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The Challenge of Leadership in Leeds

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One of the big challenges of leadership is that, once you assume it, you are there to be shot at.

It is not necessarily that people want to bring you down.  But they do want to know that ‘the leaders’ know their stuff, that they are credible.  That they are worth following on a journey.  That they deserve the commitment of discretionary time and effort too.  That it will all make a positive difference in the end.

In leadership, you have to earn your followers…

The problem is further compounded if:

  • leaders choose to more or less replicate a leadership process that the last time around didn’t pull up any trees
  • there is even a whiff of a suspicion that this is not a genuine attempt at leadership but a bit of a box-ticking exercise undertaken at the behest of ‘head office’
  • there is no clarity about how a vision, once developed will be used to really engage and mobilise the talent, skills and resources of all stakeholders
  • different opinions, instead of being heard, are simply denied and refuted

When some of these conditions are met, then vision based leadership becomes very, very difficult.  Attempts are likely to be met with, at best, ‘passive aggression’.  And I think that this is the situation facing us in Leeds at the moment with the Leeds Vision 2030 process.  It is a situation that faces many leadership teams.

People are giving up time and money to engage in a leadership process that should be a very high stakes game for the city.  Shaping our international profile, providing a platform for a socially just society, rising to an array of carbon and environmental sustainability challenges and delivering an economy that works, are just a few of the opportunities and challenges that the process needs to address.

This is why I think some people, myself included, were disappointed when we first saw the new ‘Leeds Owl‘  and strapline that have been developed to brand the Vision 2030 exercise.  Personally I think that Phil Kirby’s criticisms are justified. So too Lee Hickens.  And I have made some observations about the symbolic meaning of the owl. In what is a multi-cultural and international city we should show some sensitivity and awareness of what our city symbol means in parts of Japanese, Hindu and African history.

There are all sorts of things that the council is now doing that I think show signs of progress.  Setting up facebook pages and twitter feeds for example.  Far more council staff seem to be really engaging, online and off, in some of the stuff that is happening in the city.   But these tools are double edged swords.  Reputations take a long time to build online and can be very quickly lost.  They will certainly surface more and more critical responses (let’s face it few of us find the time to write a response that says ‘Great work, keep it up!’) than more traditional and ‘managed’ consultations

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhmjnYKlVnM]

But it seems there is still astro-turfing going on.  It can be tricky to sort out the authentic voices.  And web2.0 savvy folks will forgive many things – but bad design and perceptions of inauthenticity are not amongst them!

I believe the ‘What If Leeds…’ logo debate is only partly about the aesthetics and meaning of the brand.

It is, for me at least, much more importantly a signifier of a very important question.  Can we work with Leeds City Council and its mechanisms for exercising leadership in the city, or should this be a DIY job?  We just keep on organising and doing what we can to shape life in the city by doing our own stuff.

Is the council a credible and trustworthy partner for local people already running themselves into the ground doing what they can.  Or will it just sap our time, energy and morale?

Will the engagement continue once the Vision is developed, bound and on the shelf?

Personally I am very optimistic that the appointment of Tom Riordan shows a real willingness to engage and partner more effectively.  But there is a lot to learn on both sides if we are to make this work.

At the moment I think Leeds is a more exciting City than it has been for a long time.  Interesting things are happening at the grass-roots in business, culture, community development, marketing and technology.   And, if we can get the engagement with the council right, we might be able to pull off something of real importance for the city.   But we must have confidence in those we engage with and their ability to manage effectively the complex process for strategic change that they have chosen to use.  And we must earn their trust too.  This is a two-way process.

It is not just about ‘us’ going on a journey with ‘them’.  It is about all of us journeying together.  Learning has to be done on all sides.

Or should we just go it alone?

Learn the Skills of Community Organising in Leeds

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…or if it is good enough for Barack Obama it is good enough for me!

Community organising seems to be all the rage at the moment.

Leeds Community Organising and Bradford Changemakers are jointly hosting  a Community Organiser training weekend in September.

The training is taking place over two days on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th September 2010 at Leeds Church Institute in Leeds city centre (20 New Market Street, LS1 6DG), and will run from 9.30am to 4.30pm each day.

This is an opportunity to deepen your knowledge of the principles and practice of community organising, extend your own leadership skills, and grow relationships with others involved in the development of Community Organising in Leeds and Bradford.

The full weekend costs £30 per person and includes lunch and refreshments. Further information and booking details are included on the attached flyer – please do tell others in your organisations and communities who may be interested!

I certainly hope to be there!

Download this flyer (pdf) for further details Sept 2010 flyer-1

Who Are the Innovators?

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Recently I have been reflecting with Imran Ali about the nature of innovation in the city (of Leeds in this case) and how it might be developed.  The assumption being that more and better innovation will be an unalloyed good in a fast changing, dynamic, complex yet very finite environment.

Most of the discussion has focussed on some obvious innovation levers that we believe could yield some relatively quick and easy wins, such as:

  • encouraging more innovation across traditional boundaries of department or role
  • seeking applications of technology for social innovation
  • thinking as idealists rather than realists – exploring the art of the possible not just the pragmatic
  • providing ‘investment ready’ development programmes
  • engaging non traditional sources of funding in the innovation process and so on.

But the implicit assumption all of these approaches to innovation is of an innovative elite.  A creative class with the brains, the money (or access to it) and the networks to figure out how to make things significantly better for the rest of us.  Scientists, technologists, financiers, policy makers, politicians, environmentalists, campaigners, entrepreneurs (social and not so social) and academics are all encouraged, incentivised and trained to ‘unleash’ their creativity and innovation.

But how many in the city form part of that elite?  The hallowed few from whom progress is expected to emanate or who feel it is their duty to change the workings of the world. A few thousand perhaps in a city of 800 000.  I suspect it is less than 1% of those living in the city.

I believe that innovation, creativity and change in pursuit of progress, are essential human qualities that will find means of expression.  Regardless.

  • How does the potential of ‘innovation’ play out for the rest?
  • How do the processes of creativity and change in search of progress manifest for them?

Well, I suspect there is another slug of the population who are deeply engaged in creativity and change in relation to developing their  practice, in the more or less explicit hope, that they may be able to join the elite.  Training, learning, networking and thinking of ways to get their hands on the innovation levers.  Would-be entrepreneurs, politicians, students, scientists and bureaucrats who are working their way upwards and onwards.  Some, of course will join the elite. But most, by definition, will not.  And they will join another group of potential innovators.

These are the ones who do not wish to change the world/city/community.  Perhaps they have given up on the challenge. Perhaps they never engaged with it.  But the essential creative drive remains and will be expressed.  It may play out through personal lifestyle choices.  Living the environmental life perhaps, gardening,  reducing the golf handicap, pursuing cultural enlightenment, renovating houses/cars etc.  Progress is defined in more or less personal terms.  It is perhaps the pursuit of happiness rather social change.   Work becomes a job rather than a way to make a mark on the world.  Creative courage is reserved primarily for ‘out of hours’ activities.

And then there is another group who never really established a foothold in ‘the system’.  Those for whom a steady salary providing some level of ‘disposable’ income was never really ‘on the cards’.  Vocational and professional routes for creative expression never opened up for them.   From this group I suspect the systems demands not innovation and creativity but just passive compliance.  Do as your told, smarten up tour appearance, brush up your CV and look for a job.  Or at least pretend you are looking for a job.  But the drive to innovation will out.  Creativity will be expressed.

So when we are looking to support innovation in the city where is the great untapped potential?

  • Does it lie in providing more and better support and training to the elite?
  • Or should we try to mobilise middle England, Big Society style, to rally tot he cause?
  • Or should we perhaps change the terms of engagement with those at the margins of the system?  To shift from a coercive approach to a coaching one?

Anyone for ‘Innovation Coaches’ in Leeds?

Does Big Society Foretell the Demise of Confrontational Government?

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Kevin Harris has written a fascinating post about the possibility of the transition to Big Society foretelling the demise of confrontational we/you type government.
I too can see a way in which Big Society foretells the demise of command and control. However I can also see dozens of ways in which it doesn’t.  The recent Marsh Farm decision provides an example.
Government has a long track record of maintaining the status quo while providing the illusion of radical change.  Left/Right, Centralise/Decentralise, National/Local.  They all look like major change, but in fact politicians and civil servants collude to ensure that nothing REALLY happens.  It is  as if the pendulum of change is allowed to swing through an arc of only a very few degrees.
Kevin makes a good point about the nature of  you/me thinking.  A shift to ‘we’ would do no harm at all.  But I am not holding my breathe.  The very nature of democracy means that we elect a ‘you’.
In my mind the real shift needs to from a perspective where government seeks to engage us in the delivery of their agenda to one where it learns to engage itself in the development of our agendas.  A government focussed on enabling citizens in pursuit of their interests rather than recruiting them to do the work of the state.
But I will not hold my breathe for that swing of the pendulum either.
Perhaps it is time we learned to wean ourselves off the teat of the state and learn to make progress without them?

The Future is… Nomadic?

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Is it time for a post-settlement society?

Are home ownership, long-term council house tenancies and commitment to a community doomed to become little more than quaint memories of how society used to work?  Do they restrict the mobility of skills, knowhow and muscle power that a modern economy demands?

There are many that argue this case.  Richard Florida suggests in his book The Great Reset that the creative classes should no longer tie themselves down geographically by committing to mortgages and buying properties.  Grant Shapps, Housing Minister wants social housing tenants to have Housing Freedom Pass and a National Home Swap Scheme to allow tenants to move in pursuit of work, or for ‘any other reason’.

The message seems to be ‘don’t commit yourself to a community – be prepared to follow the money – the future is nomadic’.

Can you imagine a society divided into the rooted and the rootless?  Those who can afford to commit to a community for the long term and those who can’t?

It used to be that we wanted people to come to our communities and stay in them.  To shape a society and an economy that would serve the community.  To care about community.  Now the big idea seems to be shaping community to serve the economy.

  • Is this progress?  Or a progress trap?
  • Should we engineer society to meet the increasingly dynamic demands of a growing and shifting economy?
  • Or should we engineer the economy to serve the kind of communities in which we wish to live?
  • Will increasing social mobility help to reduce inequalities and promote social justice?  Or will it create even more stark demarcations between rich and poor?
  • How will our city evolve if the churn in our working communities is significantly increased?
  • Or will the possibility of a digital Britain and an economy that is ‘lighter than air‘ mean that spatial mobility is much less of an issue than we may think?
  • Or is it just a lot of fuss about nowt?