1. What should you start doingto maximise your potential to support and lead social change?
Focus on a few priorities, such as [specific priorities], where I can make a unique difference.
- Work with fellow civic leaders to explore how the programme can be a platform to connect civil society and local government better to tackle issues across London in a way that’s more equal, inclusive and relational.
- Find opportunities to lead or influence fast-changing, uncertain situations at work, helping others to see the benefits of adapting and flexing.
- Seek opportunities to take the lead on crucial organisational improvement projects or tasks where nobody appears to be taking responsibility or where progress has slowed or stalled.
Identify & take up opportunities.
- I can lead and bring people together to develop a team or design ways to tackle an issue. I can bring people together who haven’t worked with each other, particularly external organisations. I can use creative ways to help people influence, shape, or test out ways to tackle a problem. I like an open conversation to build relationships but prefer more structured creativity to get ideas and turn them into action.
- I’ve got various work, mixing projects where I can design the objectives, how they will work and scale, with urgent issues like [specific urgent issues] I need to respond to or mobilise people on, and learning new ways of working such as [specific new ways of working].
- I’ve got a mix of time when I’m working with others and when I can think independently.
On a day-to-day basis
- Buddy up with colleagues who have more pragmatic, common-sense thinking than me.
- Restart doing a worry diary and reflect on what I can control and what I can’t control
2. What do you think you must continue doing to maximise your potential to support and lead social change?
- Create opportunities for people to lead and create impact.
- Create the opportunity to develop their identity and career.
- Create the opportunity to learn and work in new ways, such as [specific new ways of working].
- Create the opportunity to build relationships and networks.
- Challenge people to be more inclusive and ambitious.
- Uncover needs and motivations, making connections between issues and between people.
- I bring my networks to help connect people on the programme to other organisations and communities, share what we’re learning, and help people on the programme tackle issues or access potential partners.
- Bring my experience in helping turn exciting collaborations between partners and communities into social infrastructure that allows embedding new ways of working.
- Bring my commitment to connecting issues that emerge through the Civic Leaders programmes with the lived experiences of communities I work with, and test ways to tackle those issues with fellow Civic Leaders in our respective communities — like me supporting them in their local area or inviting them to provide peer challenge in mine.
Creatively facilitate spaces for people to collaborate to initiate change by being asked to scope a new programme, strategy or activity — from a one-off activity to an ongoing cohort.
Come up with ideas that look outside my organisation for alternatives when I’m asked to respond to a challenge — i.e. an urgent issue the council needs to deal with or putting in building blocks for long-term change — or invited to comment or review a project someone else is running.
Mobilise resources or skills towards a common cause by identifying people in my team who’ve got skills that can tackle the challenge and disrupt it positively in how we respond to it, people in other services who will have the insights & data and connections to people with lived experience of that issue as well as partners with new types of skills we can bring to the problem.
3. What must you stop doing to maximise your potential to support and lead social change?
Stop working across too many different projects, which makes it difficult to focus.
Identify the roles I’m best suited for, and start by empowering individual team members to lead on each of these. This not only gives them a sense of purpose but also ensures that each project receives dedicated support.
Making excuses for not exercising every day or eating healthily
Stop getting deflated that the energy and momentum I had helped build with others could be lost and see myself limited by what I perceive as barriers.
Stop losing confidence in myself. I can inspire positive change, and my ideas are worth pursuing. It’s essential to believe in my potential and not let self-doubt hold me back.
