Devolution is reshaping the landscape for local councils across the UK. Greater local decision-making brings opportunities to tailor services, respond quickly to community needs, and innovate in ways previously constrained by centralised processes. Yet these opportunities come with complexity: overlapping responsibilities, heightened scrutiny, and the need to respond rapidly to uncertainty. For councils to thrive, leadership teams must do more than manage day-to-day operations, they must lead through ambiguity with purpose, clarity, and adaptability.
At the heart of effective leadership is a simple truth: remarkable results start with exceptional people. Hanover Leadership Solutions is committed to helping leaders thrive and create lasting impact for their teams and communities. To navigate the uncertainty of devolution, councils need leadership teams that deliberately cultivate a broad spectrum of capabilities. This is where our Leadership Code and its archetypes become essential.
The Leadership Code recognises that no single style can address all challenges; each contributes a unique perspective and capability. By understanding and harnessing each archetype below, councils can build teams that are resilient, adaptable, and responsive to both internal and community needs, directly addressing the pressures of devolution while also embedding accountability, strengthening local institutions, and improving responsiveness to residents.
• Growth Leaders foster continuous learning, adaptability, and reflection. In an environment where funding, governance, and policy priorities shift unpredictably, growth-oriented leaders ensure councils evolve alongside the communities they serve, helping teams respond effectively to emerging local challenges.
• Visionary Leaders set long-term direction, providing clarity and purpose even amid volatility. They inspire confidence and focus teams on outcomes that matter most, helping councils navigate overlapping responsibilities, complex decision-making structures, and policy uncertainty.
• Transformative Leaders challenge legacy processes and drive innovation. By questioning entrenched systems and seizing opportunities overlooked by others, they counteract top-down constraints and Whitehall-driven limitations, ensuring councils can implement effective solutions tailored to their local communities.
• Resilient Leaders maintain composure under pressure, helping organisations absorb setbacks without losing momentum. In the context of heightened scrutiny, shifting priorities, or unexpected crises, resilience ensures teams remain steady, maintain performance, and sustain public trust.
• Inclusive Leaders ensure diverse voices are represented in decision-making. By embedding outward accountability to communities, they help councils address low engagement, co-design policies that meet the needs of all residents, and build legitimacy in the eyes of the public, directly tackling one of the core challenges of devolution.
• Empathetic Leaders sense how change lands emotionally and culturally within the organisation and wider community. Empathy strengthens trust, helps manage resistance, and ensures leaders respond effectively to local concerns, especially important in areas where local media scrutiny is limited or community engagement is low.
Building a leadership team that embodies these archetypes is not just aspirational, it is practical. Teams with complementary strengths make more informed, creative, and inclusive decisions, anticipate risks, and identify opportunities early. The Code also strengthens succession planning, ensuring councils maintain capability at every level and are not overly reliant on a single individual or leadership style.
Embedding the Leadership Code in practice involves targeted development, structured reflection on team composition, and ongoing assessment of how leaders perform across archetypes. This approach gives councils a clear framework to evaluate leadership gaps, nurture potential, and equip leaders to step up when situations demand it. By linking leadership development to the realities of devolved governance - overlapping responsibilities, heightened scrutiny, local engagement challenges, and uneven regional capacity - councils can turn uncertainty into opportunity.
In practice, the Code supports councils to tackle devolution challenges by:
1. Enhancing decision-making capability: Leaders with complementary archetypes collectively navigate complexity and accountability pressures.
2. Building adaptive teams: Growth and Resilient leaders help teams absorb change and respond rapidly.
3. Strengthening community trust: Inclusive and Empathetic leaders ensure policies are responsive, equitable, and locally grounded.
4. Driving innovation: Transformative and Visionary leaders challenge legacy processes, enabling councils to seize new opportunities effectively.
Ultimately, leading through uncertainty is less about controlling every variable and more about ensuring the right people are in the right positions to act decisively, collaboratively, and with purpose. When councils deliberately shape teams that collectively embody the full range of Leadership Code archetypes, they not only manage the complexities of devolution, they convert them into real, tangible outcomes for their organisations, their staff, and the communities they serve. In this way, remarkable results are not just possible; they are inevitable.
Elle Robinson is managing director, leadership solutions, at Hanover
