Matt Prosser, Chief Executive Dorset Council
I’m sitting on a train out of London, for the penultimate time, before I head to New Zealand to become the CEO of Wellington City Council, and the phone pings. It’s a trusted colleague…will you write an article about leadership under pressure before you go…pleassee??
This creates two reactions, first I get that Bowie/Mercury ear worm…”under pressure, pushing down on me”…and second, I then feel that sense of pressure, agreeing to write the article but for the rest of the journey it occupies my thoughts. I leave the train and enter my car putting on Bowie & Mercury, maybe looking for inspiration in the lyrics.
“Pressure, pushing down on me, Pressing down on you, no man ask for. Under pressure, that burns a building down, Splits a family in two, Puts people on streets. That’s okay.
It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, Watching some good friends screaming let me out. Pray tomorrow gets me higher, Pressure on people, people on streets….
“Under Pressure” is of course a powerful exploration of the stresses and struggles of everyday life. It dives into the weight of societal expectations and personal pressures that everyone faces. It’s not about any specific individual but rather a universal experience. The creators want to highlight the urgency of compassion in times of distress and the importance of maintaining humanity amidst chaos. That seems like a good connection to Leadership under pressure; or it’s just a good way to bring music into this article! The reality is that leadership under pressure is universal, you cannot lead and not be under pressure – key is how much pressure and how you deal with it.
Leadership in Local Government is no different. What I have found over the eleven years that I have been a Chief Executive, moving from two councils to three then six into one, from 800 to nearly 5000 staff, 70+ members to 115, then 204 and back to 82, is that the constants are change and pressure – they just come in different guises and intensity!
I’ve led through austerity, local government reorganisation (LGR) and COVID 19 – this is leadership under pressure. It’s on top of the business as usual, delivering 450+ services to nearly 400,000 residents, changes in political control, supporting the needs of a new administration with 35% newly elected members, changes in your senior team with a 75% change in Executive Leadership and all the while, calmly, consistently keeping the ‘show on the road’….under pressure.
As I prepare to leave the UK, for the next five years at least, it’s given me a chance to gain some perspective. As the pressure to continually think about the future, the what next, what if, starts to subside and there is space and (a little) time to think more clearly. With the realisation that you will no longer carry that ultimate, buck stopping, leadership responsibility – there is a chance to think how might I do this differently in the future?
And I guess that is one of my thoughts about leadership under pressure. For most jobs of work there is always pressure; pressure to perform, to deliver, to turn up – but pressure in leadership positions is constant, 24/7/365, with the weight of responsibility meaning that from one extreme you are constantly awake in the night agonising over decisions taken (could I have done that differently/better) or the decisions to be taken (how should I do that to minimise or maximise the impact) through to the other extreme where you live, sleep and breathe your role to such extent that even on holiday with the family you are looking at how others deliver solutions to their communities to take back to work with you, because I always wanted to be better.
Austerity was a massive challenge for Local Government and one that has never gone away as year on year we have sought to deliver more and more with less and less. Not just the volume of service, but the quality of services matching the ever-increasing expectations of our residents and rightly so. Whilst we are not commercial businesses, we can operate with commercial practices informing our social consciousness. We don’t create shareholder value, but we do need to create social value and real impact on people’s lives. Leading through austerity – convincing your people-based organisation to become more and more efficient, adopting new technology and ways of working that whilst still prioritising the people we work for, inevitably means there are less people we work with – the workforce has reduced.
Leading through austerity for me meant leading two councils, then three, reducing the layers and numbers of managers, working to remove poor performance/poor behaviours through to poor performance/good behaviours, constantly asking more of less colleagues – with appropriate investment in development and learning of course. The pressure of leadership is to curate that compelling vision of a future that would mean that people were happy to ‘follow’ without due regard for their own personal job security. It is perhaps telling to see the headline that 30 councils are to be offered ‘exceptional financial support’, this is feeling more like the norm than the exception. In these circumstances we need great leaders to operate under extreme pressure.
It was the reality of austerity that led to the LGR conversation in Dorset which started at the tail end of 2015 and culminated in two new unitary councils being created from the 9 former authorities on 1 April 2019. The reality being that councils in Dorset could see they had no viable alternative to the fiscal challenge of delivering services within an inefficient model. This took good leadership, brave leadership both politically and managerially to ultimately act like “Turkeys voting for Christmas”, for the greater good and the preservation of public services.
The numbers speak for themselves, removing £10m from management costs on creation and then going on to deliver over £120m of savings in the first five years, savings that in the main have been reinvested back into services to protect communities, vulnerable children and adults, as well as investing in the social fabric of housing and economic growth…all whilst protecting our climate and ecology for now and for future generations.
This comes at a cost, 204 elected members reduced to 82 in Dorset Council alone…but this has delivered and isn’t that what public service is about, becoming as efficient as possible in order to protect the services we provide to our residents, communities and businesses?
The pressure of leading through LGR, even as the interim Head of Paid Service and then CEX Designate from 6 months before vesting day, was complex and challenging from being the only employee of the ‘yet to be created’ organisation to needing to use the ‘soft power’ of leadership working with the still Chief Executive’s of the councils that were about to be legally dissolved. That challenges your thinking, your use of language, your communication skills – your resilience.
Resilient leadership – leadership under pressure? I cracked two teeth during the interview processes for LGR, no doubt another pressure was being applied. I lost countless hours of sleep and leisure time as you contend with a ‘volume of decisions as the only employee’ to now, being Chief Executive of an organisation that seeks to provide services to our residents that for some is literally the difference between life and death. For those vulnerable in our society, we need to lead well under pressure – always looking to be better, do better, seek better outcomes for those who don’t have that ability, for whatever reason, for themselves.
So if ”This is our last dance, this is ourselves, Under pressure, Under pressure, Pressure.” How do we do it, how do we do it better, this leading under pressure?
For me it has always been about seeking to create a balance. The ability to some days put things in boxes and only take them out again when you have finished other priorities. Being good at prioritising helps lead under pressure.
Developing personal resilience for me, means good physical, mental and emotional health – getting a balance. A run, a walk, a break, decent nutrition, the ability to off-load to a colleague, coach, significant other…. just enough that you don’t overburden them, but you free up some capacity in yourself to be able to go again.
The ability to be flexible, to listen to all the angles (or as many as can be gathered at the pace needed) and then to make decisions based on ‘enough’ information. And of course, then the ability to reflect on decisions taken to learn, after all ‘history is for reference not for residence’.
Finally, surround yourself with good people, with a diversity of backgrounds and life experience that enrich you and your decision making as an organisation – making sure as you lead under pressure you are always curious to learn more and continuously improve.
Matt Prosser
Matt leaves the UK on 23rd March 2025 to head to the land of the long white cloud and is an alumni of the Leadership Centre’s Future Vision Leadership Programme 2019.