PPMA president Sandra Farquharson sets out why councils must treat talent as a systemic priority, creating clearer pathways, broader exposure and modern working cultures to sustain future leadership

Local government spends a great deal of time thinking about how to attract talented people into the sector. It is an important task, and the Local Government Association’s recent campaign to highlight careers in the sector is exactly the kind of collaborative effort we need.

But attraction is only one side of the talent coin and, if we were to reflect on whether the sector spends enough time asking whether it is making the very best use of the talented people it already has, it would be hard to say an emphatic ‘yes’.

Local government reorganisation and transformation programmes provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change that and think again about how the sector grows its own people. As councils across England rewrite organisational charts, leadership structures and ways of working, it would be a missed opportunity if we redesigned organisations without redesigning how people progress through them.
Local government already possesses extraordinary knowledge, commitment and leadership at every level. So I would argue a better way to think about our talent challenge is that we don’t have a shortage of talented people: we have a shortage of opportunities for talented people to grow.

LGR and transformation programmes gives us the chance to change that: to move talent from being an HR concern to being a core principle of organisational design by thinking about the talent systems we need for the future health of our organisations and the sector itself.

Here is how I think we can achieve that.

Recognise this as a systemic risk, not a recruitment problem

Fewer than 5 per cent of people working in local government are under 25, while around two-thirds of the workforce are aged between 40 and 64. What’s more, today’s experienced leaders and managers were built by years of stretch, exposure and development that the sector is no longer providing consistently.

The reality today is that we are living off past investment in talent and that investment is not being replenished at anything like the rate it is being drawn down.

This is a systemic risk to the sector’s ability to function in ten years’ time and it belongs on the same agenda as financial sustainability and service delivery.

HR and OD can help with the challenge but chief executives, finance directors and heads of service should all be asking the same question: what happens when the geneation we are relying on now has gone, and who have we developed to replace them?

Build for talent mobility
Our best work as a sector is done when we work across silos, when ideas and shortcomings are shared openly, and when new and fresh eyes in a team spot the opportunities for change that people too close to the work can miss.

This is the argument for talent mobility in our organisations and it applies as much to managers as it does to future leaders. We need to build systems which deliver the mobility that attracts and nurtures talent and builds capability.

We should do that by adopting what we know that is proven to work well, through apprenticeships, secondments, rotations and cross-functional projects, used deliberately rather than left to chance. And it shouldn’t stop at the boundary of one local authority. A secondment to a neighbouring council, a placement in the NHS, or a rotation through a combined authority, and even Private Sector Partners can offer breadth that a single, leaner organisation may no longer be able to provide on its own.

The new person that comes in or the person who comes back is more skilled with a different view of how things could work. And this is exactly what a team that has only ever worked one way is missing.

Close the gaps in the career ladder
Within services and corporate functions, the steps between manager, head of service and director are often too big. Someone can be highly effective at one level and still be several steps away from the skills the next one demands. This isn’t because they lack capability but that the level above asks for things the level below never required or equipped them with: influencing across services, building political relationships, leading through ambiguity rather than delivering against a clear brief.

These are skills and capabilities which are learned through exposure, the very thing that gets lost when the rungs between levels are too far apart to climb without a leap.

We need to recognise that the gap between a head of finance or HR and the director role above them will not be closed by someone sitting in the same seat, doing the same job, for another five years. That guarantees stagnation or team turnover, not readiness for succession.

Leaders and managers should treat succession and progression as a core accountability of their own role, not as a project handed to HR to manage on their behalf.

Recruit for potential, not only proof
The way we shortlist, interview and appoint carries real risk, and at senior levels in particular, the pattern is hard to miss. The same names appear on shortlists across the sector, are appointed, then reappointed elsewhere a few years later. This may show these people are highly talented, but it is also a signal that we are limiting our own talent pool and doing it by habit rather than by design.

Part of the problem sits earlier than the shortlist. If a job specification simply repeats what was written the last time the role was vacant, or is copied from another organisation, we have not actually asked what the organisation needs now, or what it will need in five years’ time. Instead, we have asked for a safe pair of hands to do the same job, the same way as they did somewhere else. It may have worked in the past but it will not sustain the innovation, drive change or help grow our organisations in the way we need.

This is because when you recruit like that consistently enough, at every level, you create a closed loop, where the same pool of proven names moves between authorities doing versions of the same role, while the people already inside those organisations who could do something different or do things differently, never get asked.

The cost of that loop is a sector that keeps recruiting for the organisation it used to be, leaving talent out in the cold at the exact moment LGR and the public services transformation agenda is asking every council to become something different. Promotion and career pathways structures cannot continue to favour compliance and longevity over impact and innovation, effectively penalising high-potential employees who challenge the status quo.

Sell careers, not jobs
Deployment, development and visible career progression are core to why people choose local government careers and why they stay. A council that can point to colleagues who joined five years ago and are now leading major services has a stronger proposition than one that simply advertises vacancies.
When I talk to people considering a career in local government, particularly those at the start of their careers, they rarely ask only about the job. They want to know what comes next. Can I develop? Will I be trusted? Will I get opportunities? Those are questions every employer should be able to answer confidently.

Around one in three young people say they have never considered local government as a career, and those who do increasingly expect meaningful progression alongside flexibility and purpose. Career pathways should sit at the centre of our offer to the people we want working with us.

Let how we work evolve
We cannot think about talent attraction and retention without thinking about culture. One perception of local government is that its working environment is staid rather than dynamic and perceptions like that are not normally built on nothing.

This means how we approach and manage the way we work has a direct impact on talent and static ways of working carry a cost.

Where one mode, office or remote, is treated as inherently more serious or more trustworthy than the other, that judgement gets noticed and it shapes who wants to stay and who chooses not to apply in the first place. The same is true of how technology is used, or resisted, day to day and of how people are actually managed once they are in post. An organisation that has not moved on in how it works since long before the pandemic is telling people something about itself, whether it means to or not.

None of this is really a debate about desks. It is about whether an organisation is visibly still learning how to work or has settled into a way of doing things and stopped asking whether it still serves the people in it. The first is attractive. The second, whatever its intentions is less likely to hold on to the people it needs.

Become a genuine learning organisation
Everything in this manifesto rests on one foundation: development sits at the centre of how an organisation sees itself, not at the edges of what it can afford.

Learning means more than technical training. It means learning from mistakes rather than burying them, learning about the organisation itself and not just individual roles, and valuing the peer and network learning that happens at conferences and across professional bodies, because the sector’s collective knowledge is an asset to every organisation within it.

A council that understands the value of learning is investing in the only mechanism that turns today’s workforce into tomorrow’s leadership. Succession planning and development is something we simply cannot afford to ignore anymore. Institutional inertia actively filters out the exact cognitive diversity and disruptive thinking needed to solve complex modern challenges.

HR and OD professionals sit at the intersection of organisational design, workforce planning, leadership development and culture, which gives them a unique responsibility in this moment. But this is a challenge which extends beyond HR and every chief executive, senior leadership team and political leader involved in reorganisation should ask themselves one question before they sign off their new structures: what kind of leadership pipeline will our new organisation inherit?

The greatest legacy of local government reorganisation should not be the structures we design but the talent systems which attract the right people and then sustain and grow future managers and leaders.
One thing is clear: we cannot keep drawing from the same well and expect it never to run dry. While the whole system is open for redesign, we have the chance to replenish it. This chance will not come around again for a generation and we must take it with both hands.