Graeme McDonald, Managing Director of Solace
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This episode is with Graeme McDonald, the Managing Director of Solace, a national membership network for current and future public service leaders.
As you can imagine Graeme has a pretty unique perspective on the myriad of challenges and opportunities facing public services and local government in particular.
Solace is primarily focused on leadership development so we talk about how public service leaders can continue to develop whilst operating in a state of “perma poly crisis”. This means both formal learning but also creating space for more informal reflection and thinking time – so important to support leaders to make good decisions and avoid burnout.
We also talk about the state of local government sector more generally. There have obviously been some high-profile failures – but are these one-off cases or are the challenges more systemic and bubbling beneath the surface more broadly? We have a great discussion about this.
And what about how the sector responds to failure? Graeme doesn’t think we have the balance between central intervention and sector led improvement quite right. It tends to be one or the other and Graeme argues there is scope for more of a blended approach.
I think you will agree that Graeme is a very thoughtful and considered interviewee and I learned a lot from this discussion and I hope you will too.
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