Thursday 19 April 2012

Welcome back from your Easter breaks, if you had them and thank you to those who were here keeping the ship afloat.

During my week off, between the rain, I was reading some of Dan Rockwell’s thoughts – he writes a blog under the pseudonym of Leadershipfreak. It’s excellent and thought provoking. I thought I would share some edited highlights with you because it really made me think about what I spend my time doing at work, particularly at a time when so many of us are working very hard.

When Working Hard isn’t Working

It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re working on the wrong things. Managers and leaders are the hardest working people I know. Working in your organisation is necessary but dangerous.

You work “in” when you do your business. Farmers milking cows, accountants accounting, preachers preaching, teachers teaching, and doctors doctoring are all working in their business. Working in is dangerous because it:

1. Captivates attention.
2. Consumes energy.
3. Distracts from a powerful concern – working on your business.

 This get’s you stuck - I know I sometimes feel very stuck.

 Your passion and ability to focus on getting jobs done blocks you from:

1. Creating or enhancing systems.
2. Defining long term objectives.
3. Identifying, leveraging, and enhancing the strengths on your team
4. Offloading present work so you can focus on the future.

Working IN prevents you from working ON. This is dangerous.

Getting things done works for the short-term – soon it drains – but, eventually it destroys you and your effectiveness. Constantly working in your business without working on it:

1. Defeats your innovative spirit.
2. Saps vitality
3. Restricts growth.
4. Limits your potential.

So we somehow need to breakthrough to working on:

Evaluate the use of your time. How much is spent working in rather than on? Breakthroughs materialize when you alter dead-end habits.

1.  Create a weekly “working on” appointment with yourself. Identify and take a next step.
2. Make small adjustments. You’ll never shift toward working on your business in onegiant leap.
3. Find new eyes. Discuss systems, strategies, and vision with experts outside your field.
4. Listen. Many leaders and managers owners have too many answers and too few questions.
5. Try something. Waiting for stunning success prevents progress.
6. Delegate more even if it takes longer at first.
7. Follow-up and follow-through. Frustrations inspire conversations regarding improvements but follow-through changes things. Perhaps some form of accountability would help?

 How can we as managers and leaders work on our business or organization?

 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

Thursday 5 April

Last week we took Cabinet and CLT through the detail of our Systems Thinking work. Some call this lean. Cabinet were very supportive of the approach, as they have been for the five years we’ve been using it, and the performance improvements seen in the increasing number of services that are now adopting it. We currently have 11 services undergoing their reviews. So far, we have trained over 180 people in the method to enable them to experiment and improve their services as systems. We are committed to this approach to continuous improvement and the number of staff trained will approach 300 by the end of the year.
Systems Thinking is all about designing services around our customers and communities. To do this we seek to understand the purpose of the system from the customer’s perspective. We then seek to understand the type and frequency of customer demand and the flow of work through our processes. We redesign this flow to enable us to do only that work that adds value to our customers purpose. We try and eliminate any waste in our work flow.

This got me thinking about the skills and knowledge that team leaders, managers and directors need to undertake such work.

Managers and leaders need to understand systems thinking. They must show-up in the work and ask these two questions:

• “Show me the measures you use to understand and improve the work?”

• “What help do you need from me to remove the causes of waste in the system?”

I wonder how many of us could answer these questions with definitive evidence and data?

This leads me to the question of how will we run our organisation in this manner?

For me, the new competencies for managers and leaders in the future are:

1. The ability to think in terms of systems and knowing how to lead systems

2. The ability to understand the variability of work in planning and problem solving

3. Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve; leading true learning and improvement

4. Understanding people and why they behave as they do

5. Understanding the interaction and interdependence between systems, variability, learning, and human behaviour; knowing how each affects the others

6. Giving vision, meaning, direction and focus to our work across the organisation

These competencies are all embedded in our new behaviour and values framework.

If this has made you curious and you haven’t attended one of the courses run by John Rogers, please apply to do so. It really is one of the most enlightening sessions you’ll ever experience.

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. I’m taking next week off on holiday so we’ll talk again in a week or so. Have a very happy Easter.

Carlton

Morning everybody and my apologies for not blogging for a couple of weeks. I had to take a bit of time off last week when my wife and youngest son decided on separate emergency admissions into the RUH at the same time! All fine now thank goodness.


This week has been busy and it was good to spend two full days at Monkton Park with Cabinet and meeting a lot of staff based there. It made me realise what a poor building County Hall is and how I’m looking forward to many of us moving into the new end of the building over the next six months or so. It will really help to break down some of the communication barriers that exist between teams because of the cellular design of the current building.

I met with three junior managers this week for separate coaching sessions; it is so important that we grow our next generation of senior managers and leaders for what is one of the toughest tasks around – leading people. We worked on the role of managers to lead the development of organisational vision, service strategy, operational management and tactical delivery – the four key elements to the role of management. I find this one of the most exciting parts of my job, and it was great to see one of our service directors this week sign up to the coaching course run by south west councils.

I have also spent some time this week with my finance colleagues developing the detail of how we will deliver our budget for the coming year 12-13 as well as starting to prepare for how we will develop an affordable budget for 13-14. This may sound early but I think fortune favours the prepared mind as Louis Pasteur once said.

This morning I’m meeting up with one of our councillors who wants to explore some innovative ideas that she has for her market town. It will be fun to work out ways to turn her ideas into reality quickly to enable her community to develop and grow with Wiltshire Council as an enabler.

Last meeting of the week is a Scrutiny Task Group review of the planning transformation programme. Always a feisty affair, but adds real value to our work in the council.

Then it’s a quick getaway to pick up my eldest son and his friends to celebrate his 17th birthday tonight (first driving lesson in the morning – I’m terrified!) and watch some F1 practice...

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 we’ll talk again in a week or so.


Carlton

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Morning all, I’ve been a little behind with my blog over the last week or so. No excuses, my apologies. Can’t believe it’s March already and spring is definitely here. I’ve even cleaned my bike and taken it out a few times to blow away those winter cobwebs. This will only end in tears at some point...

It was a big week last week with Council approving the budget. I just want to thank all of the finance teams and others who have been involved in this over the past six months or so. At some points it felt like it was never ending but in the end we have a robust budget that protects services for our communities and meets the saving that we needed to make in a thoughtful and considered way. Thanks and well done all.

I had the pleasure of visiting the MOD Porton Down facility last week with the Local Resilience Forum (LRF). The LRF are the group of public sector officers from many organisations that plan and rehearse for emergencies that might happen in our community. The visit was important to enable us to familiarise ourselves with what is a large site and also to gain an understanding of the type of work conducted there and the risks involved. It was fascinating. I hadn’t realised that we have a community of world class scientists and engineers – more than 2,000 in total – on our door step. Talking to colleagues from other branches of government, we were able to join up some of the objectives of the various organisations and explore new ways of strengthening the work that employs so many people in Wiltshire. A great day.

This week sees a return to more normal duties after the excitement of the budget last week. I’m visiting the economic development and spatial planning teams in Shurnhold on Thursday – pop along if you have a few minutes please – and then going on to Browfort to meet managers and staff in our weekly hub meeting. I also have one-to-one coaching sessions scheduled with three members of staff this week which is always fun and a real learning opportunity for me.

I’ve been picking up messages that some staff might lack the confidence to use our Lync software. Lync is a Microsoft product on most of our computer desk tops enabling us to stay in contact and communicate with colleagues in real time between offices and different sites without the need to use email, the telephone or more importantly travel. I’m using the system a lot myself and with practise it’s become second nature. I urge you all to experiment with the system and if necessary dedicate some time at your teams meetings for some informal training.

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 we’ll talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Friday 24 February

TGI Friday! I’m taking today off so this might be a short blog as I’m off to Wales in half an hour. I’m also still smarting from us losing last night's cricket T20 match against Pakistan too, but their bowlers were excellent, especially in the last overs.

Talking about cricket I spent most of yesterday at Somerset County Cricket ground with Chief Execs from across the South West (they offer South West Councils cheap meeting rooms). It was good to catch up with friends and colleagues, and needless to say there was lots of interest in our leadership model. We discussed some of the big issues facing local government in the south west, to agree how we would respond and lobby central government. Welfare reform to the benefits system is worrying everybody as we believe that in Wilshire it will remove around £10 million per year from the economy at a time when we need every penny to stimulate economic growth and jobs. Others are hit much worse and the impact on rural communities will be high. We also discussed the approach to inspection, particularly the peer review process being led by the Local Government Association (LGA). Our fear is that the service based approach will emphasise silos and non-corporate working within our organisations at a time when this is the last thing we should be doing. Having said that we are definitely in favour of the light-touch peer approach.

I spent all day Wednesday in Salisbury. It was good to catch up with the Customer Service teams in the morning and talk about ways that we can improve the service. These ideas all came from staff working in the front line and we have started working on these items immediately. It’s all about continuous improvement. After lunch I went to Bourne Hill to meet staff from the Planning, Technical Support, Conservation, Enforcement and the Building Control teams. Again it was great to hear their feedback on our recent planning transformation event and importantly put some faces to some names.

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. 199 followers as of this morning... will you be number 200?

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a week or so.

Carlton