Civil Service Live
Learning to lead
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Inspirational leadership will be the fulcrum on which any successful department or team will be built, director general of leadership and people strategy Gill Rider has explained.
Speaking on day two of Civil Service Live, Rider outlined key buzzwords that should act as prompts towards delivering a consistently excellent style of leadership.
After spending 27 years in the private sector, specifically in the energy and natural resources sectors, Rider is relatively new to the civil service, joining two years ago and she was open in her admiration of the calibre of staff in the public sector, stating that she was “in awe” of the leadership she had witnessed.
Standing in front of a washing line, clipped upon which were a series of seemingly abstract pictures, she went on to illustrate to the audience the significance each had in terms of emphasising certain aspects that dovetailed in constructing a great leader.
The card on which C3 was written denoted the relationship between competence, communication and confidence, Rider remarked. She advised that a competent leader would instil confidence in the workforce, through accurate and necessary communication.
Other cards used by Rider to reinforce her opinions on inspirational leadership were a swan (grace and calmness), a heart (passion), a present (appreciation), a formula which equated to trust equals credibility + reliability + intimacy divided by self orientation.
In terms of this latter idea, Rider explained that self orientation can be affected by the detrimental impacts of stress.
“When people are stressed, whether they are showing it to you, whether it's something from home, whether they're talking about it or not, stress has a real impact on self orientation.”
She went on to say that the trust of an individual by a team can be adversely affected when that team may
”[reject] somebody thinking that they're not performing well when it's actually nothing to do with their credibility or reliability and it's everything to do with self orientation that people say, which has been agitated and exaggerated by stress.”
On the subject of engagement, illustrated by a picture of three interlinked rings, Rider admitted having a penchant for “simple formulas”, offering one of her favourites:
“Inspiring leaders are the number one thing that creates engaged employees. And if you have engaged employees you do have an increase in productivity.”
And on successfully implementing change in an organisation, Rider is aware that there is bound to be a dip in morale at some point and this should be prepared for in advance:
“It takes positive intervention on anything to get out of the ‘valley of despair’ and that's the lesson that I took after years of trying to make complicated change happen”
Other buzzwords discussed in detail by Rider were authenticity; understanding of organisational culture and ensuring that alignment is sought in terms of values, intentions, promises and actions; focusing on fostering diversity in the workforce to amass differing mindsets on a given subject; and also nurture in respect to encouraging a focus on values.
Rider ended the session by drawing everything back to relationships and she explained that one of the biggest lessons she has learnt is that
“the people working for you have [to have] the right skills but ultimately, things get done because of relationships.”
“The more senior you get, actually, for many ways, the more important it becomes, that relationships between people at the top of organisations, trust, integrity, all of those things are absolutely fundamental to making organisations work successfully,”
she concluded.