What it was:

A talk, group and individual exercise led by Dionne Corradine. This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

What I learned:

A personal leadership statement can help crystallise your leadership style, your aspirations, and what you offer to the people you work with. It can also be used as part of your objectives and to measure your progress.

A personal leadership statement takes time to develop and should be considered a work in progress – it can be a blend of where you are and where you want to be.  It should answer the question “Why should anyone be led by me?”

We conducted a brief exercise to generate a first-draft personal leadership statement.  Here is my draft:

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP STATEMENT – Ten-minute draft

What do I stand for?

• The power of science, technology and information to do public good
• The Integrity, impartiality and objectivity of the Civil Service
• Experimentation and taking decisions based on evidence
• The importance of collaboration 
• Development and growth for all

Why follow me? Because I am:

• Inspiring:
  • Try to see where the future is going and get there early
  • Always work collaboratively, cohering teams into action
  • Work to set a compelling vision and concepts 
  • Work to engage people and stakeholders in that vision
• Confident:
  • Enjoy communicating, engaging and influencing
  • See and do things differently
  • Practice open leadership, working out loud and being open to feedback 
  • Volunteer and step in when things are going wrong
  • Try to influence thinking outside my area
  • Aim to be aware of myself, my impact and be reflective
• Empowering:
  • Create a team that’s fun, supportive, loyal to each other
  • Keep myself and my team at the leading edge, by driving change and developing forward-leaning skills
  • Try to help my team achieve their development dreams
  • Encourage and reward reasonable challenge, listen to evidence
  • Enable teams to do new things in new ways

Things I’m trying to be better at:

• Servant leadership
• Planning and managing the pipeline of work
• Staying always a leader, not a manager or operator 
• Maintain technical skills and being an intelligent customer 
• Coaching and mentoring my team leaders
• Maintaining and growing my and my team’s networks

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

• Develop the statement above and then try to live it!
• Bake my leadership statement into my personal objectives
• Build in review / reminder points
• Consider ways to test my performance against the statement
• Get hold of the speaker’s slides for this session as they contained lots of useful thinking.