After onboarding the Civic Futures programme, I’ve been asked to write a 360 self-assessment of myself, as well as nominate other people to do the same for me. I also get my own team to do 360s as they work with people across different services and partners.
1. What is your hope for your work over the next 12 months?
For my organisation
- To scale our work on participation to secure funding by investors who want to help us scale our work or test new experiments, attract sectors who want to put their community funds or endowments into participatory budgeting and lobby for devolution of powers
- To scale our work on welfare and good work to develop a national campaign and investment model on universal basic services
- To develop a campaign to show the unique strengths & identities of each neighbourhood to test out practical solutions for 15-minute neighbourhoods with anchor institutions and communities
- To enable my organisation to be the leader on wellbeing through using our wellbeing framework to work with other councils, charities & foundations to lobby for a new welfare & funding model
- To support the leadership to anticipate & develop strategic opportunities that lead to transformational new strategies, services & programmes
For my day to day work
To spend the majority of my time energising people from different teams to work together to tackle complex challenges and put into practice creative solutions that have a visible impact on the ground and get other people to get involved and make that positive change.
In my relationships with people
Develop strong personal relationships with people who are very innovative and influential in their field in London to test new ideas
- Connect people up who could take their projects to the next level through working together and bounce off their ideas and energy to help challenge or improve what I’m working on
- Support people in my team to thrive — to help them drive and influence the work they’re doing in a way that makes the best use of their skills and personality, and for each of them to become a leader
For my development
To develop my skills towards leading a service that brings together different teams & partners with different skills who do that and show how you can deliver visible impact on the ground and put in the building blocks to make change stick, in a way that spreads across organisations and a local area.
To get the experiences to achieve the above, to be given or create the opportunity to lead & influence projects where there is space & legitimacy to test, accelerate & embed new ways of working across the organisation or area, even if the issue the project is focusing on is the initial priority, and projects where I can build strong relationships with people who have a similar passion and complementary skills
2. What support will you need over the next 12 months? Who will provide it?
New relationships with people who want to get stuck in, pool their resources to tackling an issue together and help embed the change
New relationships in particular with people in foundations & investors to secure investment for new innovations, with people in campaigning coalitions to lobby for change together and innovative community organisations or entrepreneurs who want to test out new ways of tackling an issue
Validation of my work by people I work for and I support and in particular new people I work with
Feedback there and then in the work to say what I could improve, and to connect me into their thinking and networks.
Dedicated sessions for personal development to help me focus my mind on what issues I need to tackle, skills and need to develop and stretch myself
Coaching conversations to ask the right questions to help me come up for air, challenge me and focus me on what I should do and hold me to account
Space & time to bring to life how I might work in a more creative & iterative way and support others to do so
People sharing what excites them about the issue or project, what they need to help the project thrive and what role they think I can play.
Who provides support?
I lean on my partner and family for love, my friends for having a good time, exploring new activities and sharing issues, my manager for clarifying priorities, getting feedback on my performance, sounding out on tackling complex issues and helping me with my personal development, my team with using their skills to improve our support to the organisation, their creativity in thinking and working differently to tackle issues, getting feedback on my performance and how I can improve, my wider network in the organisation and beyond to share ideas on how to tackle issues creatively, share lessons learned and identify ways we can collaborate.
Who could provide more support?
Identifying people who are good at mobilising people — their passions, their energy and their confidence in tackling something they might think impossible. They extend what I offer which is more about developing the frameworks & opportunities that tap into people’s motivations & skills.
Identifying people who are good at looking out for other people when they’re finding it difficult to cope with the change. They extend what I offer which is more about making sense of how the team are developing and working out what’s needed to sustain cohesion.
Identifying people who are good at managing & tracking the delivery of activities & tasks. They extend what I offer which is more about developing the frameworks for programme management & assurance.
Identifying people who are passionate, who are open to new ways of working and want to try them out.
Identifying people who are curious about how other people feel, who have got skills in influencing people and specialist expertise I don’t have.
Identifying people who have strong & interesting networks, particular in areas I don’t know so well. I would turn to them for trying out new ways of working either that I initiate or they do, discovering new people and building movements.
3. What challenges do you need over the next 12 months? Who will provide it?
- Challenge to stretch my skills, knowledge & networks (manager and peers)
- Confidence to challenge the leadership (my manager and peers)
- New networks in different fields open up my imagination & opportunities
Opportunities to:
- Create different ways of working in which people develop a strategy or design a service that means they want to learn from each other, solve problems and enable residents to co-own the work
- Experiment on the ground to show early visible impact so other people can pick up the baton and grow the impact
- Create opportunities for people to shine through their skills and stretch themselves, through learning new ones and building new relationships that help them build strong networks that help drive change
Who will give me those challenges? Leaders I need to build strong relationships with
- Challenge people in my team to stretch their skills & comfort zone (myself)
- Give people the confidence to be open and vulnerable in trying out new ways of working things out together (myself)
