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LGC Manager Challenge - 25 November 2008

Success for Birmingham Manager Challenge!

The Managers event, organised by the Local Government Chronicle (LGC) & the BEST team, was held on 25th November 2008 at Aston Villa Football Club and with over 60 participants from throughout the council it proved to be a great success.

This exciting event was especially designed for the managers of the Council, to pit their wits against each other, step outside of their normal daily comfort zones, take on challenges and difficult situations and have some fun whilst demonstrating the Council’s core values.

The event was designed to help participants develop their key competencies including Interpersonal skills; political awareness; initiative, creativity and self-motivation. Teams benefited from the chance to learn how to strategically plan, prioritise and action; diagnose and analyse strategic problems and opportunities and build teams and develop partnerships. Teams also learnt crucial team building and partnership working; negotiating, influencing and presentation skills

Teams from different departments worked in clusters as a ‘management team’ to deal with a series of issues that might be faced in a real life work situation. Teams were encouraged to form partnerships in their cluster, deal with the press, make appointments with their ‘leader’ and other key stakeholders, in order to achieve excellence and success for their team.

Chief Executive Stephen Hughes presented the winning teams with trophies, the winning teams were:

First Place: “Bower”- Steve Ingram, Mick Leonard, Mark Churm, Phil John, Graham Salt & Ian Bird from Service Birmingham in the Chief Executives Directorate.

Mick Leonard from the winning team said: ‘We entered it as a team building exercise and an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how local government works. From that perspective it was a great success for us and to have won was a real bonus’

Second Place: “Grey”- Sean Connolly, Eileen Atkinson, Phil Coyne, Richard Kenny, Suman McCartney & Eve Baldwin. The team assembled on the day and was comprised of staff from across all directorates within the council who had all entered separately.

Third Place: “Kenrick”- Mark Croxford, Caroline Stewart, Janet Bradley, Louise Elliot, Martin Smith & Bill Wilson- who are all part of the Environmental Health Department in the Chief Executives Directorate.

Two special awards were also given on the day. The first was for Best Presentation- which went to the “Cadbury” team, Lesley Bannister, Andrew Hirst, Karl Randall, Theresa Tammam & Mary Kennedy from the Sutton Coldfield Constituency Office from the Housing & Constituencies Directorate.

The “Reynolds” team won the award for Best Partnership Working. This team from the Development & Culture Dircetorate and was made up of Alison Malik, Steve Brain, Pam Dutton, Hilary Atkinson & Adrian Howley.

The winning teams will go forward to the national LGC National Challenge which is being held in the Autumn. This event will give the Birmingham teams the chance to go head to head with teams from Councils across the country.

Stephen Hughes, who presented the winning teams with their trophies said “Well done to all of the teams here today, it’s great to see so much skill, energy and enthusiasm and I was delighted to be able to present the winners with their awards’

Managers throughout the council are invited to take part in the next manager challenge which will be held in the summer if you are interested please look out for further information. If you would like any more details, or to register or nominate a team, then please contact Lucy L Kenny via lotus or call 675 1579.