Garath Symonds

When I was asked by the Chief Executive to take over a failing project to create a
contact centre for vulnerable residents, I said yes without hesitation. It felt like an
opportunity to be of service to residents, but beneath the surface I may have acted in
service of something closer to home, my own need to succeed in the eyes of
authority figures.

In local government, authority often hides anxiety. When fear rises, the system looks
for a heroic leader, someone who can carry its tension. The more I looked confident,
the more authority I was lent, and the more anxiety I absorbed. It was an
unconscious exchange. The organisation offloaded its unease, and I absorbed it. It
was as if I had been unconsciously elected by the group to hold the system’s
anxiety.

Over time, the project began to take on a life of its own. Meetings were charged with
feeling but framed as technical debate. The numbers, the charts, the plans, all
attempts to manage the anxiety that no one wanted to name or think about. We were
defending ourselves against the fear of not knowing with Gantt charts and risk
registers. Bureaucracy had become a collective defence against thought. And so had
action, the more stuff we got done the better we felt, whether we were doing the right
stuff didn’t matter. Anxiety was running the show, but it wasn’t possible to say so.

When the contact centre finally launched, the context shifted again. It was delivered
on time and within budget, yet there was no sense of relief. We had achieved the
task but not addressed the underlying social problem, and therefore the anxiety in
the system persisted. When a new CE and corporate team arrived, the story
changed again. What had been previously praised became problematic. The project
was now the cause of the organisation’s distress, a helpful target for blame, blocking
any real strategic thinking about what might be needed.

That experience taught me that authority is never just structural it is emotional and
symbolic. It moves between people and roles, attaching itself to those who can carry
what others cannot. When we lead, we enter this unconscious network of
projections, hopes and expectations. The question is not whether this happens, but
whether we notice it.

Local government lives with a chronic tension between its wish for certainty and the
reality of uncertainty, much of its life is shaped by unspoken feeling. Inspections,
budget cuts, audits, change and political pressures all produce emotional
reverberations that are felt long before they are understood. Without reflection
systems repeat their defensive strategies without understanding them.

Developing this very local authority starts with self-leadership, the inner work of
noticing what is being projected into us, what emotions we are carrying on behalf of
the wider system. It asks for a disciplined curiosity about anxiety: what it signals,
where it belongs, and how it can be thought about rather than acted out. It is less
about providing answers and more about creating a space in which meaning can
emerge.

This kind of authority is quietly radical. It might involve naming the unspoken mood in
a meeting, holding silence when others rush to fill it, or acknowledging a tension
rather than smoothing it away. Containment is not about comfort; it is about
thoughtfulness under pressure. It is the ability to stay connected when people and
systems fragment.

The lesson I took from this experience was that leadership is always personal. The
system’s anxiety finds its way into us, connecting with our personal relationship to
authority formed in childhood. How we hold it determines whether it becomes
creative or corrosive force on our leadership. We are not separate from the
organisations we lead; we are expressions of them. Authority, in this sense, is not
only delegated but matured, a relationship between our inner world and outer role.
In this sense authority, is the internal capacity to remain reflective in the face of
collective anxiety. It is the ability to recognise projection without retaliating, to
distinguish what belongs to the self and what belongs to the system, and crucially for
leaders to help others recover their capacity to think.

As local government faces what Sarah Longlands, Chief Executive of the Centre for
Local Economic Strategies, recently described in The MJ as “change rippling through
local government … from structural reform and new combined authorities to health
integration and the push for financial sustainability,” this capacity has never been
more needed. These transitions demand not only new governance models but
leaders who can bear the anxiety of change without collapsing into a desperate need
for certainty. The future may depend less on structural reform and more on this
reflective discipline, the capacity for thought that keeps authority truly local.

Garath Symonds was a senior leader in local government for 20 years and is now
a practice tutor at INLOGOV, an executive coach, organisational consultant and author
of ‘The Anxious Leader: How to Lead in an Uncertain World’. His work helps leaders
make sense of anxiety as data for reflection, containment, and transformation.
http://www.spacetoreconnect.com