Meet the menders
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Contents
  6. Category F, Creating the conditions
Creating the conditions

Discipline 14. Civic and place leaders

A Black man in his sixties with a forearm crutch beside a noticeboard, a rolled plan under his arm.

Maturity of support

  • 2Codification
  • 3Institutions
  • 3Training
  • 3Communities
  • 3Academia
  • 2.8Overall, mean of the five

Civic and place leaders create the system-level conditions that allow change to happen in a place. The discipline is most often practised by chief executives and other executive leaders of large institutions in a place – local authorities, NHS trusts, large anchor employers, and significant civil society organisations; people whose decisions and relationships shape what is possible for others.

The work emphasises forming deep relationships with peers across sectors, and operating in a generous, trust-based and adaptive way over the long term. This is leadership oriented to a place rather than to running a service, delivering a programme, or growing an organisation. In this model, a leader’s job is to steward the conditions in which a community can flourish – including by sponsoring and protecting the other disciplines we describe. In this sense, civic and place leadership is distinct from more traditional models of public sector or corporate leadership, which tend to focus more on running an institution and delivering core functions.

It is rare for a public sector leader to be explicitly hired as a ‘civic and place leader’, but when people choose to work in this way it can be highly consequential for the place, and for the other disciplines described in this report.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

Considerable architecture exists for public sector leadership in general, but little of it addresses the civic dimension. There are the LGA and Solace’s managerial leadership programmes for senior officers; a Chief Executives’ Development Framework published by Solace; competency frameworks in adjacent sectors, such as the Chartered Institute of Housing’s professional standards, masters programmes such as INLOGOV’s MSc Public Management at Birmingham, and international executive programmes such as the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. Place leadership is recognised in the academic literature, with a substantial body of work on inclusive city leadership – Robin Hambleton’s Leading the Inclusive City (2015) – and on the governance of place, with research homes including INLOGOV at Birmingham, CURDS at Newcastle and Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy.

As yet, there has been less codification of civic stewardship as a distinct discipline. One attempt to name and develop this work as a practice is Our Future, founded in 2022 by Emily Bolton and Jason Stockwood and working in Grimsby and Rochdale; they are helping to convene the next generation of civic leaders through its Open House gatherings. There are also initiatives like Big Education’s leadership programme, which puts an emphasis on the civic aspects of school leadership. The most common request we heard from the practitioners we interviewed was for it to be easier to meet with peers to discuss and refine their practice, and to have more space and permission to work in these ways.