February 2021 – Love and Leadership

Careers

The month started with the Dorset Council STEM careers event for young people. I’m really keen we start to show that you don’t have to be able to write code or fix computers to work in digital, and we need people to come into the sector to help with user research and service design in Dorset (but we do need coders too!).

I appreciated being asked to contribute and we pulled together a video for digital and ICT. There were careers represented from Highways to Education Psychologists and it was a real joy to hear about other areas of work and why people love their jobs.

I’ve just heard we’ve had fixed term roles approved to support our transformation programme – service design, user adoption, digital business partner for adult social care and project managers – coming soon!

Creating new habits

I felt it was the month to give myself a bit more love and care and be a good role model and get serious about having a daily walk, even if it was just to the end of the road to start to create new habits. I attended a mindfulness course and nearly fell asleep, but it did make me feel more energised afterwards. We also had a team mindful colouring session following the success of our Christmas paper crafting, which I loved and was a great way to start the day.

As part of a digital age leadership course I’ve been doing I’ve been trying to get into the habit of journaling at the start and end of the day, taking time to think what needs to be done, the meetings, focusing on where we need to get to, and thinking about my contributions in meetings or the work I need to do as a result. I’ve noticed when I do this, I feel much more present and have a greater sense of achievement at the end of the day.

It has also made tasks that could seem a chore worthwhile. Equality Impact Assessments for example, rather than thinking of this as something that has to be done, considering it as really helping to make sure our digital work is as inclusive as possible, making sure people can benefit from the work we are doing turns it into the positive and helpful exercise which it should be.

But I’ve still not got my diary sorted with too many meetings and not striking the right balance to have thinking space and time to produce work.

Digital inclusion

Relating to equality the month has concluded with a bit of a debate about our digitally excluded numbers due to new research from the Heseltine Institute and our recent Resident Survey. Indications are now that:

• 35,000 people are completely offline in Dorset Council area (11%)
• • 64,000 are lacking all the essential digital skills in Dorset Council area (20%)

This equates to around 31% of Dorset residents that may be digitally excluded in someway so it’s great we’ve had work going for some time that can be scaled up thanks to Penny who has led in this area.

Talking numbers, the data seminar with Councillors was well received (#dataisnotdull), there is a lot to do across the council to help people understand the different aspects of data, how we use it and mature our use of insight and intelligence.

Planning our work

We had our first steering group for the customer platform work, I was slightly too ambitious with the timings and credit to Lee & Neil who had to ‘present at pace’ our website migration approach and customer account discovery work.

I loved hearing in our team session the impact our user adoption and service design work is having, and the ideas for 21/22 to build on our strengths and continue to improve. Our digital champions confidence in the last 6 months has increased by an average of 14%, with some as high as 38% which is fantastic. Delia and Helene have been amazing supporting the organisation during the pandemic to adopt and make the most of tech and sharing our learning with other councils.

Developing digital skills across the workforce is a priority for us, particularly as our post pandemic workplace which will be much more flexible and not the same as before COVID-19 so that we continue to benefit from reduced travel, reduced cost and better work life balance.

I’ve been talking with Learning & Development about how we support our managers to inclusively lead dispersed teams and the skills we will need for our leaders going forward. It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago that I was talking about the 4th industrial revolution in the context of digital strategy, now we have entered the 5th industrial revolution focused on human-centred leadership and we need to think about how we balance both those aspects in the organisation. I’m looking forward to trying out some learning interventions and evaluating those to see how they are received in the coming weeks.

Leadership

Our leadership forum featured lightening talks for hot topics and a panel discussion talking about the pandemic and the positives we want to retain. I think for the first time ever, listening to every person that spoke in that session there was great examples of ‘digital’ throughout, it was a good moment and demonstrated our progression.

I wish I could differentiate how much of this is down to senior leadership, becoming governance ‘lite’ and the new values/behaviours of the organisation, versus the impact of a pandemic forcing a situation on people. Having said that, the culture that has developed of ‘having a go’ even if it doesn’t quite work first time has been demonstrated from the top.

I’ve been thinking about role model leadership and two woman I’ve recently worked with that have made an impact on me. Not only do they bring positive energy, but they make people feel valued by:

1) when people contribute, even when you think ‘that was random’ and ‘unrelated comment’ a positive connection is made that then makes you see that person in a different light and challenges your own assumptions, as well as ensuring that person feels heard

2) stating what an individual brings that they find helpful in that moment

It’s powerful, particularly in the times we are in.

In other news

• I’ve had a few conversations this month with other authorities wanting to learn about our workplace digital champions, running virtual live events, and our customer platform work.

• It’s great to see Spring emerging. I changed my teams backdrop to blossom trees as we are lucky to have a lot in our road, it was great to see in the news today that the national trust are planning to plant more in cities.

• I picked up new glasses that I’ve just remembered I should be wearing – another new habit to create!

• I loved that my husband passed his AWS certified solutions architect professional 3-hour exam – it was a real challenge keeping the house quiet for that long whilst he was under exam conditions at the dining table, but we did it 😊

Q