What if one of the most underestimated risks in LGR is institutional bereavement?

Join the conversation on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_localgovernment-lgr-publicservicetransformation-activity-7488141561860431873-twJl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

This occurred to me after interviewing Simon Higgins about his experience of the Cumbria reorganisation. Simon talked about people who had begun their careers in one of the seven councils, met their partners there, had children, and accumulated decades of relationships and memories across a whole career. Then the organisation came to an end.

We tend to describe what happens in LGR as ‘resistance to change’, ‘cultural integration’, or a need for better communication. Not false, but they flatten what’s happening to the people.

A council is a legal entity and an employer. It’s also a web of identity, status, friendship, tacit knowledge, loyalty, habit, and personal history. The legal entity can disappear at midnight on vesting day. The rest doesn’t.

The new organisation then changes people’s experience of work in quite practical ways. Someone moving from a district of 250 people into a council of more than 4,000 may go from a broad role, daily contact with senior leaders, and substantial informal authority to a narrower and deeper role inside several management layers.

That may be a sensible organisational design, but it can still represent a genuine loss of scope, proximity, status, and belonging.

This changes how I think about culture work in LGR.

It should begin before structures and appointments harden, but not with a set of proposed values and an awayday. It should begin by understanding the distinct cultures involved, what people value in them, what they fear losing, and which forms of local knowledge and relational capacity the new council cannot afford to discard.

Leaders also need to be more honest. Telling people that very little will change may reduce anxiety for a week, but it removes their ability to prepare for what is actually coming.

The financial opening balance sheet of the new council matters. So does the less visible inheritance of trust, grief, status, loyalty, and expectation. It will turn up in the organisation whether the programme has accounted for it or not.

The full interview is here: https://lnkd.in/eZZ35yq6
hashtag#LocalGovernment hashtag#LGR hashtag#PublicServiceTransformation