Better Government By Better Leadership: Submit Your Ideas!
By Nour Sidawi of One Team Gov
One Team Gov are a team of UK policymakers, service designers and digital professionals who are working together to make government more effective. Later this year FutureLearn will be releasing their first crowdsourced online leadership course. We are inviting you to co-create it with us.
To help us to create our series of micro courses on Co-Leadership, we are reaching out to leadership professionals and enthusiasts like you. We need your submissions in video, audio, or written form by 30th April 2020.
Who are we?
One Team Gov are a movement of public servants from around the world dedicated to promoting change from within. You can read all about our activities on Medium and our website.
Improving public sector leadership is one of our three goals for 2020. So far, we have written eight short articles about our journey exploring future leadership and you can find them here.
What has happened so far?
Leading public services has always been tough, but we might be living though our toughest challenge yet. With increasing regularity and severity our public sector leaders are having to tackle complex societal issues that no single organisation can face alone.
The Coronavirus pandemic is an issue the likes of which we have not seen before; it will be life changing in a number of ways for all of us. It will take a new kind of leadership to manage these changes and identify opportunities to significantly improve and adapt the organisations we work in and with.
This is a huge challenge to public servants, but it also gives us an opportunity to find ways to work more effectively together. The world has seen public servants pivot, support, and work tirelessly to make a difference. In this time of crisis they have been changing everything to keep the public safe and essential services going .
One Team Gov believe that we can harness the collective creative response to the challenges thrown at public servants to explore and develop leadership. We want to capture living memory from public servants as we find ways to work more effectively together during global crisis. We want to support our leaders and future leaders to go into the unknown with courage, compassion, and care.
What are we going to do?
In response to the challenges of public sector leadership we are convening a global community to crowdsource a series of micro courses on Co-Leadership. What is Co-Leadership? We have defined it as a leadership approach that is collective, collaborative, and co-created in complex times.
We want to encourage people to think about alternative ways to lead, strengthen our collective ability to lead (and be led) and show the power in the collective. The microcourses we are hoping you will help us create should help participants to get from being the leader they are to the leader they would like to be.
We have a few weeks to pull together the themes we need to build our vision for the series of micro courses. That is where we need your help. We want to gather as many ideas as possible by 30 April. We are doing it by gathering answers to the question below.
How can you help?
You can help contribute to our microcourse and, in that way, help improve public sector leadership. Send us your responses to the following question:
How can we make sense of leadership in the 21st century in an environment which is unpredictable, rapidly changing, and in which no single actor controls?
We want to make it as simple as possible for people to send us their thoughts, so you can send us:
- a short video,
- an audio recording of your thoughts or,
- a written response.
Do not worry about producing something perfect. We want your ideas at this stage. Later we will synthesise those thoughts to come up with common themes and, from there, build the courses.
How do I get my ideas to you?
We have already started thinking about the question and themes for the course; you will find some of those in this Google doc. If you want you can add your thoughts and ideas there.
You can also send your video or audio to us by email along with consent for the person or people recorded by 30 April 2020. In the subject line please put OTG LEADERSHIP MICRO COURSES and the name of the video participant/s or event. Our email address is [email protected]
If you have any questions or comments, or want to support our work in any other way please let us know via email or on Twitter.
And finally, a huge thank you. Our community is built on the kindness and generosity of public servants who go the extra mile and everyone who supports them. Together we can make government better for everyone.
