Not taking stock

Ah, the report of the Taking Stock Review is finally published. The report is written in management-speak and therefore requires some translation.

The remit of the review was to assess "the Scottish Executive against its aspiration to be a fully integrated government; the effectiveness of the corporate centre; and the leadership capability of the Heads of Departments and Group Heads". Put briefly, are the donkeys of the Excutive's senior management up to the job?

Allowing for the verbiage, the guts of the report are to be found in Chapter 5:

- Staff and stakeholders feel that the senior leadership team lacks passion, pace and drive and do not perceive them as the powerful and unified driving force that they aspire to be. Many of the senior leaders do not believe they are a united driving force either. Those missing qualities may undermine the capability of the senior leadership to drive a reform agenda and position the Executive to face the challenges posed by the Comprehensive Spending Review and by responding to the priorities of the next administration.
- Many staff feel Management Group members aren't sufficiently visible and don't manage to inspire the levels of trust and respect to which they aspire. The Management Group needs to build on recent initiatives to increase visibility, and to inspire and motivate staff.
- It is difficult to know when the members of Management Group are acting as departmental heads or corporate leaders.
- The members of the Management Group are not always clear on their mode of operation in meetings and this can lead to non-supportive behaviour, such as a lack of understanding of each other's priorities.
- The senior leadership team does not always effectively communicate to staff its decisions and the rationale behind them.
- The senior leadership does not scrutinise and challenge one another sufficiently, particularly in relation to identifying priorities, resource allocation and monitoring performance to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
- The evaluation of the corporate culture change programme, Changing to Deliver, raised a number of leadership issues that have yet to be addressed. It found that strong leadership would reduce inconsistencies in embracing change and that leaders needed to increase their effectiveness in communicating corporate initiatives to staff.

You may think that this means that the senior officials in the Executive are a bunch of plonkers. You might think that the Executive's Management Group should be ashamed of themselves. That's because you don't understand the mindset of the senior civil servant. That mindset has enabled Sir John Elvidge, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Scottish Executive to write the following to the poor bloody infantry in the Executive trenches:

"The review team have generally confirmed the views my Management Group colleagues and I had developed about what is strong and effective about the Executive and how we keep making progress...
The review team recognised we are building on many strengths and achievements. They identified you - the people who work in the Executive - as our number one asset. They said staff have "a powerful commitment to provide highly effective public services to the people of Scotland". I agree completely - I know first-hand they are right about that.
I also know that, when they acknowledge the many successes you have achieved working with Ministers for the good of the people of Scotland, there is hard evidence to back that up.
They were rightly impressed how we have grown from being one department within the UK Government pre-devolution to being a government.
They fully recognise we have made substantial progress with the Changing to Deliver programme, particularly on the way we work with others and on our focus on delivery."

Sir John has been in charge of the Executive for more than three years. In denial all that time? Looks like it...