I am sure that you will all be interested to know that your District Councillor is an intuitive introvert !* On another parameter it seems that I am a ‘rationalist’ rather than an artist, a guardian or an idealist! The reason that I know these things is that I have just returned from the first two days of a course at the I&DeA Leadership Academy, where, along with fifteen other councillors from local authorities of all types, I have been put through some personality profiling exercises, and have been given all sorts of interesting tools with which to hone my leadership skills!
Although some of the material was familiar to me since I attended a similar course towards the end of my career in the City, the local authority rather than private sector context meant that I learned a lot.
Delegates had the opportunity to discuss personal challenges in small groups. It was fascinating to hear the variety of anxieties that were uppermost in councillors’ minds. A county councillor was fretting about the delivery of a huge PFI schools project for example. The potential leader of the opposition in a Borough Council was worried about having to form an administration if his group does well at the next elections. One of the people in our group was the Leader of a District Council who claimed to have so much difficulty trusting his cabinet that he found it impossible to stop himself adding his two-pennyworth to their speeches in the Council Chamber. I bet they really love him!
By the evening of the first day, as often happens, the course began to feel like a little world of its own. In the bar after dinner, hours of innocent fun were spent discussing the relative merits of plastic bags and wheely bins. It is incredible how strongly some elected representatives feel about the advantages and disadvantages of their various refuse collection systems. I had quite a good ding-dong with a gentleman who claimed that it was not just the right of everyone to have a roof over their head (with which of course I agree) but that it was their right to be an owner occupier (an idea with which I could not concur). Midnight found four survivors (or insomniacs) writing down what they meant by Conservatism on paper napkins to prove that the Party still has an ideology!
Happy days! We all reconvene again in November for more of the same. In the meantime it’s back to the real world.
