An Update from the National Leadership Centre
In the last month, life has changed significantly for people up and down the country and for our friends, family and colleagues around the world. In these difficult times public sector leadership is even more critical than ever, and the nature of our support to those leading the front line COVID-19 response has necessarily changed.
We wanted to share how the National Leadership Centre is working to ensure we continue to support public sector leaders.
Firstly though, we want to extend our thanks to all those working in so many different ways to support the public at this time — colleagues across public services in all their forms extending to charities, care services, carers, key workers, and especially those delivering the services we need to keep the country running and everyone staying at home to stop the spread of Coronavirus. We stand with you and are proud to be working together.
The National Leadership Centre’s purpose is to support the connection between leaders across public services. This has remained our core objective in these changing times, and we’ve worked carefully to achieve it in this new environment. We paused our planned events and our development programme, and we pivoted our entire operation to work with leaders to understand the impact of Coronavirus on their work, their organisations and themselves.
We have been working to collect and communicate the experience of public sector leaders, and to connect them with possible solutions and access to central decision makers. And we continue to work with leaders to understand the most helpful ways to support them in these challenging times. As part of this, we have restructured our team to create individual area leads for each region, to focus on understanding the needs of the organisations that serve our local communities.
If you are a Public Service Chief Executive (or equivalent role) and have not heard from us, or would like to find out more about how we can support you please get in touch nlc@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
You can also use our online directory service, Connect, to find and contact peers working within the public sector.
If you’re not sure if you’re included in our network, more information can be found here.
Our Team Insights
As a team of Civil Servants we are all passionate about our purpose of offering support and help to our leaders. In order to do this we are all, like so many people, learning how to work remotely.
This hasn’t been as difficult as it might have been because our team were already working in locations across the country and we use a range of collaborative tools. Despite this, we are still having to learn new behaviours and how to keep connected.
Some of the most significant elements for us are the subtle cues you pick up in person, the lack of opportunities for serendipitous conversation, and the new need to share information asynchronously with our team, to fit around new working patterns and childcare. We are experimenting with new meetings based on agile delivery principles that mean that information flows more freely between teams. Working remotely has been a great equaliser, and has encouraged us to be more aware and considerate of others needs. We’ve learned a great deal about how we work together, we know so many teams are finding this too, so we will take this forward in our future work.
And with this, as we consider how we support leaders in the future, we know the scale of this challenge nationally, globally, is immense and we will take time to process this.
