The managerial-political interface: strong relationships prosper in difficult times

09/10/201308/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Andrew Muter

The Chief Executive’s leadership position in Local Government operates in a different context to simple hierarchies. We all manage at the political interface – what some have termed a grey area between the hurly-burly of big P Politics and the general management of the organization. And the relationship at the core is that between the Leader and Chief Executive.

Much has been written and said about these relationships over the years. In particular, Simon Baddeley’s research has provided a fascinating insight into the way that Leaders and Chief Executives describe the way they work together. One of the recurring themes is the way that strong leadership relationships are under-pinned by shared reflections about the way the partnership works. It’s the ability to describe, express and check-back on what is happening that helps to define the relationship and build trust.

The Leader / Chief Executive relationship can come under the greatest of strain even in the best of times. Where trust hasn’t been built, or is undermined, the consequences are huge. So you might have expected that the impact of the harsh financial climate for local government over the last five years would have placed an increasing strain on that crucial interface between politics and the organization.

I doubt that the answer is so simple. In fact, it’s perhaps more likely that strong relationships will prosper in difficult times. The pressures of shrinking resources, transformational change and spiraling demand call for leaders to raise their games. This is a test for the relationship but it’s also an opportunity for synergistic co-leadership.

In our pre-recession world, the managerial-political interface was sometimes illustrated through the development of policies. The dividing line was that although the development and discussion of policies engaged senior managers and politicians, it was the politicians who decided. In today’s world, this may be no less true. But choices have narrowed and the pace and direction of change is relentless and unforgiving. Political and managerial careers may not have been planned around this destination, but we are where we are.

That relationship between Leaders and Chief Executives has been tested in this grave new world. Local government’s performance in handling the reductions in finance, showing that we are fleet of foot in comparison with almost every other area of public service, suggests that we might be optimistic about the resilience of our political and managerial leaders.

In a recent meeting I watched a Leader and Chief Executive of another council explaining how they were planning to deal with the challenges ahead. Their explanation was clear, compelling and seamless. The tone and content of their sentences melded with one another into a seamless narrative. They had not rehearsed their approach – they had lived it, breathed it.

In time, we may have a new academic analysis which sheds light on the stresses and strains of leadership during the austerity years. Here’s hoping it shines a light on strong and successful leadership relationships forged in the heat of battle.

Andrew Muter is the Chief Executive of Newark and Sherwood District Council.

Relational leadership, group dynamics and personal identity

08/10/201308/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Kim Ryley

There is a general consensus from researchers that many of the skills and behaviours of leadership can be learned and acquired. But recent research in the United States and Britain, on the particular challenges facing public sector leaders over the next ten years, has revealed not only the need for a new skills set, but also the importance of these being underpinned by a particular personal mindset and attributes. Indeed, these explicit values, attitudes and behaviours appear essential to operating effectively in the emerging new environment – not least in generating the support and loyalty of others that will be necessary to shape the development of that environment.

It is already clear that the leaders of our public services must prepare for the future on the basis of dramatic, fundamental and irreversible change. The complexity, scale and speed of this paradigm shift requires an unusual degree of adaptability, tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, and the courage and resilience to take responsibility for inventing the future without the benefit of any clear blueprint to follow. The adaptive challenges involved in this are not the same as previous technical problems – they cannot be fixed by experts!

In this context, leadership is not simply about creating shared intellectual understanding. Rather it is about engendering the trust necessary to persuade and motivate people to let go of what is now expendable. Overcoming the emotional resistance involved in this is about overtly challenging the beliefs, identities and feelings that will obstruct the extensive innovation necessary to thrive in the “new normal”. That is why leadership of change is so difficult – it threatens people’s sense of professional identity and self worth.

Fundamentally, the new leadership approach is about changing behaviour, through the distribution and acceptance of loss, so that people can, themselves, make the changes necessary to adapt to the new reality that is now emerging. Whole system leadership of “place” in local public services means acting in conjunction with politicians, partners, staff and local communities to create cohesion around what needs to be done, through shared identity and purpose, and a new sense of reciprocity or “neighbourliness”.

Tomorrow’s public sector leaders will be those who feel compelled to connect with others, As well as being politically astute, they will understand the dynamics of power, be able to read other people’s behaviour, and have the credibility to secure co-operation beyond their formal authority, Like a good Buddhist, their role will be to break through the illusion of constancy by inviting uncertainty, to challenge the status quo – and to change behaviour. But, doing this will depend on them being able to demonstrate that they live the values that drive them.

The changing views of local authority leadership emerging from research surveys of council chief executives by SOLACE in the UK, and of city managers by IMCA in the United States, rate highly the ability to manage complex inter-relationships and inter-dependencies. Indeed, performance is likely to be evaluated increasingly in terms of expert use of the enabling skills necessary to create new alliances, as well as to facilitate and operate in (formal and informal) networks. These include conflict management, negotiation, problem solving and communication. The challenge for leaders in this collaborative context is to be both authoritative and participative.

What the new research also shows, however, is that successful leadership in this context will depend on behaviour and individual attributes which engage and instil confidence in potential collaborators. These attributes include being:

Open Minded
Flexible
Positive
Patient
Persistent
Decisive
Risk taking
Reflective
Accessible
Accountable
Friendly
Trustworthy
Unselfish
Honest
Respectful
Empathic
Attuned to others
Ethical
Committed/Passionate
Consistent

For leaders of complex social systems, relationships and relatedness will be primary, all else will be derivative. The new research has illustrated what skills public sector leaders need in future to be effective. But it shows also that they are extremely unlikely to actually be effective unless they also pay attention to how they exercise those new skills – and keep their attitudes and behaviours under constant observation, as others will.

Kim Ryley is a recent Past President of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and a Trustee of the Leadership Centre. He has 14 years experience as a Chief Executive in four upper tier local authorities. Kim is currently a freelance Leadership Development Consultant and Director of Torque Leadership Associates Ltd.

Keeping the door open to new ideas on leadership: Why the public sector may be leading the way

07/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Ian Briggs

In 1981, Ralf Stogdill published with Bernie Bass a taxonomy of leadership research. To scholars of leadership this Magnus opus has performed two vital functions: firstly, it has been invaluable in keeping open cathedral doors in a gale; and secondly as a work of undoubted scholarly value that it is has served to demonstrate how often confused and misplaced a great deal of leadership research in the past has been.

What is not always adequately reflected in the literature and in much of the teaching of leadership is that many of its core concepts are often based in the struggle to better understand how politicians operate. This has, at times, been lost in translation when it is applied to occupational, industrial and military settings.

Until comparatively recent times much teaching and learning of leadership as a topic has been done through trying to better understand the key characteristics of those who in history have been seen to be successful. This has led to students digesting biographies of the ‘great and the good’ – even today in military settings it is not unusual to be encouraged to read about Alexander the Great and extrapolate from his great achievements how campaigns can be led today.

It is therefore hardly surprising that we are socialised into thinking that to be an effective leader one has to be ‘charismatic’ – this is a term that is loosely banded about to describe an engaging individual who can illicit the support and followership of others. And lest we forget there is still a huge industry out there promoting these ideas, which seem to remain highly attractive to current and budding politicians.

At the forefront of our current understanding of leadership practice, we find the words ‘transactional ‘and ‘transformational’ regularly appearing. In current lingua franca, transactional is taken to mean ‘poor’ and transformational is applied to those who are seen as being effective, ‘with it’ and engaged with current trends. However, many students of political science may recognise these terms as being applied to political leaders; where transactional political leadership is …”vote for me and I will make you better off through reduced taxes” and transformational is…”vote for me and I will do my level best to create a better, fairer world”. But returning to Stogdill’s great taxonomy we can also see that leadership as an issue, a topic and as a matter of scholarly understanding is defined by having sudden leaps of understanding with longer periods of plateaus and stagnation.

I think now we are potentially at a point where that next great leap of understanding is rapidly approaching – and it may be arising from the world of current politics and wider society. Recently we have seen a senior Minister avoiding a critical leadership issue – stating that the decision whether to allow the wearing of the hijab as a clinician or nurse should be a matter for local agreement. I thinkthat should be something where a politician can demonstrate clear leadership and stand in the ground where opinion is firmly divided. Is it ducking the issue to say this is a matter for local agreement, or it is a reflection of the changing expectations we have of those who we elect to stand in this ground?

As I write this I am preparing for some sensitive work that is attempting to reconcile differences of expectation where senior politicians are giving political oversight to what are referred to as megaprojects – think aircraft carriers, HS2, locating nuclear power generation sites and the like – many of these megaprojects being right at the heart of concern for local government and local people as well as parliamentarians. But it would seem that those drawn from professional sources that operate in the role of programme and project managers are at times failing to understand the political pressures placed upon elected representatives. Politicians, too, are failing to grasp the challenges inherent in megaprojects. What is abundantly clear is that whilst some see a leadership issue at the core of such challenges, there is not one clear off the shelf leadership model that fills the gap.

It is at that crucial, pivotal point where political aspiration comes into contact with managerial competence that we need to explore a new language of leadership. Perhaps both sides of the equation are doing what they should do; politicians are articulating social aspiration and managers and professionals are applying well known, tried and trusted mechanisms of project and programme management. However, they need a ‘Babel fish’ (with due respect to Douglas Adams and that most useful of all managerial textbooks – the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) to fully understand each other and each other’s roles.

Perhaps we need to develop a new model of leadership, one where the long term success (or otherwise) of leadership can only be judged by those who will step into the shoes of the leaders of today, a model of leadership that accepts that quick wins are just not possible and that we have to encourage leaders to think beyond the immediacy of the delivery of milestones and concentrate upon how they pass on their leadership much like we as humans do when we pass on our DNA!

But Stogdill’s taxonomy reveals that where we have enjoyed in the past great leaps forward in our understanding of leadership, it seems to have corresponded well with periods of plenty and economic growth. If we are to face another six years of austerity the question remains: from where are the resources to come from to help us capitalise upon the learning we need to engage today? It could be that when the fourth edition of this taxonomy appears we will have a new chapter that offers clear explanations of the ‘pivotal role of leaders in meeting social expectation’ drawn from how we managed to deal with complex, wicked problems of new high speed rail, aircraft carriers for the new age, new environmentally friendly towns and how we managed to generate new sources of energy. But, unless someone throws a bit of money towards us to help research this phenomena then that chapter will take a little longer to write and the current edition will continue to hold open the cathedral door in a gale.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

George Osborne’s budget surplus: paid for by local government

04/10/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

In his party conference speech on Monday, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced that a Conservative Government would seek, by the end of the 2015-20 Parliament, to have eliminated completely the roughly £120 billion national deficit and be running a budget surplus. It would do so, moreover, without raising taxes or cutting capital spending. The audience and most of the business world applauded, naturally, while Labour spokespersons seemed at least temporarily stunned. The best immediate response they could manage was that the Chancellor’s record for meeting his past deficit-elimination targets was pretty flaky, so why should this one be any different.

In fairness, they had cause to be taken aback. The last time a government managed what is sometimes termed an absolute budget surplus – meaning it generated more revenues, including tax yields, than it spent – was in 2001, and it’s only happened about seven times in the past half-century. Not as rare, then, as a Brit winning Wimbledon or the Tour de France, but more so than England winning the Ashes (10, if you were wondering), and excuse, surely, for another spasm of flag-waving and nationalistic celebration?

Possibly, though probably not for most of those in or reliant upon local government, for whom it’s hard to know which scenario would be more painful: the achievement of a surplus by 2020, or being forced to aim for one and not achieving it.

The problem is that this budget surplus isn’t quite the kind of target that Local Government Association Chair, Sir Merrick Cockell, suggested subsequently at a Localis conference fringe event. He observed that a surplus could be arrived at by one of two ways – either by government planning for the public finances to go into the black following spending reductions, or through growth in the economy increasing revenues.

Technically, of course, Sir Merrick’s right. But, wearing his LGA hat, he must know that a budget surplus by 2020 is not going to be achieved under a Conservative or Conservative-led Government either by some hitherto undreamt of explosion of economic growth, or by two lines on a graph, expenditure and revenue, each moving chummily towards the other and eventually converging. He must know, because he’ll have seen the projections, that in this instance one line, revenue, stays unhelpfully almost horizontal throughout virtually the whole of the relevant period, leaving the expenditure line to do all the converging on its own.

The graph is drawn from projections published this July by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), to which local government followers of LSE’s Professor Tony Travers are regularly commended, most recently in his article in this week’s Public Finance. More specifically, the projections are from the supplementary data published alongside the OBR’s annual Fiscal Sustainability Report, of which this summer’s was the third.

Total Managed Expenditure (TME) covers all spending by central government, local authorities and public enterprises: both the directly controllable Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) – the budgets set for departments, Non-Departmental Public Bodies and local authorities in the three-yearly Spending Reviews – and the frustratingly uncontrollable Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) – departmental spending that can’t reasonably be restricted to three-yearly cycles (mainly social security benefits, tax credits and public sector pensions) plus debt interest. Public Sector Current Receipts (PSCRs) are largely taxes and National Insurance Contributions.

There are two potentially deceptive features of the graph as I’ve set it out: the conflated vertical axis, and the 2010-11 starting date. Between them, they have the effect of emphasising the single-year spending blip in 2013-14 and de-emphasising the remarkable nature of the trend.

The historic trend of public spending is, if I correctly recall my Latin, prorsum et sursum, onwards and upwards. Between 1956-57, the year I went to the secondary school in which I learned that Latin, and 2009-10 there was an average growth of 3.2% a year; from 2000-01 an average of 4.7%. We’re now in an 8-year period in which it’s projected to fall by an average of 0.3% a year, in the middle of which a small upward AME lurch is but a proverbial pimple.

Sharp-eyed readers will have detected by now that, rather disappointingly after all that earlier talk of convergence, the two main lines on the graph don’t in fact converge – in 2020 or indeed at any subsequent date. The gap – the public sector net borrowing requirement – has certainly lessened, from 9.9% of GDP in 2010-11 to 6.8% in 2013-14. But the OBR’s current forecast still shows a gap of 1.5% (around £30 billion) in 2019-20, and that, of course, is one measure of the scale of the surplus problem.

The PSCR line, having struggled up to 38% in 2011-12, just stays there, projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility to fluctuate throughout the rest of the decade by barely half a percent, presumably irrespective of the political complexion of the post-2015 Government.

So, even if the Chancellor hadn’t confirmed that the deficit-vanishing trick was going to be accomplished without tax increases, it’s clear that whatever convergence there’s going to be will have to come, as suggested on the graph, from further spending cuts – and at a time when the long-term spending pressure of an ageing population is already growing by the year.

The OBR has a whole mini-vocabulary for deflecting responsibility when particularly its longer term forecasts turn out rather differently. My addition to the graph, therefore, is what they’d call an illustrative, broad-brush projection, rather than a precise forecast. The thing is, I can’t rid my mind of the image of a black arrow, heading straight for local government.

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Caught in the crossfire: local authority outsourcing and the murky world of employment law

03/10/201303/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Ian Briggs

Given the extent of legislation affecting officers and members in local government, it can be rather misleading to see the influence of Westminster solely through the lens of direct local government legislation. Wider legislation on employment has arguably had as big an impact on the way that local government and local government services are delivered.

For councils the reshaping of delivery means, in the majority of cases, seeking partnerships with external providers. Where services are outsourced or delivered through contract, the costs associated with redundancy and passing over employment duties to others is an issue that perpetually causes debate and discussion.

The application of the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE) to transfers from the public sector, commonly known as ‘TUPE plus’, has been regarded as being more onerous on public sector employers than others. The Coalition Government has since 2010 gradually watered down these legal obligations but they are still regarded as problematic.

It is generally accepted that employment legislation is a problem area for local government and for many there is a desire to see a more flexible approach to employment. By implication, employment law is a matter that perhaps needs some review.

So, is this an issue that is shared in other places? The approach to employment practices that is enshrined in law across Europe raises some interesting issues. The media has made much of the economic problems in Greece, citing the high levels of protection afforded to civil servants and public employees there. The European Working Time directive is taken very seriously there; when the hours are worked the person stops and goes home! A similar situation exists in France and Italy, where anecdotal evidence suggests that even police officers, when they are part way through an arrest, have clocked off and gone home as their hours are worked.

The obligations of local authorities in a TUPE transfer are not entirely clear; TUPE plus has been significantly eroded but not removed altogether. In any future outsourcing situation, a local authority risks being caught in the crossfire between prospective contractors and trade unions. On the one hand, prospective contractors are likely to be reluctant to incur costs, offering generous employment benefits which go beyond the normal requirements of TUPE. On the other hand, the trade unions are likely to push for full-scale TUPE plus protection, or as close to this as they can realistically achieve. Any such situation is likely to need careful handling to minimise any potential exposure and legal advice should be taken wherever necessary.

A new response to the ‘jaws of doom’

02/10/201302/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Staite responds to Local Government Chronicle’s anonymous ‘Insider’ columnist about the ‘jaws of doom’ and INLOGOV’s New Model of Public Services.

Dear Secret Chief Executive

I’m so sorry to hear you are having such a miserable time. Leading in difficult times really does take it out of you. However, this isn’t like you – so buck up. If you give way to despair, how will your staff cope?

You describe an impossible conundrum. You have rising demands and falling resources – otherwise known as the ‘jaws of doom’. You know that the solutions of the past aren’t going to solve the problems of the present or the future. You need some new thinking. The good news is that there is a lot of it available and much of it is pretty much free.

At INLOGOV, we’ve developed a model that you can use to re-think the way you meet your challenges. We’ve tested the model with many of your chief executive colleagues who’ve shared their time, insights and inspiration with us so we can offer something useful to you. Our book ‘Making sense of the future: do we need a new model of public services?’ is available to download on our website. There are chapters on building better relationships, behaviour change and demand management, co-production and risk and resilience. Chapters on collaboration and integration and on income generation will be added shortly. The book is a gift from us to you.

In brief – here’s some of our thinking. You operate in a whole system. Changing the way you think and operate in one part of the system will have impacts elsewhere. The old thinking – a focus on the deficits of individuals and communities, which placed councils and their partners in relationships of power over communities – doesn’t work anymore. There isn’t enough money to be all things to all people and perhaps it isn’t good to try to be.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

Are we clear what the Council is for? Do we know what we must do, what only we can do and what could be done as well or better by others?
Is political and officer leadership aligned and focused on shared ambitions? Can anyone I meet in the corridor tell me what those ambitions are? Now ask a few people in the street what matters to them and see if there is a strong match.
Do we have strong relationships with our communities? If not – what can be done to foster better relationships?
Are our services building confidence, capacity and resilience – or perpetuating dependency?
Do we encourage and support co-production? Could our residents do more for themselves and others? Do we make the best use of volunteering to enhance lives and maintain services e.g. libraries, in our communities?
How do we recognise and build capacity in individuals and communities?
Do we understand the pattern of demand? Have we managed out waste and the demand which is driven by service and communication failure, not need?
Do we invest in early intervention and prevention?
Do we understand how we need to change perceptions and influence behaviour to improve lives and deliver better outcomes?
Are we maximising income and using prudential borrowing as leverage for income generation and growth?

You might think about creating a virtuous circle like this:

If you can sew braid onto your daughter’s skirt, then the people you serve can also make a contribution to their own welfare and that of others. Give them access to braid and sewing lessons and then let them adapt their own metaphorical skirts. If you can do it – so can they.

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.

This post was originally featured in Local Government Chronicle, September 2013.

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

Month: October 2013