Chairing with purpose
Chairing committees, learning from failure and member relations.
Around four hours on chairing with purpose: committees and public meetings, minutes and actions, three capstone cases, learning from failure, building a learning system, political leadership and member-officer relationships.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Serving the public
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Chairs and members of committees and boards in councils, health and the voluntary sector, and the officers who support them
Overview
A meeting is only as good as the decision it leaves behind. Drawn from Holding to account, this course starts with chairing audit, scrutiny, planning and public meetings, including hybrid meetings and the different legal paths in Wales and England, with the Pwyllgor of Mind Cymru as an example. It follows the meeting out of the room through minutes, action logs and Steven Rogelberg's work, then reads Handforth Parish Council, HBOS and Attlee's Cabinet. Learning from failure draws on black box thinking, the Swiss cheese model and just culture at Mersey Care. It rounds off with political leadership and member-officer relationships, drawing on Hambrick and Mason and Eric Berne.
Aims
It is designed to help chairs lead meetings with a clear sense of purpose, close actions on evidence rather than hope, learn openly when things go wrong, and build working relationships between members and officers that withstand hard challenge in public.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Plan a scrutiny session or public meeting that keeps to evidence, treats people fairly and gives remote members parity.
- Use the action log and the board evaluation cycle to close actions on evidence and review your own chairing honestly.
- Apply Reason's system approach and the restorative questions used at Mersey Care to respond to failure by fixing the system, not just the case.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Distinguish how the chairing of audit, scrutiny, planning, remuneration and stakeholder committees should differ according to their purpose.
- Explain the four jobs that minutes do and identify what good minutes should contain, including brief evidence of challenge.
- Explain how unclear authority and process conflict caused the Handforth meeting to break down, and identify how settling who presides helps prevent this.
- Distinguish Edmondson's basic, complex and intelligent failures and choose a proportionate leadership response to each.
- Apply the four habits of useful learning reviews and the four aims of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework to a complaint or incident in your own setting.
- Distinguish discretionary from prescribed activity, and transactional from transformational leadership, and explain how members and officers sit differently on each.
- Distinguish political from managerial leadership and explain where the two legitimately overlap.
- Plan a scrutiny session and a public meeting that keep to evidence, treat witnesses and the public fairly, and handle disruption proportionately.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Committees in the public eyeChairing committees, scrutiny and minutesBitesize · Chairing Meetings, Boards and Committees3 modules
- 02Failing well, learning fastLearning from failure and service improvementBitesize · Complaints, Ombudsmen and Learning from Failure2 modules
- 03Two roles, one purposeMember-officer relations and leadershipBitesize · Working in a Political Environment2 modules