Preaching to the choir blog series

Preaching to the choir: reflections on key leadership skills for local authority chief executives – part 3: courage

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Catherine Staite

Leadership is not a sprint – it’s a marathon. You are in it for the long haul and that is why courage is so important.

Maya Angelou argued that courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently and that is certainly evident in the role of chief executive. Not only do you need to keep yourself going through challenging times, you also need to be able to demonstrate courage to your staff and members. If you falter, so will they.

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Don’t make the mistake, though, of thinking that you have to go it alone. True, it can be lonely at the top and you can sometimes feel that you should keep your doubts, fears and frustrations to yourself. That’s a big mistake – and so many leaders make it. You are only human – very clever human, but human nonetheless.

Not only do you need support, you also need someone to tell you when you are wrong. If you isolate yourself in your leadership castle, you could be very wrong without knowing it. There’s a saying that ‘a lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client’ and that is just as true of chief executives who only take their own advice. You need a critical friend you can turn to, someone who will help you focus, learn from your mistakes and laugh about the sometimes crazy world that you inhabit.

Some chief executives have really strong relationships with their Leaders and each can be a good critical friend to the other. For others, their Leader is the source of many of their troubles. They definitely need to go elsewhere for support.

You need all your energy to be a strong and courageous leader, so don’t waste energy on what you can’t change. Do let go of the past. Only look back to learn from your mistakes, not to wallow in nostalgia for a misremembered past. Times may seem particularly hard –but then they always do when you are living through them. As Heraclitus said, the only thing that is constant is change. I observe the very different ways that chief executives respond to change, from seeing it as a threat to greeting it as an opportunity. The best at using the prevailing challenges of austerity to make the sort of bold changes that would never have been possible in times of plety.

Focus on building a better future for your Council and the people you all serve. To do that you should keep searching for better ways of doing things. Support your staff to do that now and they’ll carry on doing it when you are no longer there. The more talent you can develop in others, the more support you can draw on now and the better the legacy of your leadership.

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Catherine Staite
Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Preaching to the choir: reflections on key leadership skills for local authority chief executives – part 2: charm

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Catherine Staite

If Brian Tracy and Ron Arden are right when they say the deepest craving of human nature is the need to feel valued and valuable. The secret of charm is therefore simple: make others feel important – then charm must be a crucial attribute for leaders.

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Charm is shorthand for a sophisticated set of skills which enable you to make new connections and solve old problems. Charm is about much more than being nice in a superficial way – otherwise known as ‘smarm’. If you don’t have real charm then just be gruff and honest. Everyone will understand. Smarm, on the other hand, will simply breed distrust.

The truly charming have notable skills. They are interested in others. They pay them real attention and give them positive regard – as opposed to the barely controlled irritation demonstrated by some powerful people in their dealings with underlings. Even if they attempt to catch you with a bright idea when you are en route to the toilet, don’t snap – suggest they catch you on the way back, when you can give them your full attention. You need all the bright ideas you can get.

Charming leaders also know how to listen, not just to what the people you lead are saying but what they perhaps feel they can’t say to you. A leader who doesn’t listen won’t have access to all the facts, no-one will tell them the unvarnished truth and they won’t hear when people are trying to tell them they may just be wrong. The failure to listen renders leaders about as effective – and as potentially dangerous – as a blindfolded driver. You may have had experience of a leader who doesn’t listen. Remember how awful that was and don’t case that level of distress to your staff.

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Charming leaders seek to bring people together and that has never been more important for local government. Albert Camus observed that charm is a way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without ever having asked a clear question. You need a lot of people to say ‘yes’ to a lot of things they may not necessarily like if you are going to effect real change.

There is so much good work going on around collaboration for the benefit of the people we all serve but there are still so many terrible instances of people in senior positions who perpetuate old feuds and personalize organizational battles, to the point where there is no way out for anyone. A history of corrosive, destructive pettiness endlessly repeats itself.

I am sometimes obliged to listen to a range of grievances going to back to 1974 and it’s no fun. The petty disputes I observe range from being mere energy vampires to the evidence of utter moral failure. Those disputes are about the past and you have to get beyond them – and encourage your members to do the same. You are leading in the present to build a better future and you’ll need all your energy and charm to do that. That behavior will shape your organizational culture and ripple through external relationships to the point where no-one can articulate or even want to remember why this country doesn’t co-operate with that district or vice versa. That will have an impact across your area and beyond – so your charm is a force for real good.

It’s amazing how pervasive and powerful an influence the chief executive and top team have on the culture of their council. When the people I pass in your corridors are smiling – in spite of all the challenges – I know their leaders have charm and their councils will survive and thrive.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Preaching to the choir: reflections on key leadership skills for local authority chief executives – part 1: creativity

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Catherine Staite

I have called this blog series ‘preaching to the choir’ as it is dedicated to local authority chief executives and they already know a great deal about leadership. They wouldn’t survive and thrive in their posts if they didn’t.

They already know that heroic leadership is only useful in the case of fire and flood and that leadership of organisations in giving way to leadership of whole systems – which is a whole lot harder. Instead, I’d like to focus on three aspects of leadership which are talked about less often but are absolutely crucial to effective and sustainable leadership, in complex systems and in difficult times. They are: creativity, charm and courage.

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So what is creativity and why do leaders need it so much?

We hear a great deal about the need for change and innovation – which implies creativity. However, so much which is described as innovation is nothing of the sort. Adam Smith introduced us to lean thinking in The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The Hanseatic League demonstrated the benefits of collaboration and shared services in the 17th century. We could and should learn from the past, but too often old ideas are re-labelled and sold on as new, not as a coherent element of a new way of solving problems but as a ‘one size fits all’, ‘but this and all will be well’, single focus solution.

So if creativity isn’t just about endlessly recycling the ideas of previous eras, what is it? Steve Jobs said creativity is just connecting things. How simple, and how true.

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We are subject to constant but superficial change. The ink hasn’t dried on one paradigm before it’s shifted. But we’re in a time of evolution not revolution, no matter how apocalyptic the environment feels at times. Not withstanding the 24/7 networked digital revolution we all still meet in rooms – not cyberspace. Joseph Chamberlain could come back from the dead and find his way round Birmingham City Council. Not only is the décor much as he left it, members and officers are focusing on the successor problems to those that were the focus of his attention. Both he and they are attempting to achieve the same outcomes – better lives for the people of Birmingham.

We really need creativity – not to create a new universe but to unstick the current one. In mental health services in the 1990s we were innovating to create an integrated care system, including diverting mentally disordered offenders from inappropriate custody. The evidence was clear. Early diversion from the criminal justice system and multi-disciplinary support wrapped around the person saved a lot of money for services and a lot of damage for people with severe mental health problems who committed minor offences. 25 years later not much has changed. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because, in spite of the enthusiasm and commitment of the champions of change, episodic creativity and short term collaboration does not penetrate the roots of organizational silos and professional conservatism. As Albert Einstein said, we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

So what can leaders do to help convert short-term creativity into long-term benefits? According to Albert von Szent-Gyorgy, discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. Leaders can make the space for creativity as well as bringing people together, allowing time, encouraging risk and forgiving failure. Creativity is often about seeing opportunities to bring together different ideas and new ways of thinking. Leaders can also help to embed new thinking by challenging some of the entrenched interests rather than colluding with those who say that change is ‘too difficult’. As Thomas Edison put it, with admirable brevity, there’s a better way to do it – find one.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.