I’ve been talking with Manjeet Gill about leadership in #localgovernmentreorganisation, part of the RedQuadrant #LGR Hub. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_localgovernmentreorganisation-lgr-ugcPost-7475571973708840960-ZLG0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADUV_eUBZSxZvFpx70OV050F6K5HM2MhTMo
I’ve been talking with Manjeet Gill about leadership in #localgovernmentreorganisation, part of the RedQuadrant #LGR Hub.
One phrase kept coming up for me: shared mindsets before shared structures.
That can sound soft, until you’ve seen what happens without it.
LGR asks leaders to run today’s council while designing tomorrow’s council. It asks chief executives, leaders, statutory officers and senior teams to defend current services, support staff, hold political tensions, manage partner relationships, design a new authority, and still make credible decisions under scrutiny. Then we wonder why the system starts to creak.
Manjeet made the point from direct experience. Leadership capacity isn’t just about whether individuals are capable. It’s about what happens to the leadership system under sustained pressure.
– Where do decisions start to slow?
– When do heads of service stop getting clarity?
– Where does communication narrow just when it most needs to widen?
– Where do people start filling the silence with fear?
A lot of LGR work goes quickly to the formal machinery: programme boards; workstreams; data requests; target operating models; constitutional arrangements.
All needed — but none sufficient!
The deeper question is whether the people around the table have moved beyond representing their organisation, their geography, their political pressure, their legacy, their current anxiety.
Not abandoning those things. That would be fantasy. But becoming able to hold them while also representing the future council and the people it will serve.
That doesn’t happen because someone says ‘trust each other’ in a workshop. It happens through structured conversations about hopes, fears, priorities, risks, governance, trade-offs and what each partner can offer the others. By creating enough honesty before the system hardens.
My worry is that too many places will mistake agreement on structures for readiness to lead together; they aren’t the same thing. And if the leadership system fractures, no programme plan will save it.
We’ve built our LGR development offer around this problem: shared mindsets before shared structures, and leadership through transition. The interview is well worth watching! Check out the link below for the full thing.
You can view the full video here: https://youtu.be/YDhsdGVVBsg
We’ll be posting more LGR videos shortly.
And you can read more about our LGR offer here: https://www.redquadrant.com/lgrhub
chosen path 