Tomorrow’s sector leaders – who are they and where will they come from?

There is no silver bullet to solve local government’s workforce crisis but a number of solutions could help make a difference.

Anyone reading a public sector publication or scanning local government job alerts cannot fail to have noticed the swathe of chief executive vacancies, often shortly followed by other senior responsible officer levels. More local authority CEO jobs have been advertised in the first half of 2023 than all of 2022, according to a reliable senior C-Suite colleague.

The eagle eyed will also have noticed the salary inflation on some of those top jobs. Why? Desperation? A necessity to attract the best candidates? Inflation? Danger money? The truth is likely a combination.

Post pandemic

Long-standing talent is leaving the sector for a variety of reasons. These include delayed post pandemic burnout, reassessment of priorities and work/life balance, new-found courage to pivot careers, changing electoral landscape, negative impact of social media and public accountability and of course pension reform.

Then there’s the transformation piece. Any new council CEO worth their salt will inevitably spend the first 30, 60, 90 days evaluating what has been inherited, listening to why and how things have been done, understanding their resident, business and wider stakeholder community base alongside a forensic deep dive under the financial bonnet.

With so many scare stories of multi-million black holes, future council CEOs will need to be hyper-resilient, laser-focused, highly numerate and data literate troubleshooters, with the utmost solution-focused organisational clarity.

Genuinely – how many of these super-human exemplar leaders are there in the sector? Where and how do we find them? From the lack of obvious ‘new blood’ into newly recruited CEO roles, there would appear to be a preference to err on the side of caution and recycle the known, safe, tried and tested as opposed to looking to different skillsets to tackle the challenges the sector will face in new areas such as AI, forensic accounting, crisis management etc.

While no one individual can be the silver bullet, deploying solutions like fractional leadership, job sharing at the top and bringing in partnership consultancy on an issue-led basis at senior responsible officer level can go some way to mitigating senior talent dearth and C-Suite burnout.

How Local Partnerships can help

At Local Partnerships we support central, regional and local government at the most senior levels to play our part in delivering value and efficacy for the public purse. This includes finding solutions to the themes identified in this article. Do get in touch with me if anything resonates!

This article is also available in the LGC