Leading together

Who It's For

A council's leader, cabinet and corporate management team; or a board and its executive

Overview

Leading together is top team development where the team actually works: for a council's leader, cabinet and corporate management team, or a board and its executive. Over six months it begins with diagnosis through profiles, 360 interviews and Avanti's XRAY team exercise, then two away days facilitated by Jon and Amanda: the first on who you are as a team, the second on where you are taking the council. In between, the team works through an Avanti Academy pathway together on top teams, political and officer roles, strategic thinking, culture, groupthink, conflict and change, with coaching for the leader and chief executive. XRAY is repeated at six months.

Aims

This programme aims to help a top team become a real team: clear about its purpose and roles, honest about how it decides and handles conflict, and aligned on where it is taking the organisation, leaving with a shared top-team compact and priorities that are reviewed at six months.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Diagnose how your top team currently works, using profile, 360 and XRAY evidence to name its strengths, blind spots and patterns of trust and conflict.
2. 2Agree shared priorities, distinct political and managerial roles and a common narrative, testing decisions against groupthink and the realities of implementation.
3. 3Lead change as one top team, building a culture of trust and candour and holding yourselves to a compact you review together.

What you'll develop

Over the programme, you and your cohort will be able to:

1. 1Distinguish a single-leader unit from real team mode and choose deliberately which an agenda item needs.
2. 2Distinguish discretionary from prescribed activity, and transactional from transformational leadership, and explain how members and officers sit differently on each.
3. 3Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
4. 4Identify Schein's embedding mechanisms, both day to day and through systems, and explain why they shape culture more than formal statements.
5. 5Explain what psychological safety is and is not, and how it combines with high standards to create a learning zone.
6. 6Distinguish task, relationship and process conflict and explain what the meta-analyses say about each.
7. 7Identify which frameworks, including the Strategic Choice Approach, Cynefin, Five Forces, Blue Ocean and Rumelt's kernel, were in play in each of the three cases.
8. 8Use the NAO's four root causes of scope, planning, interdependencies and oversight as a health check on any programme.