From going to the toilet to acting like meerkats — How do you lead teams?

What can you learn from current or former chief executives of councils in thinking about how to lead teams. At the second London Leadership Programme session, we had talks from by Nick Walkley, CEX of Homes for England, Mary Ney, Commissioner at Rotherham and Mike Cook, CEX of Camden. Here’s what I took away:

1. Mission (im)possible: start with values & relationships

• Be explicit on your values and articulate who you are over & above what you do, people want to know what guides their managers particularly in a crisis
• (Re)energise people on why they joined the organisation and build on what they’re really good at to get them revved up (again)
• Show the organisation the opportunities they don’t see, be that how they position the identity of the place or how they can focus on their core strengths
• Support behaviours that pull away from the existing culture, be that taking advantage of a move to a new building to make new ways of working go viral or focusing on a particular issue like housing repairs to devolve power to frontline staff

2. From brokering to letting go: create the space for others

• Know when to influence, broker or intervene and most importantly…when to let go
• Identify the different leadership roles that people around you can play
• Give people the confidence to ask what’s wrong and to challenge…you

Over my career, there are two examples that stand out of where people have created the space for me:

• One of my first managers, the head of a children & families team, rotated chairing of team meetings and let me shadow social workers going across England. That’s where I understood the importance of putting yourself in other people’s shoes and motivating people to think what role others could play
• Another manager, the CEX of a think tank, asked me to “manage up” to help me start leading without realising and using visualisations in meetings as a way of creating consensus through being able to join up dots between people’s arguments
• Another manager, a director of commissioning, let me develop a service design programme because people are most productive when they’re doing what they love. She also challenged to develop a business model to make the programme scale.
• Another manager, a head of transformation, create the space by leaving the room to go to the toilet at meetings we were both at to provide the opportunity for me to lead discussions.

3. Identify your leadership opportunity: create the space for yourself

As well as creating the space for others, where is the leadership opportunity for you? Is it…

• The next level up, in other words…your boss’ job?
• A step sideways and developing your expertise in an area you lack experience in?
• Looking at what organisations share the” same values as you and considering that you lead best not because of what you’re good at, but how you work with others?
• Working with rather than for a public service, be that with an agency or social startup?
• Rethinking what value you can add and creating a new role going freelance…or even setting up your own agency?

Do you want to “inspire people not to change the system but to bring it down, from the outside…to create a new, and better system to replace it”? Or do you want to “inspire people to stand up for authenticity, candour and fairness within their companies, corporations and governments. Not to tear down the system but to make it better”? In other words, are you a pirate or rebel? Check out @benproctor for more on that…including goats.

Where have leaders created the space for you? And where have you created the space for others?