DARK DAYS AHEAD PREPARING FOR A DIFFICULT WINTER
THE MONTHS AHEAD ARE GOING TO BE CHALLENGING. NOW IS THE TIME FOR CIVIL SERVICE LEADERS
Armed with these insights, teams are exploring how they will support each other through the coming challenges. They are working on defining the value-add they can bring and examining questions like: “What is it that must be done and can only be done by us working together? What could be done by others if given enough guidance and direction? Where might we need to take the risk of putting something on hold because of other priorities?”
Sometimes we suggest a “pre-mortem” about their key objective. If the team stood in the future and discovered that the goal was missed, what would be most likely to have gone wrong?
What could they do in the present to make failure less likely?
The biggest risk may be that the team does not take others with them. Hence the importance of addressing questions like: “What do our people, customers and stakeholders need from us now? What’s the shift we need to make in our mindsets and behaviours if we are going to be as influential as we need to be?”
Some leaders are holding back from this type of conversation with their senior team, because they don’t want to overload them further. Their reluctance is understandable – but potentially misguided. It’s often the case that team members are waiting for the conversation to happen.
Some team members will be keen to advance their careers and want to learn what it means to work at the next level. Others may want to ensure that their particular strengths will be used to the full in facing the coming months. A number may want a stronger sense of support from their colleagues. Most people prefer being in a team with a strong sense of shared identity and purpose, however hard the challenge.
As one of our clients said to us: “Working as a team helps to keep you and everyone else going.”
Hilary Douglas and Peter Shaw are former directors general in the UK government who now work with senior leaders as coaches at Praesta Partners. They are co-authors of The Resilient Leader (2020) and The Resilient Team (2017), which are available to download from www.praesta.co.uk
There are many demands on a permanent secretary’s time, as Jonathan Slater well knows. Until he left the Department for Education in September, ministers, officials and education bodies were all vying for the perm sec’s ear. But lockdown brought more stakeholders into Slater’s working day, which for his last few months on the job was spent – like most civil servants – at home. He recalls one memorable phone call over the summer, when chief medical officer Chris Whitty called to talk about reopening schools while Slater was in the garden with his daughter. “I hoped it would be a short conversation, so I tried to play French cricket with her and speak to Chris at the same time,” Slater says. “I thought I was doing a pretty good job but she thought I wasn’t concentrating enough, so she went and sat with her back to me until I finished the call.”
Those breaks in the garden, trampolining or playing French cricket, were precious – because the enormity of the challenges coronavirus presented for Slater’s department meant he was soon seeing much less of his family than he would have liked.
“We’ve all been struggling during lockdown to balance work and home life. That is true for me and for anybody,” Slater tells CSW over the phone. He is waiting to meet a former colleague at a club near his old stomping ground in Whitehall – something that until recently, he has had very little free time to do. It is only a few weeks since he left government in what he calls “difficult circumstances”, following months of 14-hour days leading DfE’s response to the pandemic.
Issues the department had been grappling with during Covid included whether – and when – to close schools; which children should stay in school;
Jonathan Slater was one of the nation’s top civil servants until he was asked to leave by Boris Johnson in August after the A-Levels grades row. In an exclusive interview with Beckie Smith, he reflects on his departure and achievements at the Department for Education. Photography by Baldo Sciacca
and how to calculate grades for students whose exams had been cancelled.
Of course, DfE had its critics – who were especially vocal when schools closed to most pupils in March. Parents were given just two days notice that only children of specified key workers could remain in class.
Does Slater think the criticism was fair? “So it was certainly being done in a hurry, absolutely. No doubt about it. We had less than a week to close all the schools in the country. Everybody was having to scramble to operate as quickly as possible, in circumstances where we hadn’t expected to have to work at such speed.”
He says agreeing the key worker list took time. “Do you include shopkeepers, for example? If they don’t get to go to work, then how do we get food? But equally, there’s a lot of them.”
Slater personally recommended to the prime minister that schools remain open to vulnerable children. “It seemed to me we should provide continued education, if we could, to support
“Everybody was having to scramble to operate as quickly as possible, in circumstances where we hadn’t expected to have to work at such speed”