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“Keeping it personal”: new system leadership essay collection from CollaborateCIC’s Ignite course
CollaborateCIC is pleased to announce the publication of their new essay collection on system leadership in local government, authored by Chief Executives who have participated in the Collaborate/Solace Ignite system leadership programme over the past year:
The essays set out compelling portraits of the challenges these leaders face in their localities, in a context of perpetual and rapid change. They reveal how important Ignite has been in supporting their progress, raising their ambition, and reflecting on their work. Local authority Chief Executives were missing critical support and important challenge. And they show how, through Ignite, they found it in each other.
The starting point for Ignite discussions has been the context of austerity, rising demand, increasing complexity, and ongoing political uncertainty. These extraordinary factors have certainly formed a now familiar background to our discussions. However, as the essays in this new collection attest, our real focus has been on what it means to embrace this complexity: to develop the personal resilience to work effectively within it and to find ways to bring colleagues, partners and communities along on the journey too.
The collection takes a personal approach to its core questions, because:
… leadership itself is personal, and many of the stories reflected are of people finding the inner resources to meet the needs of local people in challenging times. Personal purpose provides the resilience and energy to lead organisations within complex systems. It is the bedrock on which everything else in the role of a Chief Executive rests. Extending our thinking about leadership beyond organisations into systems requires us to start with our own capacity, appetite, and commitment for the challenge.
CollaborateCIC’s Ignite leadership programme has helped participants to recall why they went into public service in the first place, to consider the degree to which their current roles enable them to fulfil that original purpose, and to reconnect with it, to approach their work today in that original spirit.
If you would like to find out more about the Ignite programme or Collaborate’s leadership offer, please get in touch with Anna Randle .