Slough Borough Council

I heard about the financial difficulties Slough Borough Council had been having in early 2022 and when I was signposted to the interim position of Chief Digital and Information Officer, my curiosity made me look deeper. With family connections to the area, I felt this might be an interesting opportunity to help an organisation in a difficult place, to recover. Since undertaking my MBA in 2010 I have had a particular focus on how leadership impacts transformation and change programmes. From what I was hearing during the interview process, transparency, and people’s willingness to share the issues and problems was likely to be one of the most important areas of focus.

Break the fear

It quickly became clear that first and foremost, it was essential for me to make clear that historic decisions made in moments of pressure, taken to resolve a particular moment in time issue, and under pressure, were not going to be judged. Overall, like most organisations I think, people were clearly working with the best intent. However, the prevailing culture made it hard for staff to share failures and seek support for long term issues. When you consider that in Slough’s case the sequence of events was; early termination of a transactional services contract that included IT, Covid-19, attempting to deploy into a new head office during Covid, and major reorganisation of the management team that had clearly been destabilising, the prevailing culture had of course suffered. Establishing trust and transparency was therefore at the top of my agenda.

"The more I shared into the top management team, and with elected members, the more trust we started to receive"

Share the challenges

My openness and willingness to share the issues I discovered was of course worrying for some staff. However, it quickly became obvious that the more I shared into the top management team, and with elected members, the more trust we started to receive. Of course, this can’t happen in isolation, and we had to explain how we would also get control of the situation. At the point I joined the Council the team had already established a programme of work to tackle some of the core issues at the heart of the technical problems. We have built on this control and routinely share the status of our work, along with the risks, issues and delays that have inevitably occurred. We have also established more robust tracking of audit actions and department risks, with the latter now being used as the basis for risk recording across the whole Council. As a result, we have now developed a reputation for having a good level of control.

An opportunity

We still have a challenging journey ahead of us but by implementing the foundational blocks, especially making people feel safe to expose issues, and by continuing to demonstrate control, we have the best chance of success. For anyone wanting to have a big impact, I genuinely believe this will be a great place to work and to grow their career over the coming years.