When is an organisation not in transition? If you believe in continuous evolution, never. So transition is not a ready-made excuse for poor performance but there are periods where the performance dips whilst people adjust to new roles and different ways of doing things. It may be that the jigsaw requires a couple more pieces before it is complete. But how long will the Cabinet give you before the lack of progress creates doubts about your ability to deliver? How do you buy more time? And what do you do about the doubters in your ranks, you expect a certain amount of discontent from the front line but how do you keep your senior managers loyal?
The brutal reality is you only have two or maybe three budget cycles to live up to expectations. During this time you can only survive a bad inspection, below expectation performance or a tragedy like a death in care if you have the backing of the leader, the support of the Cabinet and the confidence of your senior management team.
Whilst you can't take anything for granted you can count on the support of the leader, until you can't count on the support of the leader. The leader carries the Cabinet and you were the leader's appointment so they are reluctant to admit they made a wrong appointment. However the leader is the leader because they know when to whip the Cabinet into line and when to recognise that the Cabinet is reflecting the wider view of the party and as such continued support of a chief executive who has lost the confidence of group could be at the expense of their own position. Note it is an issue of confidence not popularity. The chief executive can be very unpopular with certain sections of the council and large groups of staff but still have the confidence of the Cabinet that they will deliver, if fact some may view their very unpopularity as proof they are doing something right.
The loyalty of the senior management team (SMT) is a different matter. Generally speaking maintaining loyalty is a question of exercising the right balance of fear and charm. Understandably chief executives put a lot of emphasis on their expectation of loyalty from their team. The team needs to be 100% behind the strategy in order to convince those who must deliver it that it will work even if hasn't worked so well to date. Likewise the whole senior team must own decisions even if they were a result of heated debate which failed to get a consensus. The extent to which genuine debate is tolerated or any dissent is viewed as disloyalty may depend on the individual's leadership style.
If members start to lose confidence in a chief executive they will sound others out and if a senior officer appears to share those doubts they will become further emboldened and lobby Cabinet members. So the chief executive must charm members particularly those on the Cabinet but also the influential members outside of cabinet like those on the scrutiny committee. This usually comes down to being approachable and making themselves available (but not too accessible to opposition members).At the same time they will be looking at their SMT rewarding those eager to please, being watchful of those who are ultra-ambitious and weary of those prone to dissent. Just as members can be charmed by approachability and accessibility, officers can be controlled by lack of accessibility. It is very difficult for a director to do their job if the chief executive decides to keep them out of the loop. The directors' position within their own directorate is undermined once partner agencies and colleagues realise their influence has diminished and they are the last to know what's going. This works both ways. If the leader starts to make themselves unavailable to the chief executive then their days are numbered.
The time limit on a chief executive tenure is determined by performance results. No matter how much loyalty they instilled in their staff, no matter how much faith they instil in the leader or their ability to charm members, the length of time they are given to prove themselves is getting shorter.
