He also used the speech to explain some of the things he has learned during his time as head of the civil service, specifically related to the ongoing reform of the public sector.
Here is the speech in full.
Transforming large organisations in Jersey: some reflections
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the invitation to speak today. In February last year, I stood here, at this podium, and made my first major external speech as the Chief Executive of the Government of Jersey. In that speech, I set out my stall for modernising the public service, the risks and opportunities, and the scale of the task we were facing, both as officers of the Government and as a public service.
When Murray invited me to come back to speak today, he did so initially expecting me to give you an update on where we’ve got to, but I’m not going to do that. Let’s face it, one thing you’ve not been short of from me and the Government over the past couple of years are progress updates.
There have been two Annual Reports, my first six-monthly Chief Executive update, my second six-monthly Chief Executive update, my first annual performance report, a One Government, One Year On report, and the Council of Ministers’ One Year in Office report – all published, transparently, for all to see. Oh yes – and my employment contract.
Frankly, it would be a very easy gig to rattle off the long list of all the things we’ve done since I last stood here. But instead, I thought I might reflect on what it’s been like to be leading the transformation of the public service through this time of uncertainty. Some of the lessons and opportunities, the pitfalls and blockages. And, if I may, I’ll include some reflections on the more interesting experiences that I’ve faced during my time here.
First though, I want to say I have never, for a moment, regretted coming to Jersey. It’s a fabulous place to live and work – safe, clean, friendly and beautiful. It has wonderful history and heritage. There is a special community, here in Jersey, full of a courtesy that has long since been lost elsewhere. I’ve met so many great people – in businesses, voluntary organisations and charities, in the pub, up at the rugby or the race track, on the street and on the No 1 bus.
I’ve felt welcomed and supported by the majority of those I’ve met, including by many of you in the room today. And I work with some terrific people, who come to work every day to do their best for Islanders.
It’s not just a coastal town or a collection of villages that you might find in England or France. It’s a proud country – and that’s what makes it different, exciting and like no other place. And it’s that uniqueness that makes it such a great job to be Head of its Public Service.
The Island is also part of a global economy. Indeed, Jersey has, over many centuries, reinvented itself – and it continues to do so today. It has to compete and it needs to be competing with the best, otherwise it won’t survive.
Many of you in the room have recognised that, especially in the last decade, and you have responded by making changes to your businesses. It’s what any good businesses do. I have talked to a range of leaders here on the Island, who have identified a number of principles they have used to implement business change. When they set about introducing change, they did so by taking into account our environment, heritage and unique setting here in Jersey. They created an offer that differentiates Jersey from other locations, but maintains its competitiveness. Despite what is sometimes reported, these simple principles are no different for how we should change our public services.
But Jersey is also a small community. Everyone knows everyone’s business. And while that can be a positive, it’s not always so. In a small community, word spreads like wildfire. Jersey likes its myths, and there have been a fair few about me. Whether it’s apparently being barred from my local, the Dolphin in Gorey, and, with every respect to the Dolphin, I almost can’t imagine what I might have to do to get barred from there. Or my kids’ school fees being paid for by the Government, when they are both in their 30s. These absurd rumours – often presented as facts – have been a tad surprising. Some are spread by social media, and some by word of mouth. All are the product of someone’s malicious imagination and of others’ willingness to pass them on.
So, my first observation in leading change is that as a senior Government official, you have to have a very thick skin and be personally resilient. Of course, I hear you say, you have to do that in any change programme, and again, many of you in the room today will be used to that. But when you’re involved in changing an institution like the Government’s public services, then you need to remember that there is no escape from the goldfish bowl. And because of Jersey’s geography, that is magnified.
Leading change is always going to be relentless, and you need to be able to handle and mitigate that. You have to have other interests that give you a sense of perspective. I’m not complaining that a few people have a view about me – I’m old and experienced enough to let it roll over me, and I was prepared for it. Luckily, I also have a lot of external support and outlets that put this sort of stuff into perspective. And I don’t do social media, where a lot of this stuff goes on. However, it does point to an attitude, among some, that makes doing a job like this just that little bit harder in this island community than it might be elsewhere.
Some of this stuff partly explains why it can be hard to attract and retain people – not just senior people, but also front-line staff like social workers – when they realise that they could be subjected to personal abuse or unhealthy gossip. And people are the lifeblood of all our organisations. So we mustn’t forget the importance of not deterring people through poor behaviours, especially when we’re going through a period of change. And while I have frequently highlighted the failings of the outdated systems and processes that undermine our operations and services, as well as the substandard offices that staff often operate from, I have nothing but admiration for our hardworking employees, who continue to deliver, day in, day out – despite what is sometimes reported.
Whether it’s our police, teachers and head teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, firefighters, manual workers, and ambulance staff. Or our civil servants – accountants, lawyers, policy officers, managers, scientists, engineers, economists, environmentalists, specialists in IT, HR, transport, meteorology, health, education and customer services. The teams responsible for our exemplary Brexit planning, our global trade and financial services – and, despite what you might read, Communications. Yes, them too. They ARE our public services.
So, if we don’t think about how we support them during change, then we’re in danger of losing our greatest asset – and our best opportunity to deliver lasting improvement. Again, many of you here will have gone through this, and you’ve had to make tough decisions as you’ve adapted to change. I suspect you would see it as business as usual, but in our public services, this isn’t fully understood.
And, to be quite frank, in government we’re woefully under-equipped to deal with change. Our HR function is under-resourced, even though our people account for half of Government spending. Even with increases proposed in the Government Plan, we’ll still be spending less than 2% of employee payroll costs on HR, against a UK average benchmark of 3-5%. Our HR systems and processes are out-dated, bureaucratic and inconsistent. We have no formal process for identifying and developing talent within the organisation. Roughly three people leave us every day, yet our HR operation doesn’t include a dedicated recruitment function.
I hear people talking about the threat to jobs. Nearly 13% of the workforce are over 60 – that’s almost a thousand people – but there’s no plan for how we’re going to replace them. In fact, over the next few years, our biggest challenge will not be how we exit employees because of change, but what are our succession plans for the hundreds who are due to retire – in the face of a highly-competitive jobs market, in an Island with virtually full employment – and without getting into an inflationary wage spiral when competing with jobs in the financial services sector.
If the Government is to meet the challenge to become an employer of choice for Islanders, we need to adapt our bureaucratic employment practices to the new ways of working that people want from a modern employer. We have an advantage that we can attract people with a sense of public duty, but that’s not enough. We need to offer family-friendly flexibility to support working parents, and people with caring responsibilities. We need more part-time working and job-sharing to attract people back to work.
And coupled with this, we need proper investment in our people. Our corporate training budget currently equates to an average of just £10 per employee per year. And while some employees will get training costing £1,000 or more, many will get none at all – for years at a time.
Most of you here today will know that you can’t change an organisation unless you invest in your systems, and invest in your people, and make real efforts to bring them with you. That’s why the Council of Ministers has supported investment – sometimes in partnerships with other organisations – to help us start to modernise the systems and processes we rely on. It’s also why they’ve agreed to the temporary recruitment of interims and fixed-term contractors, to provide additional capacity and capability at this critical time – to help make the changes we need. But, most significantly, they have supported the investment in the Team Jersey programme – which I’ll come back to.
These actions are critical to help change – but they don’t win votes, and they’ve generated criticism in some quarters. But the fact is – and many of you will know this, because you’ve also struggled to fill roles – that while there’s an abundance of talented people in Jersey, and many of them are working in public services – there are often just not enough experienced senior specialists with particular skills in a range of key positions.
Similarly, we don’t have a consistent supply of Jersey-born front-line nurses, teachers, social workers or police officers. So, like many of you, we’ve had to look further afield when the local supply for such key positions just isn’t there, both for short-term and permanent staff. Most sensible people recognise that you often need to get a short-term injection of capability and capacity to drive through change.
Alongside this short-term issue, you also need to invest in the skills of your own people, and change the culture of the organisation, to ensure that change is embedded for the long-term. We’re now embarking on that in our public services, after years of not doing so.
I’ve talked before about the different stages of transformation for Jersey’s public services, which begins with getting a grip on the organisation in order to stabilise it. There is inevitably a command and control element to this period of disruption. But just telling people what to do won’t create a sustainable organisation in the long term.
In my experience, changing the culture of a large organisation doesn’t just happen without a strategic intervention if there is no internal track record to deliver the necessary changes. So, very early on, we sought to secure a partner to start to deliver a behaviour and leadership programme to shift the established culture. We have called this Team Jersey.
This isn’t new and again, I’m sure most businesses in Jersey have recognised the need to tackle entrenched behaviours across the whole organisation. But it costs money – for which we and Ministers have been criticised. Yet, in reality, we’ve never actually done this throughout the entire organisation before. We’ve only ever focused on the top 100 leaders and managers. And even there, you can’t simply flick a switch to turn leaders – who have worked in old ways, or under a certain direction – into modern, visible, empowered leaders without sustained help.
Taking difficult decisions and leading teams across, as well as up and down the organisation is essential if your business is going to survive. So, with the help of our Team Jersey partner, we’re currently working with our 1,200 leaders and managers – to empower and equip them to take greater delegated responsibility. There are five modules, covering issues such as having crucial conversations, leading organisational change and building high-performing teams. In addition, we’ve also now launched the phase where all our employees can engage with the Team Jersey programme. For many, it will be the first time they’ve had the opportunity to participate in an organisation-wide initiative, working with colleagues from right across Government to further their own skills.
These sessions have been designed specifically in response to employee feedback about shaping our workplace culture and living our values. Creating the capacity to drive decision-making down the organisation – to give people the opportunity to take responsibility for designing and delivering new services, to encourage them to take calculated risks, and learn from their mistakes as part of a learning organisation. This is essential if you’re going to deliver real behaviour and cultural change throughout our public services and it takes time for the benefits to be fully realised.
In parallel with our changing workforce culture, of course, we have to be acutely sensitive to the political culture in Jersey. We have a unique set of political arrangements here in Jersey and, irrespective of any personal views about their efficacy, they are critical, and multi-layered.
Like any Chief Executive, one of my key challenges has been to establish productive, trusted and mutually-respectful relations with the Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers – aka my Chairman and Board. I worked hard to develop those with the previous Government, and I was pleased to have secured their early trust and support for my One Government proposals for modernising the public service.
But then, of course, there was an election last year, and we had a new States Assembly, a new Chief Minister and a new Council of Ministers. So, I had to start again. This inevitably took time, and understandably I had to build new relationships, as there were also a lot of new States Members. I’m really happy to say that many of those relationships have started to develop really well.
The current Chief Minister is very different from his predecessor – with the singular exception that they’re both accountants, so know their numbers. But we have developed a close working relationship. He cares deeply about Jersey and wants to do the right things for the Island, including modernising our public finances. I think that the collaborative process that we went through with the Council of Ministers in developing the Common Strategic Policy and the Government Plan has helped enormously – not just in working through the new Government’s agenda, but in cementing those new working relationships between senior officials and the Council of Ministers.
Beyond our immediate political leadership, I’m mindful that the public service is also accountable to the States Assembly. So, the leaders in the public service need to work closely with Members of the Assembly, and with Scrutiny. We need to provide timely and accurate information – whether directly to Scrutiny, or to Ministers – to enable the States Assembly to do its job of holding us to account.
Businesses don’t have this second layer of accountability in the same way. You report to your Boards. You don’t generally have your shareholders also summoning you to answer their questions on an ongoing basis. It puts me in mind of the screening of the National Theatre play – One Man, Two Guvnors – that I went to see at the Opera House the weekend before last. For some of my colleagues, it does give rise sometimes to a feeling that, as public servants, we’re serving two sets of masters, and with different agendas.
To some extent, that goes with the territory. But when creating a best-in-class public service in Jersey, it should be the ambition of all elected politicians – Ministers and backbenchers – to want an efficient and modern public service to serve the need of Islanders.
But let me also address the issue of who is in charge – as it comes up a lot. Indeed, it was tagged onto a commentary in the JEP only a couple of days ago. For clarity, politicians make decisions and officers carry them out. We should not blur those lines. It’s simple, really. But in being accountable to politicians, we also need to recognise the strategic responsibilities that the Executive has, versus the operational responsibilities that the Civil Service has. So, the Council of Ministers is in charge of strategy and policy; public servants are responsible for carrying them out.
I am also clear that delivering change successfully in a political environment – as I have done before – can only be done in conjunction with politicians. And never despite them. So, we do need to work in partnership – both with Ministers and the States Assembly – and never as partisans. Because the transformation of our public services is a must for all the Island. It’s not just a priority for officers, but also for politicians. It’s not a nice to have. It’s essential to the interests of taxpayers and stakeholders. It helps improve the productivity of our economy, and it enhances the Island’s reputation for strong, modern, democratic Government. In short, it’s essential for the whole of Government to play its part.
So, in my experience, one of the big challenges for anyone leading change is doing so in an organisation that either doesn’t recognise that change is needed – or does recognise the need to change, but it doesn’t know what good looks like. I think Jersey’s public service was in that position when I joined. It had been frequently criticised by politicians, media and Islanders for being too bloated, unresponsive, and stuck in its ways. But there’s a comfort for many in sticking to those familiar old ways, doing things how they had always been done when change starts to happen.
And here we must draw a distinction between respecting history, heritage and tradition – which are good things – and inertia, which can be deeply damaging. For instance, sticking to old ways was exposed by the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry to have damaged the welfare of our children and young people across generations, as they were failed by institutional neglect and systemic emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
We also have a legacy of failing vulnerable people in need of mental health and adult social care. So, sticking to tried and tested old ways is not good enough when the lives of vulnerable children, young people and vulnerable adults are in your hands.
But how do you go about tackling such a large and diverse organisation, when so much needs doing, and in so many areas? In my experience, there are six lessons to bear in mind:
First, you have to identify the immediate and long-term problems, in order to map your priorities – and luckily, I had the help of the Transition Team to do just that. Over six months, they identified the operational, organisational, finance, HR and communications weaknesses that would hold back change, and recommended to me and Ministers what we needed to do to correct them.
At the same time, through getting out and about personally – not just inside the organisation, but among stakeholders and partners too – I was able to hear and learn first-hand about other priorities from an external vantage. So it’s really important for a leader to listen and learn, be visible and available, and be curious in understanding the issues you face.
Second, despite what commentators, or even cartoonists, say, you can’t lead change by bringing over a blueprint from somewhere else and imposing it. You have to reach into your experience, but adapt how you apply it to what you learn about your new environment.
For instance, one solution to operational inefficiency in UK government – both national and local – has been to outsource operations to big service providers – like Capita and Serco. That’s simply not something that would work here. Quite apart from the issue of whether outsourcing is the right answer – look at the collapse of Carillion – there simply isn’t the market for it in such a small Island. So, we need to make the operational improvements ourselves, build our own skills and improve our own capability and systems, rather than just having an outside company take them over and do them to us. We have to create local solutions that fit Jersey.
Nonetheless, to achieve this, you do sometimes need to someone to bring outside expertise into the organisation to help you, if you don’t have it already in the Island. You can’t fudge the issue of a lack of skills and experience in the short term, if you are embarked on a significant programme of change. That’s not new, and many businesses here in Jersey have had to take the same route. They just don’t get the level of public scrutiny that we do.
Third, as I have mentioned, you often need to provide firm direction and some disruption in the early stages of transformation than you might in the later stages, when you should have developed a more distributive leadership model.
Fourth, once you’re sure of your objectives, and you know what needs to be done, don’t allow yourself to be deflected. Be flexible and adapt, of course, but don’t allow yourself to be knocked off the main course, or you might never find the tracks again.
Here in Jersey, one potential derailler has been the disputes about pay. Although it hasn’t been easy, one by one we’ve reached a negotiated agreement with most of our employee groups. Yes, there has been a lot of comment – from some politicians, the media, unions and the public – that we should slow, halt or reverse the changes we’re making, to avoid prolonged disputes. But that’s what we have always done in the public sector here in Jersey.
Yes, we know from our own employee survey – the first for the whole government in nine years – and from the Team Jersey phase 1 report, that morale is lower than we want it to be, some of it because of the changes we are making, and some progress on engaging with staff to take the changes forward has been impaired by the pay dispute. But a dip in morale is always the case when a large organisation goes through fundamental restructuring. As an organisation, you inevitably go down, before you come up again.
However, in the same employee survey and the Team Jersey report we also heard, loud and clear, how proud employees are of the work they do. How committed they are to their jobs, their teams and to serving the Island. And, in fact, they also said that they do understand why the public service needs to change, and how it is changing.
That doesn’t mean that they always know or agree with what those changes should be. And as we’ve gone through the tiers of leadership, people have been fearful about what it means for them personally. So, we have to continually strive to improve our communications and engagement with staff. But still – and this has been my experience in Westminster and Oldham, Manchester and Liverpool – provided you explain why you need to make changes, how you’re going to do it, and you keep employees informed, they can and do accept what’s happening and get up the change curve much more quickly.
That’s one of the reasons why I’ve kept my foot hard on the pedal. The faster we push through the changes, the quicker they’ll be over, and the uncertainty that has worried our workforce can come to an end. Indeed, i’s one of the perennial dilemmas in a change programme: the faster you go, the more of a shock it is; but the slower and softer you go, the longer you’re drawing out the uncertainty. My own experience is that it is always better to do it as quickly as possible. And when I haven’t done that in the past, I’ve regretted it – and have had the same feedback from staff.
In the Team Jersey report we saw the same dilemma. Staff said that it was all going too fast, but that they also said they wanted the changes over and done with. Although it has taken longer than I would have liked, because of a variety of reasons, by the end of the year, we’ll be pretty much done with the formal restructuring phase.
However, as new IT systems and online services come on stream, there will be further changes to how we work which will affect people in those areas. That’s what happens with continuous improvement.
Fifth, you are never going to be popular! People just don’t like change. As I mentioned previously, there are some who talk about change as an attack on Jersey, its history and its heritage. It’s easy to focus on a particular person as seemingly the cause of so much of the Island’s problems. To put it bluntly, when introducing large-scale change, some people prefer things as they were and who would go back to what they see as the halcyon days that are long since gone.
Then there are some who demanded changes, but then recoil when faced with them, because that’s not quite what they thought change would look like. And some still don’t know what they want. And, of course, there are some who will be critical of the Government and the public service almost regardless of what we do. You just can’t win them round whatever you do.
So, in my experience, you need to be clear, resolute, tough and honest, but stick to the plan – always remembering that it takes time to see the benefits.
And finally, you need to create good teams as you can’t do this on your own. Developing the capability to create high-performing teams to lead all parts of the organisation is essential if you are going to deliver sustainable long-term change. You have to invest in those teams. Coach and mentor colleagues and give them the power to be fully accountable for their area of responsibility.
And, of course, in delivering public services transformation there is the small matter of the inevitable scrutiny by the media. I’ve been here before in other places I’ve worked. But the geography of Jersey does, I think, have an impact on the way the media operates in the Island. There are a lot of hungry media mouths to feed.
I remember being faced with a similar problem in Liverpool, Manchester and Oldham. Bad news sold papers – or so they thought. And in Oldham, the local Manchester radio and TV media weren’t really interested in being part of the town. So, we sought to work with the media, through a process of engagement – culminating in a major investor event in London, to present our plans for regenerating the town to numerous institutions, banks and private investors.
These players were never going to come to Oldham until we had sold them our vision and convinced them that the civic leaders of the Borough and the local press were going to actively support such plans. We had to have a compelling narrative for our place that would help convince them to invest in the regeneration of a northern former mill town, which had been the centre of major riots less than a decade earlier. It had to work for investors, so they could make their return. It was important for citizens to improve their town. It was essential for politicians to reset the image of Oldham.
But the media thought it wasn’t the right thing to do. So we put them in discussions with the investment community, who were critical of the local media and its impact on their decisions. As a consequence the media started to better understand the power of being more positive about the town. That wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t still challenge the local authority, but they moved away from their default setting of relentlessly searching only for bad news. They began to recognise that they needed to be proud of their town every day, and that they could be part of the solution, and not part of the problem. Over time, they became important advocates for the changes, whether physical or transformational.
So what’s it like here? Interestingly, the Communications team monitor and measure the Government’s media coverage, so we can better understand what the drivers are for those many hungry media mouths. For example, and to make the point, they’ve found that the JEP gives negative stories much more prominence than positive stories – both in the size of the article and how high up it is in the paper. And those negative stories often only include a brief quote from the Government right at the end ‘for balance’.
“So what?” I hear you say. That’s the role of the press. Nonetheless, this default negativity about the Government does have an impact on staff’s willingness to take risks, and raise their heads above the parapet, as I mentioned earlier. It makes delivering changes harder for those less experienced in delivering change, when we’re constantly criticised by those in the media whose working assumption is that we’re up to no good.
Yet when the media take time to do some in-depth sessions, both with me and other colleagues – whether by interviews on the TV or radio – they often get a better and more accurate picture of the changes we’re trying to deliver, the reasons why and the long-term benefits. My sense is that if the print media spend time really understanding the modernisation of our public services, rather than seeing it as a cheap source of easy copy, then they will get better information, more stories and therefore provide a better service to Islanders.
I may not have centuries of Normal French heritage behind me, but I don’t need that to know that Jersey folk are decent, and courteous, and generous and welcoming. I believe that Islanders want the improvements that we’re trying to deliver for them. They want joined-up public services, delivered in one place – and even better, online. They want the Government to be more effective, to stop wasting money through inefficiency and outdated systems and processes, so that more money can be made available for local services and improvements.
They want proper long-term planning – like the Island Plan and the Government Plan – so they can see the direction of travel, understand what is being promised, how it will be measured and how it is going to be paid for. We now have that. And that is what will be delivered by public servants on behalf of Ministers, through the One Government initiative.
Being Chief Executive is a unique challenge, and I am privileged to have been entrusted with leading the public service through this period of change. I’ve said before that this is the biggest and hardest job I’ve ever had – it just happens to be in the smallest place. But what a great place, eh? Although I’m less than two years into this five-year project, I am confident, despite the challenges we’re facing, that we will have improved and repositioned Jersey’s public service from one that was behind the times in so many areas, to one that is performing among the very best.
So thank you for listening to my thoughts and observations about leading change in Jersey. And, to many of you in this room, thank you for your support so far. Onwards and upwards!
