An initial look at how councils operate suggests that their culture is probably far healthier than that found in NHS Trusts.  However, the top-down, bullying approaches so common in the NHS are less often seen in councils.

But, there are worrying parallels with the NHS which many local authorities need to heed if the sector is to avoid a similar crisis in public confidence.

The jarring disconnect in many authorities is between a well-intentioned, but cack-handed senior management team and a bewildered, disengaged workforce who essentially, do not trust each other sufficiently to ensure the right things happen on the ground.

The worst outcomes of this are seen in local government services which end up in special measures.  Here, the problem is not so much a lack of resources as a culture in which drift has replaced leadership and in which the glue of human relationships has been slowly dissolved to the point where people end up unproductive, demotivated and left to make decisions in a climate of fear and blame.

Although the numbers of authorities whose children's services are experiencing difficulties has not yet made it into the national conscience, we are probably not far away from this being the case.

How should we respond?  The first thing to do is avoid the urge to blame everything on a lack of resources in local government.  Although this is a relevant factor, and one that interacts in complex ways with key services, local variations suggest this cannot be the reason why we see so much breakdown.

The public do not appreciate the resourcing argument when they read about well-paid, fully-pensioned professionals who cannot bring themselves to do the right thing to head off a tragedy.

The right response is for local authorities to look closely at what is, in report after report, highlighted as a profound problem in failing services – the fact that the people delivering have little sense of ownership or control of their work and are managed using outdated, discredited tools from the command tradition.

This is where the NHS is finally waking up.  A committee of inquiry, headed by Professor Chris Ham of the Kings Fund, is soon to explore how employees in the NHS can be better engaged in the way Trusts and other health providers operate.

This follows in the wake of recent scandals in Staffordshire and elsewhere and the observation, on the part of social care minister Norman Lamb, that ways have to be found to ensure NHS staff take far greater ownership of their work and that of the organisation for whom they work.

Mid-Staffordshire, Mr Lamb observed, would never have happened if that Trust was an employee-owned mutual in which staff had an appropriate role in the organisation's management and in which they had a clear stake of ownership.

Whether or not Mr Lamb was right, he makes the point that employee satisfaction and performance levels in former NHS bodies which now operate as mutuals is, by and large, far better than in the NHS organisations that they left behind.

There is something about the value-set, management approach and human relationships in these more employee-led organisations which appears to mitigate the risks of things going badly wrong.

The findings of the Ham Inquiry, of which I am a member, will be released next year.

I am sure they will have an application in local government where the problem is not so much the dramatic system failures we have seen in the NHS, but a struggle in many areas to move productivity and provision to its next level of evolution and to bring workforces on the transformation journey with us.

One truism about the management of change is that it can only be successful when people can own and shape the way change is made to happen.

Often, this does not describe the way we in local authorities go about driving transformation, where practices can resemble those seen the worst parts of the NHS.

Whether or not local government goes down the mutualisation route, as may happen in areas of the NHS is, as yet unknown.

We owe it to ourselves to look closely at what can be learned from the organisations that have successfully drawn staff close to them and tackled challenges together, rather than in the traditional, hierarchical fashion that is still the norm in much of our public sector.

Craig Dearden-Phillips is CEO of Stepping Out which helps local government to develop new businesses from current public services