“We weren’t having these conversations anywhere else!”
Your Agenda, Your Discussions: Part of a series of posts written by the Directors’ Network, supported by One Team Gov and the Cabinet Office’s Collective Leadership Team.
We’re writing this blogpost to continue our series on growing the community of Directors committed to collective leadership, co-creation and building cultures that support collaboration. You can find out more about this work here:
Leading public services has always been tough — we have to tackle complex societal issues which no single organisation can face alone. As public sector leaders, Directors are the forefront of this, wrestling with the systemic and interrelated nature of many issues.
COVID-19 has changed everything for us, fast. We’re finding ourselves navigating a complex, uncertain world whilst exploring how to lead differently to deliver public services. We’re pulling together behind a single, collective purpose and we’re reflecting on how to ‘bottle the positives’ to sustain them into the future.
Despite being busy with the day to day, we’re continuing to carve out time for ourselves to reflect and connect in a shared space. We’re opening up to having a different kind of conversation.
We had our second breakfast call where we set the agenda and had the discussions. It was a very simple way of bringing a diverse range of views together to create change. The agenda was not set in advance; instead, it was generated by us and what we felt passionate about.
A participant-led discussion:
- Using a Google Doc, we anonymously proposed a topic for discussion,
- We used “dot voting” using emojis to prioritise the discussions based on what we wanted to talk about, and
- We then discussed the highest voted topics.
It was great to welcome new people to the discussion this week; this allowed us to split into virtual breakout rooms for group discussions on each topic before regrouping to share the highlights.
Below is a summary of our discussions.
Topic 1: Why does it take a crisis for us to start to work in new ways that would otherwise have taken months, maybe years to agree / or achieve?
We are finding that focusing on one shared objective, regardless of level or profession, has led to rapid achievements, with siloes being set aside and work in areas such as commercial moving far more quickly.
We discussed how sustainable these changes are in the long run.
- Are they the natural human response to crisis?
- How will we continue with the good elements?
We’ve noticed that some workloads have become unsustainable, with bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and less productivity emerging. However, some teams have simply been left to get on with it — and this has led to public servants coming up with imaginative ways of doing things.
We know the current pace is unsustainable, for us and our teams. However, the new ways of working have revealed a lot about ourselves. There is the untapped potential to do something quite different. It’s revealing a lot about our interaction with society, and imposing humility upon us because we didn’t and still don’t fully understand the ecosystems we are responsible for.
Topic 2: Getting the balance right between time spent on reactive COVID work and thinking about recovery — how do you manage your time as a leader?
Our discussion on the second topic followed on from the first! We discussed suggestions for how leaders manage their times and switching between reactive/thinking modes. Through our brief exploration, we were left with more questions:
- How do you build an inclusive environment where some are time pressured? How do you create inclusive purpose?
- How do leaders look after themselves?
- How do you carve out the time to explore leadership on a weekly basis?
We’re still seeking to better our understanding of how to create the space for our people to balance their time, in the short, medium, and long term. We think it comes back to allowing teams to get on with it and having governance so good people want to use it.
Reflection
We reflected that we had found connecting virtually and having these conversations very useful — we weren’t having them anywhere else!
We also talked about how we use the hour most effectively, balancing time spent discussing topics in detail whilst also allowing time to connect with new colleagues and develop a shared agenda for the discussions. We’ll continue to refine our approach over the coming sessions. This conversation led us onto discussing how we work in the open to share what we’re doing.
The kind of change we need starts from within. Whatever your role or discipline — we believe everyone has a topic in them. All Directors from across the Civil Service are welcome to join the ‘Your Agenda, Your Discussions’ breakfast call.
The next call will be held on Thursday 30 April from 8.30–9.30am.
You can sign up using the link below:
We look forward to seeing you there!
Further reading
Your Agenda, Your Discussions: Our journey navigating new terrain:
Exploring Future Leadership with the Directors’ Network:
