Gavin Macgregor

When Alan Blackie took over as chief executive of East Lothian Council, our organisation was facing significant challenges. A public audit contained criticism, and senior managers were used to a command-and-control ethos and working in “silos”. The new CEO wanted to bring in a style of leadership based on involvement and shared ownership, which would, in turn, drive forward a change in culture.Genuine involvement was encouraged at an early stage with a “Challenge for Change” conference that brought together managers, leaders, union representatives and politicians to discuss key challenges and what changes were required.The momentum from this brought people together to work collectively on developing proposals for change, which included a commitment to challenge preconceived ideas of leadership and to enable people to see themselves and their roles in a new way. The executive team shared the objective to work together in a more collaborative, strategic way and to encourage this approach across all departments.We began by having an internal debate about leadership and values, which then widened into a “behavioural qualities” framework to define the way things were done across all levels of the whole organisation. This framework became known as “the East Lothian Way” and is now used across recruitment and selection, inductions, performance reviews, customer care, employee development (including management and leadership development) and equality and diversity work.