Local Leadership

The job of councillors is to make sure the direction taken by the City Council reflects the reality – both opportunities and needs – in communities.  This ‘local leadership’ – engaging with people and working in partnership – is a key part of being a councillor.  It has never been easy – and current conditions in many ways make it harder. The aim of this guide is make the job a little easier. The guide – and the website of which it is part – are designed to be updated and amended by users.  That includes local community leaders who are not councillors as well as ones who have been elected.  This guide is not full of rules about local governance; but suggestions that might help you get even better at engagement, partnership and leadership.

 

A Citizens’ Council

Local councils came about because citizens set them up. Although a lot of what councils do is decided by Parliament, their prime responsibility is to citizens.   Councils are not limited by what Parliament says they should do: they can do anything which is legal and which benefits the area and its citizens, now and in future.

Since the move to the Cabinet Model, most councillors are not often involved in making council decisions.  In this context, local leadership is the difference between being a ‘backbench’ or a ‘frontline’ councillor.  Thinking about what makes effective local leadership has developed over the past ten years from the idea of ‘placeshaping’: that is ‘moving beyond the management of services to the leadership of localities’.

The Localism Act aimed to help councillors take up the local leadership role.  Public spending cuts make it essential.  In Birmingham, there are all sorts of factors that generally serve to encourage and enable councillors to develop local leadership, not least an active and innovative civil society. The future wellbeing of neighbourhoods and communities depends on local leaders working with, and as part of, a Citizens’ Council.

 

Practical Action

Leadership is a set of qualities, abilities and resources – not a single thing you are either born with, or not.  Effective leadership can help to win elections, of course, but its point is to take practical action: doing the right thing, not necessarily always saying what is most popular.

This guide picks out six areas in which local leaders can take practical action to improve their local leadership approach.  They are not intended to be a comprehensive set and each one is simply a set of starting points on:

 

• Leadership styles – we need different sorts of people to lead at different times – there is no formula for the perfect leader. Local community leaders come in all shapes and sizes and from all communities.  Councillors are local leaders – but they also have a special role – to be connectors between communities and enablers of other active citizens. Getting better at this depends on knowing your area and using good communications skills (especially in listening).  The greatest problem with communication may often be that we assume it has happened, when it hasn’t.

• Community dialogue – is the words between us that hold things together. It matters, in particular, in diverse neighbourhoods.  Most Birmingham neighbourhoods are diverse, even the ones you might not think of as being so.  They are great places to listen and learn.  Conversation – rather than consultation – is often the route to that learning.  ‘Outsiders’ may have the most to teach us about the places we live.  Community  dialogue takes place wherever communities meet.  Particularly valuable are those places – which you might call ‘community hubs’ – where different communities meet.  Not everywhere called a ‘community centre’ or a ‘community hub’ necessarily works as one however.

There are simple things you can do to make more of the opportunities to chat and to listen other people’s conversation: avoid using consultations and follow the principles of good conversation instead; start by asking about things like the environment, safety, schools and young people which most people know and care about; if communities are at loggerheads, try shifting the timeframe – ask people about short term achievable improvements, or about what they want to see in the long-term.

• Local ward meetings – are an essential forum for local leadership. Birmingham’s ward committees have been re-defined.  Councillors and other local leaders can follow whatever form best fits the local functions required.  Different approaches are taking shape in different parts of the city.  Local leaders should not be afraid to experiment and to try out new approaches to running meetings, varying: venues, timing, style of meetings and ways of running meetings enable conversation, for example.

Looking at how meetings are run in other places is a good idea – but there is no single winning formula.  Local leadership isn’t, in any case, about applying rules or standard approaches, but unlocking and using local creativity and potential; enabling what there is to work together to make better places to live.  In considering how you want local meetings to work, bear in mind that people tend to feel uncomfortable with any change to start with.  That feeling generally passes when people can see new ways working in practice – producing results.

• Social innovation – means enabling different people to do different things in different ways to add  social value, ie to make better places to live.  There is nothing ‘set in stone’ about public services.  They are all the result of past innovation – often led by voluntary groups.

The need for social innovation is particularly strong now because of cuts in public spending and increasing demand for social care.  Trying out new ways of delivering services – particularly based on involving service users and communities – is essential.  Local leaders are in a good position to make a success of new, ‘coproduced’ services.  Trying out new things, however, can be costly, risky and hard to explain to service users.  Innovating without much money; managing risk; and accounting for the variation in services that results from finding new ways of adding social value isn’t easy.  There may be ways, however, to overcome these challenges.

• Social media – is the ways people have for having conversations in public.  The internet has added to social media, but it’s important to bear in mind that people have always had ways to have public conversations.  Social media which are nothing to do with digital technology remain some of the most direct and effective.

Social media can change the relationship between local leaders and citizens.  You can use social media to increase the ways of listening and make communication less formal and more creative.  Engagement with social media can help you to become more of an enabler of other people.  Simple things local leaders can do to engage with digital social media include setting up and using: a Facebook identity; a Twitter profile; and a blog.  Doing these things can help you get more value from good old-fashioned non-digital social media including meetings and events.

• Open data – data is facts we can make useful information from. ‘Open data’ is data that is stored, distributed and presented in such a way that we can use it and re-use it creatively and in different ways.

Local leaders bring together data from different kinds of sources to inform local decision making.  Effective and informed decisions depend on local knowledge which is rarely found in committee reports, project management spreadsheets or on official plans. It’s in everyone’s interest to  open up data about the places we live, work and serve.  The more easily people can form information about a neighbourhood, the more likely it is to thrive and make progress.

 

Birmingham City Council Values

In all of these areas – as in every aspect of work for the city of Birmingham, the City Council espouses these values:

• We put citizens first – we are empathetic and respectful in all we do
• We are true to our word – when we make promises we keep them
• We act courageously – in leadership, in management and in tackling difficult issues every day
• We aim to achieve excellence in all we do.