I’d heard of the concept of the difficult third album but actually couldn’t put my hands on a good example. The closest for me was actually the 4th album, by OMD, which the Guardian reviewed with the headline How to lose 3 million fans in one easy step.
Second, third or fourth, it doesn’t really matter. The idea is that an initial whirlwind of success is set back by the next attempt or phase. This week I hit the difficult third album in this role on Tuesday, leading to a sleepless night and lots of soul searching.
One of the reasons I’m doing these weeknotes is to force myself to routinely review my thoughts, feelings and behaviours during a week to learn from them and (hopefully) improve.
As I’ve been learning over the previous weeks, it’s conversations with people that make a difference (particularly during remote working), and it was certainly true again this week. So a huge thanks to Gav and Andy for being patient listeners and helping me drag myself out of the little hole I’d dug for myself. What seemed so insurmountable felt less so once I’d talked about it, and pretty soon I was back to my enthusiastic self.
Another key midweek conversation was with our very excellent Chief Executive who had set aside 30 mins just to shoot the breeze with me. When someone who runs an organisation of 5,000 staff can make time for you like that I think it speaks volumes about the culture and the kind of leadership I’m experiencing here. I found myself gushing to him a bit about that.
As it’s been half term week the volume of meetings has dropped and most of my team have been off, so it’s left me with more thinking and planning time. Committing some of my thoughts to paper about issues I’d found and actions I felt we needed to take was another therapeutic way of making sense of things and moving forward.
By the latter half of the week I felt I’d started to hit my stride and make decisions or give advice that was helping move things along. That feels better than being a passive observer of events; ‘a sponge’ just absorbing more detail. Second-time around meetings with people are feeling good now that relationships have been established, and they still take time to say nice things about my starting with the organisation. Maybe it’s something in the water in Dorset?
Excitement at Dorset Towers with the LGC Awards this week, with our very own Alex May up for an award for one of his projects (I have to admit I’ve not caught up with exactly what it was yet). I love how he had dressed to the nines, (top half tux, bottom half lycra shorts) which we were robbed of seeing on screen when he didn’t win. The Digital team were out in force, shouting him on in the chat!
In the end Dorset (and BCP Council) walked away with the award for business transformation for the herculean task of creating two unitaries in 13 months. I’m still seeing the ripples from this work in my encounters, and there are some hills yet to climb in completing it. But well deserved.
Reading the comments on twitter as everyone pitched in to congratulate each other it made me realise that success like this is made up of countless herculean efforts by countless individuals. For my own team (pre-me) that meant migrating CMS platform quickly to try and create a seamless experience for users of the new council.
And once again I ended the week thinking about the excellent people I work with and how they support each other. I feel I need to do more to protect my team from the dross and help them focus on the quality work and challenges ahead, so that is shaping up to be my key priority in the coming weeks.
The most popular question I get when I speak to people is “have you moved yet?” I guess we’ve become wearingly accepting about how long the conveyancing process is taking, and how lockdowns might scupper the whole thing anyway.
As much as I appreciate the interest it is getting to be a bit of a drag talking about it so next week I’m adding a Teams backdrop of Oxford with an update note on where we are.