Category: Leadership

11th July 2012

Helping Birmingham Leadership Foundation use social media

Birmingham Leadership Foundation helps new and aspiring leaders to emerge. They connect emerging leaders with established leaders to help them learn from each other’s experience.

They organise networking events, training and connect existing leadership development projects to encourage the next generation of leaders in Birmingham to develop – leaders who reflect the city’s demography. These could be:

A young person aged 16–30 with the ideas, ambition and spark to make an improvement to the lives of others in their local community.
A person who is proactive in their community.
A chief executive or senior manager of a private company or public sector organisation who wants to work with, and support, the local community but lacks the know how and contacts.

Nick and I ran a social media surgery at the Foundation’s first Monday Masterclass last month. We’ll be working with the young leaders at the upcoming Masterclasses, sharing social media skills to help them get out there, network, collaborate and make things happen.

We’re also helping the Foundation team with their social media strategy and to further develop their own social media skills.

4th July 2012

“Charities should be the gold standard for open data” – and so should local gov.

Karl Wilding and I have worked together on social media and the implications of the web for civic activity since 2007. He’s head of Policy and Research and NCVO (I’m on the advisory board of NCVO) and a very clever/prescient man.

Here he talks for Guardian Voluntary Sector Network about what open data means for charities – much of it is also useful/true for local government.

23rd January 2012

Skills in Birmingham – our people, what they’re like and what we need

Two tins of peas — Great Value(s) P(l)eas(e) - photo by Tony Crider (click to view on flickr)

Later this month the Birmingham and Solihull LEP will start making some decisions about skills and work – asking themselves what skills do employers need and how to make them available.

I know this because of a set of “skills” that are hard to measure or teach.

One is being networked.

Peter Latchford (who’s doing some initial work for the LEP on skills) approached me to see what I thought businesses like Podnosh will need. On 30th January he’ll report back and tell the LEP what small business is asking for. So this is what I’d like them to hear:

Podnosh recruits for?

Values

We are driven by making things better: improving public services, helping active citizens have a greater impact, allowing individual civil servants more freedom to improve lives, supporting good third sector organisations to help more people. We don’t work with anyone – if potential clients don’t share a good chunk of our passions or values we’d rather they found someone else to help them.

So for this we employ or work with people who:

believe in what we do
care about it
are accountable
transparent
honest
have integrity
are networked

In turn they often know what they want and believe in and are leaders in their own worlds.

They are usually enterprising: Steph Jennings runs her own hyperlocal blog, Josh Hart makes LIVEBrum happen, Gavin Wray has nurtured the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery for years. They make things happen, adapt to change, accept and learn from failure.

On top of that they are flexible and committed. All seem to have an unstoppable ability to make things work, see things through and to learn everything and anything they need to make that happen.

So we also want to find people who start things themselves (not the same as self starters), can’t help but learn on their own, aware of their strengths and happy to be open about what they want to strengthen.

It may sound like a halcyon world of small enterprise. But these are the people who work at, or with, Podnosh and they all have remarkable qualities (and if it sounds like I’m expecting them to be superhuman I’m not, I could never keep up).

One thing I haven’t mentioned? A certificate in anything.

Certainly there are technical skills and we are looking for more folk who are good at Ruby on Rails, but in our world many technical skills get outdated very quickly. So at it’s simplest we recruit the person, get that right and the knowledge later.

What do you recruit for – what does the LEP need to understand are the skills or qualities we need to help Birmingham’s small businesses thrive?

Update:

Karl Binder at Adhere added these thoughts to the discussion in his post “Total Business”:

So I look for:

Aptitude, a readiness and quickness in learning

Love what they do, have a passion for their job

Flexibility

Desire to continually try something new

Recognition that their job role can and will change

Existing skill set

If I had to sum up my employment strategy in a catchy little sound bite I would say I always looked to ’employ people, rather than skills’. This effectively means if the person’s attitude is right, they have a willingness to learn and an ability to do so, don’t get disheartened and give up quickly and realise that their role is one that is constantly evolving, I would employ them over someone who was the finished product in one particular area of expertise.

Thanks Karl.