To say Donna Hall changed Wigan during her time as Chief Executive is understating it; her Wigan deal led to a huge 59% increase in resident satisfaction and, even more impressively, a 7 year increase of life expectancy in the most deprived areas of the town. And all the more strikingly this was done during a time where Wigan was facing huge austerity cuts, the third worst in the country in fact.
Donna was well versed in implementing change, in her previous role at Chorley she had brought in a concept called listening into action, but she was faced with a challenge when she first arrived in Wigan: “The previous management team, that I inherited, were not that interested in what staff thought about the organisation; it was a well performing council but wasn’t very engaging, quite paternalistic and that’s the politicians and the senior leadership team, so there was no systematic listening at all; and one of the first things that I tried to do with my management team was to get them to listen.”
In this video Donna takes us through how she changed the culture at Wigan and transformed not only the leadership team, who she brought in anthropologist Dr Robin Pharoah to teach them ethnography and to redesign the way they listened, but the whole of the council and the way they listened to their stakeholders: “Every member of staff was trained in ethnographic techniques whether you were emptying the bins, whether you’re a senior social worker, whether you are a midwife at the local hospital; we had this thing called ‘The Be Wigan’ experience which was training people in ethnography, in anthropology, in deep listening and then being able to, with what you’ve had, do something about it. And help to reshape and transform the organisation based on the things we weren’t getting right.”
What you will learn in this video:
- How Wigan Council switched from being a rigid, paternalistic organisation to practising systematic listening regularly.
- Why building trust is essential when you are trying to change ways of working.
- How an anthropologist made all of Wigan Council’s mini ethnographers to learn how to listen deeply to people.
- How to empower teams and how this increases their efficacy.
- Switching from focussing on processes to focussing on relationships and the results you might see.
- That cutting costs doesn’t necessarily mean cutting services, indeed it can be the opposite.
- Examples of how to ‘listen better’.
- The power in the ‘Art of the possibility’.
Related resources:
- Read more about The Wigan Deal.
- Learn more about Radical Help by Hilary Cottam here.
- The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart- click here to get your free eBook, full of great ideas for creating a happy workplace.
- Click here to find more videos from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference.
