The Leadership Centre for Local Government works with local authorities in England to develop the quality of leadership among their political leaders and officers.

We aim to equip present leaders with the best skills, develop their top teams and create a pool of talented potential leaders for local government to draw on today and tomorrow.

Our unique approach

We focus our help and support on developing the working relationship between the senior political and managerial leadership in an authority.

We are already in active discussion with almost 50 of the country’s local authorities on how we can help the development of senior leadership.

In this role we can provide and pay for the services of a leadership adviser who will work closely with senior members and officers to help bring about real and lasting change.

Our leadership advisers are - we believe - the country’s leading experts in leadership development at the most senior level in local government. We ‘quality assure’ and support their work with authorities, ensuring they receive the best advice and support.

Explore and map

The most potent part of the Leadership Centre’s work involves a ‘leadership advisor’ spending an intensive period working with the senior political and managerial team to achieve the following targets:

• Explore and help to identify ways to improve leadership capacity and ways of working together
• Identify the leadership issues they face and do this in a positive and constructive way
• Help to map out a tailor-made leadership development programme to bring about the kind of changes that have lasting impact

Civic Pride

This is a groundbreaking campaign of initiatives designed to encourage effective, visible and accountable local leadership. It is made up of three key strands that together should make it possible to deliver a greater sense of civic pride. It is made up of the following:

• Pioneering work within political groups on the best way to work with administrations either in control or about to take control, to help them tackle the issues that confront them politically
• A high-energy campaign to raise the profile of councillors in order to attract more people to stand
• A programme to develop present members with leadership potential

Leadership Development Services

We are frequently asked to advise authorities about which organisations they could or should employ for their own leadership development programmes.

We are actively working with over 100 of the country’s major suppliers of leadership development to build up a database of the programmes and services they have to offer.

This database will soon be available through this website and will provide local authorities with the following:

• Details of what these companies can offer in terms of leadership development programmes and support
• The names and contact details of other authorities who have used these companies so they can check out customer feedback about the quality of the provision being offered

Leadership Partners

We are selecting the very best of the leadership suppliers who we intend to groom into our ‘leadership partners’ - a small group with whom we will work particularly closely.

Our work with our leadership partners will be of particular value to local authorities for the following reasons:

• We are using a rigorous selection process to identify our leadership partners - ensuring they have met our high standards for inclusion
• We will invest considerable time and effort helping the leadership partners understand the unique challenges of local government so they can reflect this in the way they develop and deliver the leadership development programme
• We will audit the leadership partners’ quality assurance processes in order to monitor, on behalf of local government, the quality of leadership programmes nationally

Our clients

We work with individual local authorities, groups of councils who wish to work together to develop leadership capacity, such as counties and local districts, or groups of authorities in what could be called a 'City Region', and local strategic partnerships, as they seek to develop their leadership capacity.