Attention, local government managers!
Strategic Public Leaders is an intensive short course for senior and mid-tier local government leaders to learn strategic skills.
- Level up your leadership: With strategic skills, you lead with more intention and confidence. Strategic leaders are goal-oriented and make consistent, intentional choices that move them in the right direction.
- Elevate your impact: Strategic public leaders rise above the operational overwhelm to see the bigger picture and move the needle on the most important stuff.
- Future-proof your career: Developing strategic skills involves a combination of communication, tactical and people skills delivering a higher return on investment.
Making progress in a highly visible, political, regulated, responsive environment like local government is challenging. You have an ambitious work program to deliver and limited resources to do it with. Add community issues, government consultations and media attention into the mix (before we talk about ever-changing Councillor requests), and it may seem impossible to move forward. The demand on local government managers is increasing. The number of initiatives, scope of responsibilities, and cost burdens shifted to local government are escalating – as is the complexity of those requirements.
Strategic Public Leaders helps local government leaders who are experiencing challenges such as:
- Being overwhelmed by tasks, projects, and priorities.
- Caught in a reactive cycle of responding to ad-hoc problems instead of progressing key strategic projects.
- Becoming defensive and frustrated when interacting with elected members.
- Dealing with delays in delivering strategies, plans, and procedures.
- Having difficulty building engagement, purpose, and ownership with your team.
A local government leader’s most important responsibility is to deliver on the elected members’ strategic vision for the community. This is the role of the administration. Councils are filled with passionate, knowledgeable operational leaders, while decision-making and strategic skills are not taught. Strategy and decision-making are often treated as an artistic talent or other intuitive abilities. The good news is that strategic skills can be learned! Having practical tools and frameworks on hand to ask relevant questions, make better decisions and see the full picture, you can transition to a strategic public leader and watch your impact transform your council. With strategic skills, you will lead with more intention and direction, even as you flex and respond to the ever-changing needs of your Council and community. By building your strategic skills, you can shift from a busy public manager to a strategic public leader.
Course topics and learning outcomes
In this two-day rapid intensive, get a grounding in core principles of strategic leadership for local government, along with a suite of practical tools and strategies you can apply for immediate progress.
Topics include:
- Strategic basics: Demystifying strategic thinking and planning frameworks.
- Role clarity: Drawing a line between governance and management.
- Bridging the gap: Aligning big picture strategy to daily operations.
- Decision-making: Planning, making, and evaluating quality decisions.
- Systems thinking: Solving tricky problems in complex systems.
Alicia’s training workshops are at the cutting edge of thinking for senior public leaders. Both inspiring and pragmatic, this training is designed to tackle limiting habits and behaviours while embedding practical skills.
At the end of this course, you will have the skills to:
- Apply strategic frameworks to align daily operations to big-picture strategy.
- Prioritise never-ending project wish lists with clarity and confidence.
- Elevate conversations with colleagues and Councillors from operational issues to strategic impact.
- Evaluate the quality of decisions effectively to improve buy-in and project success.