Leadership – what are we doing now for tomorrow?
Ashleigh Dunn, Senior Consultant, Scottish Leadership Foundation
Gill Bhatti, Employee Development and Diversity Manager, South Lanarkshire Council
Ashleigh started the session by emphasising that leadership was critical for the public sector to achieve public sector reforms. She believes that genuine leadership in the public sector needs to focus on four streams:
- developing a leadership culture across the organisation;
- delivering leadership across services and organisations;
- developing organisational leadership; and
- recognising and developing individuals as leaders.
Ashleigh emphasised that leadership is a process and we need to work at and invest in today to deliver the agendas of tomorrow.
The Scottish Leadership Foundation (SLF) are working with public sector organisations to develop some common frameworks and evaluation models that can help deliver effective leadership. SLF are keen to promote experiential learning, learning what works for others and translating and replicating this as appropriate.
She concluded there needs to be an investment of leadership at all levels of an organisation and that organisations need to understand the impact of leadership before they implement change.
Gill Bhatti began by emphasising that organisations want and need leaders to be fluid and be able to adapt to the priorities of the organisation. She then talked about the approach South Lanarkshire has adopted to deliver effective leadership.
South Lanarkshire have developed a leadership programme around five key competencies that include "strategic thinking" and "developing effective partnerships". Importantly, staff that successfully complete the leadership programme are made responsible for undertaking key corporate tasks that drive the organisation forward. To date, these staff have carried out projects that have delivered successful succession planning and have increased staff retention and motivation. The leadership programme has also increased understanding of corporate visions and objectives.
The chair closed the session by challenging all public sector organisations need to think how they are going to work with organisations such as the CIH and COSLA to take forward the leadership agenda.