By Alistair Neill, Chief Executive at
Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council
With nominations open for the Leading
Wales Awards 2006, Alistair Neill, chief executive at Merthyr
Tydfil County Borough Council and winner of the 2005 Leading
Wales Award, looks at how public sector leadership could
learn from private businesses.
The public sector plays a huge role in
the Welsh economy. It employs an enormous number of people
and affects many more. Yet when it comes to leadership,
it might benefit from looking at the private sector.
By applying some of the approaches employed
by many successful private businesses, the public sector’s
culture, image and service delivery could be transformed,
but it will need to apply some bold and transformational
thinking – and leadership.
After 21 years in the private sector,
taking on the challenges of a leadership role in local government
at Merthyr Tydfil Council held a few surprises. There is
so much that is very good, very committed and very inspiring
about the public sector in Wales – but there are also
many changes that we need to bring about to radicalise the
way we deliver services in the future.
‘Team Merthyr’ transformed
Merthyr Tydfil Council by applying management and leadership
approaches developed in the private sector and, as a result,
lasting radical and positive change is being achieved, enabling
the Council itself to perform in a respected leadership
role.
By starting with customers and engaging
them, responding to their needs and tailoring services around
them, leaders can construct a stronger, more effective public
sector for Wales. But too much of what Councils do is driven
not by local needs and customers, but by central or national
priorities and policy-making.
In the world of business, no company would
survive by designing its services centrally and then presenting
them to its potential customers in the hope that it’s
right for them. In the public sector, traditional structures
need to evolve away from central ‘control’ into
flexibly meeting local customer needs in a modern and relevant
way.
A culture of centrally imposing external
requirements onto public sector organisations has not helped
to create organisations that embrace constant change and
gradual evolution. Instead this has created too prevalent
a culture where employees are heavily risk-averse and not
highly motivated.
It also leaves many customers feeling
disengaged – a cardinal mistake, as any business knows.
Freeing up local councils to identify their own priorities
and drive on them, to establish their own key performance
issues and monitor them, reducing the cumbersome burden
of inspection and audit – in a balance with meeting
necessary national requirements – will have the huge
advantage of motivating the people in our organisations
to be more responsible for their own performance.
We need to un-clutter the delivery mechanisms
of funding. There is a veritable industry of channels and
mechanisms to ‘bid for’ funding for key projects
which is a bureaucrat’s dream and a customer’s
nightmare. Simplifying these mechanisms is important.
Local government in both England and Wales
carries a top-down hierarchical approach to leadership that
is counter-productive to organisational performance, leaving
customers at the bottom level. It tends to equate the value
and contribution of management and staff according to grade.
It also places senior managers at the furthest distance
from customer and front-line staff.
It also doesn’t help that the public
sector sometimes takes the attitude that it can’t
go out of business, so why bother changing? As well as being
untrue – any organisation that doesn’t function
well is liable to be re-structured or replaced - this is
extremely unwise. Change can rejuvenate an organisation,
bringing about innovation, improvements, increased motivation
and customer satisfaction.
For example, Merthyr Council is developing
the culture of a horizontal organisation that flattens the
hierarchy and brings everyone closer to the customer, including
the senior management team. With the hierarchy removed,
we can hear what our customers, management and staff are
saying at first hand and react much more quickly.
Good leaders understand that leaders exist
at different levels. Bringing those leaders out of the hierarchical
clauset is tremendously rewarding – it can also powerfully
contribute to the change an organisation is crying out for.
The Continuous Improvement Programme (CIP)
introduced at Merthyr Council gives staff at any level the
opportunity to lead change. Over 400 people volunteered
and were trained in the programme. Now 70 CIP teams focus
on improvements in their own service area. Management must
respond to their proposals. This really helps motivate people
locally, helping to deliver services designed to be better
for its customers.
Merthyr is attracting important new investment
from both the public and private sectors, including new
National Assembly building, major new regional retail park
and further major projects embracing education and retail.
It is successfully positioning itself as the regional strategic
centre for the Valleys and is banishing its old image for
good.
The Council and Team Merthyr is playing
a key leadership role in this transformation, in part by
becoming a good and rapidly improving organisation that
people are now ready to do business with, and partly by
building confidence through projection of a new future role
as the regional strategic centre. This is a business strategy
at work – better customer focus, better projection
of Merthyr as a region.
By taking a leaf out of the private sector’s
book, public sector leadership can create something people
are proud to work for and even prouder to use in Wales.
