Local government often sees management skills as transferable – but how often is that backed up in the recruitment process? asks Blair McPherson Like many organisations, we have recently undertaken a major management restructuring. New senior management posts were created and salaries reviewed, to ensure they were attractive and competitive. Yet we were disappointed at the quality and number of suitable applicants. The age profile of our workforce combined with fewer young people in the population mean this scarcity of talent is likely to get worse. So, what can public sector bodies do? Organisations could ‘grow their own'. This would involve cramming the maximum amount of experience into the minimum amount of time. What's needed is not managers with many years' experience in the same area of work, but managers with a broad range of experience. Five years in the same area of work at the same level does not necessarily equal five years' experience. All too often, it is one year's experience times five. As organisations increasingly adopt a project-management approach to delivering change, there are more opportunities for people to gain experience beyond their normal area of work by getting involved in corporate projects. How about an exchange of skills between directorates? How many people, say, from environment, are involved in a project within social services? These opportunities will only be taken up if there is a clear expectation that every manager should be involved in at least one major project. This could be built into annual appraisals. Aspiring senior managers would be expected to be involved in a corporate project, and to have been a project manager for a directorate project. Participation in a project or, better still, being a project manager, is an effective way of broadening an individual's experience in a relatively-short period of time. The most effective way of broadening a manager's experience and strengthening their management skills is to ask them to lead outside their technical or professional specialism. This forces them to delegate, as they are not able to fall back on their superior professional knowledge. Rather, they have to develop their management skills. These skills include managing people, influencing significant others, seeing the bigger picture, being strategic, quickly grasping complex information about new areas of service/business, and the ability to paint a clear picture to a diverse group of people showing what the future will look like and explaining how we will get there. Offering people posts in areas of service outside their comfort zone, taking operational staff and putting them in IT or HR posts and taking support staff and putting them in operational posts would be radical. If this at first seems hopelessly impractical, remember the average director comes from an operational background, and on appointment, assumes line management responsibility for the assistant director of finance, the head of HR and the head of IT. No-one thinks this strange or points out that the director is not a qualified accountant, doesn't have a personnel qualification, and is barely IT literate. You don't have to be a teacher to run a school or be director of education. We often say management skills are transferable, but how often do we back this up in our approach to recruitment? The risks of such an approach could be reduced by effective mentoring arrangements and learning sets which offer mutual support. Most organisations make this kind of investment in their senior managers – growing your own requires a similar level of investment in first line and middle management. I have personal experience of this approach. Early on in my management career I was appointed on a two-year secondment to deliver a major project. I managed a team which included senior finance and IT staff, and operational staff from mental health and learning disability services, even though my own experience was limited to children's residential and older people services. In truth, I got the job because no one individual could offer the breadth of experience the post required, so they went for enthusiasm and potential. Which is exactly what is involved in ‘growing your own'. Blair McPherson is director of community services at Lancashire CC
