Conduct, rules and community

Who It's For

Councillors, especially those newly elected, and the officers who work alongside them in Wales and England

Overview

Good governance depends on trusted relationships, fair rules and real connection with communities. Completing Your first days in office, this half day opens with political leadership, drawing on doctoral research in Rhondda Cynon Taf and community power in Westmorland and Furness, then examines member-officer relationships through Eric Berne's transactional analysis. It sets out codes of conduct under the Welsh and English regimes, and handling interests with the Porter v Magill test and the Greensill Capital case. Chairing the whole room draws on Bion, Janis and Edmondson, followed by standing orders and quorum. It concludes with McKnight and Kretzmann's asset-based community development and the Preston Model.

Aims

This half day exists to help councillors build working relationships with officers that hold under pressure, handle conduct and interests with confidence, take part in meetings that are fair and open, and work with communities from their strengths rather than their deficits.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Use transactional analysis to steer a difficult member-officer conversation towards Adult to Adult, and plan a jointly built protocol.
2. 2Apply the five steps for handling an interest, and the fair-minded and informed observer test, to decisions in your own work.
3. 3Identify the assets already present in a place using McKnight and Kretzmann's building blocks, and assess whether the conditions for community wealth building exist.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Distinguish discretionary from prescribed activity, and transactional from transformational leadership, and explain how members and officers sit differently on each.
2. 2Distinguish political from managerial leadership and explain where the two legitimately overlap.
3. 3Distinguish a code of conduct, which sets minimum standards, from a behavioural framework, which describes what good looks like.
4. 4Distinguish actual, potential and perceived conflicts of interest and apply the fair-minded and informed observer test.
5. 5Identify Bion's dependency, fight-flight and pairing patterns in a meeting and describe how a chair can act as a container.
6. 6Identify where the rules for your meeting come from and check that it is quorate, including when members leave part way through.
7. 7Apply McKnight and Kretzmann's five building blocks to map the assets already present in a place, and distinguish this from stakeholder mapping.
8. 8Distinguish a wish list from a delivered community strategy using the four requirements of shared vision, narrow priorities, a named delivery mechanism and a review cycle.