. Ideas about capacity, queuing, improvements to the Civica payment systems as well as ideas around improving communications internally with other services. I’ve shared these with my management team and we’ll work on these together. I was struck with the positive “can do” attitude of everybody I met. Thank you for this.
At Shurnhold it was good to see the police integrated with the transformation team. We are working closely together to develop our campus and hub proposals to include facilities to share between both organisations. More on this anon...
The payroll team wanted to know more about the new transformation and resources team, and we worked together to explore some of the business challenges ahead that we face, particularly from a shared services payroll perspective. We then discussed some of the issues emerging from the staff survey and planned how we might engage staff to address these together.
If you would like me to visit your team for chat about anything then please do get in touch and I’ll come along.
Thanks for reading and speak again soon.
Carlton
The Salisbury team had numerous ideas for improving things in the face to face contact centre. Ideas about capacity, queuing, improvements to the Civica payment systems as well as ideas around improving communications internally with other services. I’ve shared these with my management team and we’ll work on these together. I was struck with the positive “can do” attitude of everybody I met. Thank you for this.
At Shurnhold it was good to see the police integrated with the transformation team. We are working closely together to develop our campus and hub proposals to include facilities to share between both organisations. More on this anon...
The payroll team wanted to know more about the new transformation and resources team, and we worked together to explore some of the business challenges ahead that we face, particularly from a shared services payroll perspective. We then discussed some of the issues emerging from the staff survey and planned how we might engage staff to address these together.
If you would like me to visit your team for chat about anything then please do get in touch and I’ll come along.
Thanks for reading and speak again soon.
Carlton
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
14 June 2011
I want to talk about work today – or more specifically how much of it we have to do in our teams. We’re a high performing team – because of all of you – and as with all high performing teams we can always analyse our current situation and learn together to improve things.
Our working lives in local government generally and specifically for us at Wiltshire Council are tough for all at the moment. We have less people in our teams and the work to be done remains largely the same. This means fewer people are having to work harder to meet our business objectives. The result of this is that we’re getting tired and we’re struggling sometimes to meet our customers' needs. I want to acknowledge that this is a fact of life – right across the public sector – and ask you to talk about this in your teams. Be open, acknowledge this and don’t hide or ignore it.
Whilst we work at this level of intensity, we will make the occasional mistake. I would ask you all to tell us when it goes wrong and we’ll support you to address the issue and ensure we minimise it happening again.
Unfortunately this trend is going to continue. The speed of change in the public sector is a reality and I think it will, and needs to increase. We have to find new and innovative ways of delivering increased value for our customers in more cost-effective ways. The way to thrive (and survive) in this new world of change is to embrace it and seek to influence it by engaging with it and driving it ourselves. This means all of us, not just managers and leaders.
The first step on this journey is to be honest about how work is at the moment; how we feel about it and start to discuss what we might do to make it work better for all of us. We need your ideas to improve things; what could we do better? What could we stop doing because it adds little or no value? How might we do something differently to achieve the objectives we seek?. It would be good at this point to also reflect on the results of the staff survey. What actions do we need to put in place in response to the survey to make our work better for our staff and therefore more effective for our customers? I encourage you to be bold and innovative here – let your imaginations run...
Please discuss these questions with your colleagues; take them into your team meetings and come up with a list of ten things, however small, that would improve the way your work works for you and your customers.
Please share these ideas with me and your Service Directors so that we can focus on helping to implement them quickly. That way we’ll thrive as a team...
Thanks for reading.
Carlton
Our working lives in local government generally and specifically for us at Wiltshire Council are tough for all at the moment. We have less people in our teams and the work to be done remains largely the same. This means fewer people are having to work harder to meet our business objectives. The result of this is that we’re getting tired and we’re struggling sometimes to meet our customers' needs. I want to acknowledge that this is a fact of life – right across the public sector – and ask you to talk about this in your teams. Be open, acknowledge this and don’t hide or ignore it.
Whilst we work at this level of intensity, we will make the occasional mistake. I would ask you all to tell us when it goes wrong and we’ll support you to address the issue and ensure we minimise it happening again.
Unfortunately this trend is going to continue. The speed of change in the public sector is a reality and I think it will, and needs to increase. We have to find new and innovative ways of delivering increased value for our customers in more cost-effective ways. The way to thrive (and survive) in this new world of change is to embrace it and seek to influence it by engaging with it and driving it ourselves. This means all of us, not just managers and leaders.
The first step on this journey is to be honest about how work is at the moment; how we feel about it and start to discuss what we might do to make it work better for all of us. We need your ideas to improve things; what could we do better? What could we stop doing because it adds little or no value? How might we do something differently to achieve the objectives we seek?. It would be good at this point to also reflect on the results of the staff survey. What actions do we need to put in place in response to the survey to make our work better for our staff and therefore more effective for our customers? I encourage you to be bold and innovative here – let your imaginations run...
Please discuss these questions with your colleagues; take them into your team meetings and come up with a list of ten things, however small, that would improve the way your work works for you and your customers.
Please share these ideas with me and your Service Directors so that we can focus on helping to implement them quickly. That way we’ll thrive as a team...
Thanks for reading.
Carlton
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Good morning everybody on this bright and sunny day. I’m looking forward to going to see the first day of the second test against Sri Lanka tomorrow at Lords, although I haven’t quite recovered from our victory on Monday at Cardiff. Exciting times for us cricket lovers...
I visited Google at their central London Office on Tuesday. I wanted so see some of their latest office applications in practice and discuss the opportunities that technology like this could offer us in Wiltshire. The latest generation of email and applications such as spreadsheets and word processors can all be based on the web which means we don’t have to pay for expensive software on every personal computer. The opportunities for us are huge. If we adopted such technology, we could dramatically reduce the costs of ICT provision to the organisation – freeing up money for use on other front line priorities in the Business Plan. Watch this space...
Today I met with the managers of our new team – Transformation & Resources at our monthly Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) Meeting. I took the team through the set up and management planning arrangements for the new team. We covered the following areas for the new team: purpose, vision, objectives, people, structure, governance, budget, methods and models and communications. I have asked that managers to share this information with you and discuss it in your team meetings. This is important because I want all our staff to have the opportunity to shape this moving forward. If you want me to come along to your team meetings to share this with you then please just ask.
The biggest challenge we face as a new team is to explore the alternative delivery models that we might pursue in the future. This is more complex than the traditional in-house or out-source alternatives. The government are keen that we look at other models based around social enterprise principles such as mutual’s (for example, the John Lewis Partnership which is not owned by shareholders, but is owned by its employees). We will be getting into these and other options over the coming months to evaluate the potential benefits or otherwise for the citizens of Wiltshire.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
I visited Google at their central London Office on Tuesday. I wanted so see some of their latest office applications in practice and discuss the opportunities that technology like this could offer us in Wiltshire. The latest generation of email and applications such as spreadsheets and word processors can all be based on the web which means we don’t have to pay for expensive software on every personal computer. The opportunities for us are huge. If we adopted such technology, we could dramatically reduce the costs of ICT provision to the organisation – freeing up money for use on other front line priorities in the Business Plan. Watch this space...
Today I met with the managers of our new team – Transformation & Resources at our monthly Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) Meeting. I took the team through the set up and management planning arrangements for the new team. We covered the following areas for the new team: purpose, vision, objectives, people, structure, governance, budget, methods and models and communications. I have asked that managers to share this information with you and discuss it in your team meetings. This is important because I want all our staff to have the opportunity to shape this moving forward. If you want me to come along to your team meetings to share this with you then please just ask.
The biggest challenge we face as a new team is to explore the alternative delivery models that we might pursue in the future. This is more complex than the traditional in-house or out-source alternatives. The government are keen that we look at other models based around social enterprise principles such as mutual’s (for example, the John Lewis Partnership which is not owned by shareholders, but is owned by its employees). We will be getting into these and other options over the coming months to evaluate the potential benefits or otherwise for the citizens of Wiltshire.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
Friday, 20 May 2011
Friday 20 May 2011
I hope you will have seen the communication on the Electric Wire today outlining some changes of roles and responsibilities of senior management. These are designed to ensure we maximise delivery of our ambitious Business Plan over the next two years. The key changes are as follows:
• The two statutory officers, legal and finance (incl. procurement) together with their teams are moving from resources to work to the chief executive. This creates capacity for:
• A new team leading on all corporate programmes and transformation, specifically our work on systems thinking and Campuses And Operational Development (CAOD), all asset management and technology. The new team, called transformation and resources comes into effect immediately. It will have three service directors: business services (shared services, customer services, ICT and property); HR & OD; and transformation (programmes, systems thinking, CAOD, asset management, technology)
• Housing will transfer to community services to maximise the opportunities and synergies with adult care
• Performance will be combined with policy and partnerships to ensure we integrate these roles and will move to Carolyn Godfrey.
These changes are important and will ensure we are focused on delivering the key elements of the Business Plan. Business transformation through people, systems and organisation is my passion, so these changes are very exciting for me personally. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this agenda over the coming years.
The new leadership team has already had a number of planning sessions with our Cabinet and portfolio holders to agree the set up of the new team, objectives, and how we will run the programmes and activities. Service directors will share these plans with you all over the coming weeks. The important aspect to communicate now is that we shall run a single, co-ordinated transformation programme. This will ensure all activity is joined up and focused on the key political objectives in the Business Plan.
The new programme office will have a key role. We have well over 300 projects and programmes underway across the organisation at present and these need to be brought together in a coherent way to ensure we maximise success, minimise risk and ensure a return on our investment. This is an exciting time for the authority as we strive to improve outcomes for customers across the organisation. A co-ordinated programme will enable us to achieve this in a way which reduces duplication and maximises outcomes.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
• The two statutory officers, legal and finance (incl. procurement) together with their teams are moving from resources to work to the chief executive. This creates capacity for:
• A new team leading on all corporate programmes and transformation, specifically our work on systems thinking and Campuses And Operational Development (CAOD), all asset management and technology. The new team, called transformation and resources comes into effect immediately. It will have three service directors: business services (shared services, customer services, ICT and property); HR & OD; and transformation (programmes, systems thinking, CAOD, asset management, technology)
• Housing will transfer to community services to maximise the opportunities and synergies with adult care
• Performance will be combined with policy and partnerships to ensure we integrate these roles and will move to Carolyn Godfrey.
These changes are important and will ensure we are focused on delivering the key elements of the Business Plan. Business transformation through people, systems and organisation is my passion, so these changes are very exciting for me personally. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this agenda over the coming years.
The new leadership team has already had a number of planning sessions with our Cabinet and portfolio holders to agree the set up of the new team, objectives, and how we will run the programmes and activities. Service directors will share these plans with you all over the coming weeks. The important aspect to communicate now is that we shall run a single, co-ordinated transformation programme. This will ensure all activity is joined up and focused on the key political objectives in the Business Plan.
The new programme office will have a key role. We have well over 300 projects and programmes underway across the organisation at present and these need to be brought together in a coherent way to ensure we maximise success, minimise risk and ensure a return on our investment. This is an exciting time for the authority as we strive to improve outcomes for customers across the organisation. A co-ordinated programme will enable us to achieve this in a way which reduces duplication and maximises outcomes.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
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