Connecting public service leaders: Project background
The story behind our work with the Cabinet Office for the new National Leadership Centre…
(This follows on from a blog post by the National Leadership Centre, introducing their purpose and their plans.)
Imagine you’re twenty or so years into a career in public service — having diligently worked your way up in a local authority, blue-light service, healthcare, central government, the armed forces or… (you get the idea, there are many varieties of public sector organisations)
At each stage of this career you had a boss who set you a direction and parameters, guided your work, and hopefully supported you. You had colleagues at the same level to share the ups and downs, help you get to grips with your role at each stage, and take you for a drink after work to soothe the tough days and celebrate the good. And maybe you even had training programmes and coaching to bump up your know-how to climb each rung.
By now you’ve learned a lot about management and leadership, as well as lots about your sector’s specialist knowledge.
But, however high you’ve climbed the ladder until now, the ultimate responsibility always stayed somewhere above you in the chain of command.
You eventually get to the very top. You’re the CEO, Permanent Secretary, Chief Constable, or some other slightly daunting title.
You now report directly to a range of high-profile stakeholders with exacting and disparate demands, but there is nobody above you within the organisation itself — no boss to set your direction and support you. You are the interface between the organisation and the minister, the commissioner, the elected members.
Nobody else in the whole organisation is at the same level as you, either. The ultimate responsibility in the chain of command now rests solely on your shoulders.
You are held to account personally by committees, the press, think tanks, campaign groups, and seemingly the whole country. All around you, hundreds or thousands of staff look to you for direction, motivation and support. And you now have ultimate fiscal and legal responsibility too.
No other job quite prepares you for the top job, and when you get there you’re on your own.
This isolation at the top was one of the insights from the work of the Public Services Leadership Taskforce.
They were convened by the Treasury in 2017 to investigate equipping public sector leaders to increase productivity in the public sector — to be one part in the turnaround of the decade-long productivity slump in the whole economy.
What might have been simply a step towards announcing more cutbacks took a more thoughtful approach, stating:
“Increasing efficiency alone will not be enough to tackle these challenges, nor for public services to keep pace with the continuing pressures they face to do more with less.”
The taskforce identified three themes in their report:
“The most difficult challenges faced by public services are complex and cross-cutting, so more effective collaboration between them is a source of considerable public value.
Some senior leaders feel very exposed by their new responsibilities, and are not sure where to turn for support. The right cross-service programme could give these leaders the skills, knowledge and behaviours they need to fulfil their potential.
Networks between leaders are underdeveloped and there is demand for a mechanism for public services leaders to support each other, share practice and learn from experience.”
Following the taskforce’s report, the National Leadership Centre (NLC) was created in 2018, with a remit to work with the top leaders across all public services. It would provide them with a programme of learning specifically tailored to the unique challenges of the top jobs; a way to connect with each other more widely and regularly to provide peer group support and learning, as well as cross-sector collaboration; and undertake focused research to better understand and inform good public service leadership.
Leaders would now have more tailored learning available, even as they reach the very top job, and they would be better able to connect with and learn from other top leaders. The NLC have written about their purpose and work on their blog.
And that’s where we came in, being appointed as the NLC’s digital services partner. In the original taskforce report it said:
“This is an ambitious project and success would mean continuous improvement and a robust approach to testing the case for change.”
And the NLC team built on this to plan a ‘digital’ workstream, with agile, user-centered service design. The digital tools would need to support the programme of training, networking between leaders, and the research output of the centre.
While the procurement set out some specific technical things that were needed, we advocated taking small bites out of the problem set, doing lots of user research, experimenting, doing lots of testing with users, improving and launching the result — before identifying the next small bite to take. This connected well with what the team wanted, and played a key part in them selecting us.
We emphasised in big letters:
This doesn’t mean it’s not about technology, just that it is more about people. That’s because the problems to be solved here don’t represent novel, complex or risky things from a technology perspective. The hardest thing will be to really understand the needs of this very specific user group — and find ways to serve them without expecting big changes in behaviour, or investments of time or effort, from them.
This fitted very well with the way the team at the NLC were thinking about the project, including head of digital Billy Street (who’d previously worked on cross-government transformation at GDS), backed up by his boss Stephen Crookbain, and colleague Jenny Vass.
Billy also advocated a multi-channel approach, where we would work not just to deliver digital outcomes, but to support work across the NLC with user research insights and prototyping.
We then set out as one team on our journey into Discovery and Alpha, and we’ll all write more about our learning and experimentation in the next posts in this series.
You can find out more at https://www.nationalleadership.gov.uk/ and follow the NLC blog for more details about their work.
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