Weeknote #1
By: Matt Prosser
Tags: CEO, Week 1

Weeknote #1

What’s all the fuss about? Writing down your activity for the week right? Well it would appear that there are some who think this is the cream-de-le-crem of something, but they seem to know what they are doing so, in for penny, in for a pound!

This is my first time writing a weeknote, have no idea what I am doing but just setting out a few musings on my week as CEO of Dorset Council. We are a new unitary council (for the uninitiated that means we deliver all the services of both a large county council and a smaller district council) serving 380,000 residents across beautiful Dorset.

And we are new, did I mention that? Still taking toddler steps as an organisation having merged six previous councils into one bigger thing. We want to be modern, agile, customer focussed, lean (or was that just the target for me by Mrs P?), but we are also quite a large and complex organisation, got about 5000 staff delivering over 450 different service lines, some of which can occasionally be in conflict with themselves!

As CEO I get to lead a superfragelisticexpealidocious group of senior leaders, who in turn work with some more great leaders who work with more….you see I believe in distributed leadership, it’s not all about me. If you are a manager then you are a leader, if you have opinions that people listen to and agree with (and not) then you have a leadership role. Everyone can be a leader in my humble opinion. I’m quite keen on followership (not cult like stuff to be clear) but if people believe in what you are saying and are prepared to follow you in the direction you are taking an organisation then that is pretty cool right? And not just on the good days, also the difficulty days too.

We have had plenty of difficult days this year haven’t we? We sent home nearly 2500 colleagues to work from home in March and we are not going to be back in the offices till next March – how mad is that! But we make it work. We’ve employed new people, via the internet who have never been to Dorset, but one day they will! It’s amazing, empowering and exhilarating. To be fair we have also upset a whole load of people who used to love being in an office and are missing their work buddies so much they will do anything to get a desk in the COVID secure offices! I get that. But for now I am staying at home.

Just realised how much I have written, better save something for week 2! But this week has been quite unique for me, see I have just come back from an operation, had to have time off work and I don’t usually do time off work, but as I have recently entered my 50’s (OK a year ago) the body needs a bit of repair work. But taking time off isn’t easy as a CEO, you have to trust others to lead where you usually do….good job I have such a fab team that I get to work with.

So this week was the first full week back after ‘the op’ think I did OK, was pretty shattered most days, but my fab Exec Assistant had fought valiantly to keep some space in my diary for me to get up from the desk and walk around, or to lie on the sofa and catch up! But being away make you realise how much you like the people (well most of them ;-) !) and you miss them when you are not there.

Final para…what did I actually do this week? Chatted to whole bunch of people, influenced some conversations with our MPs, spoke to about 600 colleagues on our all council session, did a pre-record with a bloke who then convinced me to weeknote, checked a bunch of reports, thanked some people for doing great work, encouraged some others, talked about changes to the way we need to work and thought about how we can continuously improve our organisational culture….and now for the weekend!