I've always felt that one of the most critically-important roles of a chief executive and a management team is to build a ‘one-team' approach across the organisation.

Building a ‘can-do' culture that is consistently positive isn't easy. Someone senior from the Audit Commission once said to me: ‘It's fantastic. You've undertaken Mazlo's Hierarchy of needs at Chorley – you've actually done tribal bonding!' [This is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A theory of human motivation].