Top Issues for Leaders
1.Setting the Direction
We all now realise that the public sector is in a permanent state of improvement and renewal. Politicians, civil servants, Trustees, Board Directors, the public, patients, clients, carers and customers all have an opinion about what they want and changes they want to see. Left to its own devices this can have the effect leaving organisations and their people feeling torn in many directions and ending pleasing no one.
How do you set a clear direction in conjunction with your Board, Cabinet, Partnership or Top Team and provide a believable and compelling framework within which all stakeholders can operate and begin to work together?
How do you articulate and follow though on a compelling vision of the future - a lucid description of what it will be like when it is done? How do you use the vision rather than the problems as the guiding light with which to craft the fundamental purpose, values, and key areas for action and strategy?
How do you ensure your organisation gets its 'ducks in a row' to deliver what is there for. What process can be implemented over time that enables each directorate, department, service, branch, team and individual to discuss and understand what the wider goals of the organisation are and to be able to describe:
- How what they do contributes to the delivery of the wider goals of the organisation?
- How what they do fits alongside what other people do to deliver the wider goals of the organisation?
- What they can expect from their managers and leaders to help them do their jobs better?
- How do you know when and how to get this done as a prerequisite to performance?
This is clearly one of the major issues for all leaders.
2.Managing Performance
Hard on the heels of setting out a clear direction comes "how do you ensure that everybody is doing their bit to deliver the organisation's wider goals?" How do you ensure that every person in your organisation understands their contribution to the whole and is helped to understand how effectively they do the job you have asked of them? How you measure their performance and how do you enable them to be pleased with what they have done well and motivate them to do more? Deciding the best methodical way to address these issues is always a critical success factor
Also what about you? How do you know how good a leader you are? How do you manage yourself and all the pressures upon you? How good is your performance? What are your development needs? How do you provide a role model of balanced, positive, effectiveness? All are key questions for leaders everywhere. What system do you have for addressing these questions?
In the end, organisations are there to deliver their products and services on time, within budget and to the standards required. How do you lay out clearly what each individual is required to do to deliver their bit to contribute to the delivery of the wider goals of the organisation? This is the stuff of which greatness is made. Success is determined by what the body of people do, not by how clever and resourceful just a few management stars can be. How do you create excellent, dynamic, improvement creating performance management that is the key to success?
3.Delivering Key Projects
How do you ensure that everybody delivers the most important change or improvement in his or her work area? Do you have a system for enabling at least all your leaders to identify and then agree what needs doing next? Do you have a system for tracking progress and for connecting linked projects? Do you have progress and success regularly reported to the board, cabinet, partnership or top team? Do you have a grand design and schema that guides what is being addressed and when? Do you have a process for celebrating and recognising successes? If there were a gas pedal to improvement this would be it!
4.Working together effectively
'You have a team when the product of the whole is greater (preferably far greater) than the sum of the individual parts'. Being able to systematically build effective teams is necessary to create this. Not all who manage and lead within organisations will know how to do this. So, how do you install the means by which teams can be built, ended, rebuilt, changed reconfigured to suit whatever needs to be done? How do you deliver the flexible responsive organisation that is the key to delivering excellence?
Once you have teams how do you get them to collaborate? How do you do inter-group teambuilding? How do you orchestrate the dialogue and performance across teams to get bigger things delivered on time and to the standards required? How do you check how well this is being done? Sustainable performance and continuous improvement are all enabled by this prerequisite.
What about the top of the shop? The purpose of the Board, Cabinet, Partnership and/or Top Team is to lay out what is required, to hold managers to account for its delivery and to provide an objective 3rd party view so that executives and managers can see more clearly what they are doing and the options available to them. The role of executives and managers is to come up with how to do what is required and take action, to deliver it on time, within budget and to the standards needed.
How do you avoid a situation where these distinct and separate roles or Board, Cabinet or Partnership Members and Managers get confused and where all sorts of dysfunctional behaviour can creep in? How do you build an effective and collaborative relationship with the Board, Cabinet or Partnership or Top Team body? This too is mission critical for success.
5.Creating Service Excellence
If you were to track the steps each piece of work your organisation goes though from inception to completion and delivery you would be able to see immediately where effort was duplicated, where bottle necks and delays occurred, where unnecessary work was done and where needed work was omitted. What tools does your organisation use to see these things and make the obvious changes that could enable your people to deliver excellence on a sustainable basis? Improving performance is easy. Producing sustainable excellence is another kettle of ball games! What are your organisation's core processes? How do you and your Board, Cabinet, Partnership and/or Top Team use these to drive performance change and improvement? 'Once you know what the process is you can measure it. Once you can measure it you can improve it!' W. Edwards Deming
6.Working Intelligently
Is your organisation creative? Does your organisation work intelligently? Do your people systematically identify and analyse problems and opportunities to find their root causes, then look for all the options there are for addressing them, and then go on to implement best solutions with those involved and affected and then measure how well theydid? There are really well proven tools for doing these things. Do your people use them?
Ensuring these methods are understood and used methodically by at least all leaders in your organisation will make a massive difference to what you do and progressively make it easier to do more with he same or less resources or simply reduce the stresses and pressures to which people are subject.
7.Managing Knowledge and Learning
Do your people really have all the information they need to do an excellent job? Is it really available to them at the place where they need it? If they need to find out or get permission for something unusual to deliver something extraordinary do they know where to go? Is every person clear about the information they really need to do their job effectively? Is every person expected to take personal responsibility for accessing the information they need? Is there a controlled documentation system in place in place to ensure important information always gets to and is seen by the right people?
How is learning orchestrated in your organisation? Are mechanisms in place to ensure people can learn through doing what they are there for? How do you ensure that learning is always turned into the results it s intended to create? Without learning, success today can crumble into mediocrity or failure tomorrow. What you build into address these issues in the right certain way will be vital to self-sufficient sustainable success that is not dependant on the shaky foundation of just a few key skilled individuals.
8.Succeeding with Money and Resources
As always there is a finite amount of money. 'Public service organisations are in the business of doing good. There will never be enough money to do all the good they could do'. So, financial governance is the necessary reality often accompanied by Cost Improvement Programmes year on year and ever tighter spend controls. How do you delegate accountability for living within and using resources as wisely as possible? This too is a critical success factor. Organisations that hold budgets centrally rarely thrive. How do you ensure responsibility and accountability does get confused with control and remain only with a few?
9.Managing Talent
A leader cannot be all things to all people all of the time. How do you build a team of direct reports who can share the load and both deliver in the now and work together to develop and deliver coherent change and improvement? How do you select and identify the people you need around you?
Come to that how does your organisation select people for appointment, promotion and transfer? How valid (will they be able to do the job?) and reliable (will they stay?) are those decisions? If you have key people leave tomorrow, what succession arrangements are in place to ensure their functions stay in play? Have you got a talent pipeline in place for key and senior people?
Does your organisation know how to interview for operational skills and personal qualities for every post? Do you appoint on the basis of behaviourally specific evidence that predicts validity and reliability or do you just allow recruiters preferences and biases to be used? Do you ensure that every appointment is accompanied by a development and performance management plan for every appointee?
Good organisations have good people come and stay because it is a good place to work they enjoy it and learn lot. Good organisations also have people go because it is a good place to work and they learned a lot? In good organisations the balance is always maintained. What's the alternative? Maybe we don't need to go there!
10. Managing Risk
The reason people don't manage risks effectively is most often because they don't know how to do part or all of their job properly! Does every person and every team in your organisation have a register of risks. Does your organisation ensure that action is taken on those risks in a sustainable rational priority order based on frequency and seriousness of the risk? How do you get people to manage and control risks? How do you get them to do this proactively? Could your organisation withstand a lawsuit if something really difficult happened? Is control of risk systematically reviewed and part of you performance management process? Corporate Manslaughter legislation puts this firmly on the key issues agenda - as if it wasn't already!
11.Engaging Stakeholders and Marketing
Who are your stakeholders? What do they want of your organisation and what does your organisation want of them? What mechanisms are in place for this dialogue to take pace, be acted upon and tested for effectiveness and satisfaction of all involved?
What messages and information do you want to get sent out to others? What do you want them to do once they receive it? How do you communicate when you choose to? How do you know your intended message has arrived and delivered the intended effect? Do you test effectiveness before you launch major campaigns or communication efforts? What do you do to measure effectiveness of your communication? An organisation that can talk to the world with which it connects can go on to do great things.
12.Commissioning and Purchasing
How does your organisation get from others that which it wants and needs? How do you procure excellence in the first place? How do you ensure you pay no more for it than is necessary? How do you ensure that supply lines and or delivery of results is robust, consistent and reliable? How do you share responsibility for the measurement of performance with your suppliers and providers so that excellence is really delivered?
No organisation is an island. Successful procurement and purchasing is the means by which you can build a network of excellence wherein your suppliers and providers avoid dropping the ball just as much as or more than your organisation does. Your organisations reputation is at stake here too!
Thepip.org is dedicated to helping you find and deploy answers to these and other questions your organisation may have about how to radically improve its performance. Contact us for information and help with how to start and proceed with your journey to excellence.
