News

Beyond winning and losing: leadership lessons for LGR

Oct 22, 2025

Max Wide

In this article, originally published in The MJ, Max Wide explores the leadership choices posed by reorganisation and reflects on how collaboration, cultural integration and private sector insights can help shape future-ready councils.

The bids are in. Web channels are overflowing with proud submissions to ‘grow’, ‘transform’, ‘strengthen’, ‘deliver’ (and many other superlatives), to create a new promised land (or two, or three or five).

Competing plans will culminate in what the secretary of state is ‘minded’ to do and structural change orders will follow. From past experience the letters communicating the decision will be sparse. Cases set out in great detail over hundreds of pages may be judged in single sentences, consistency between these letters may be lacking.

Though it might seem gauche to refer to ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’ in the local government world, that is what a competitive process with a binary outcome creates, and if you are involved in it, that is what it feels like. Believe me, I have been there.

The psychologist David Kantor believed that personalities are not set and constant (as many personality profiling tools suppose), but that actually people behave differently depending on the context. When what is at stake in a group moves from a conflict of preference to a conflict of survival, then participants are in ‘high stakes’ and their behaviours enter what he called ‘heroic’ or ‘shadow’ modes that are outside of normal parameters and of which their owners may not, on reflection, be proud.

As someone whose career has moved between private and public sector it fascinates me to witness how little each learns from the other. There is an equivalent private sector process – mergers and acquisitions (M&A) – and there are some particular trends emerging from that in recent years from which we might learn.

I think it is fair to say that across the country these past few months, there have been more than a few people in high stakes.

Whether at the right or wrong end of a decision in their eyes, how leaders act at these crucial junctures will impact thousands of people for years to come. I am not arguing that people should give up on any belief they hold dear. ‘I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician,’ said one famous leader, but weighing the consequences will test leaders’ ability to read (the realities of the situation and the prevailing winds) and carry (their own emotional response).

The sector is facing a crisis of financial sustainability. Even if we accept the PWC prediction of £2.4bn net savings from local government reorganisation (LGR) over five years, the LGA estimate a gap of £3.9bn over the next two years, just to stand still. There is a clear imperative against which a choice to contest the decision should be weighed. Robert Greenleaf set out a view of servant leadership, proposing that true leaders are not free to do as they wish but are stewards who hold their organisations in trust for the greater good, not for personal gain. Only leaders themselves will know how this responsibility will play out in their own thoughts and consciences.

Local government orthodoxy is unhelpful in this situation. Two things in particular. First is the belief that until the political realm is clear and certain the organisational realm cannot really progress; not until the new council, leader, chief executive, directors and so on are in place. Staff have to play a waiting game in which at best they lose a sense of agency and at worst, live for many months, even years, in high stakes.

Second, the unswerving belief that all you can do is to get to vesting day with the lights on, ‘safe and legal’, then – and only then – can we think about what to do next. As a consequence, new unitary organisations often take longer to derive less benefit than originally forecast, and many nearly fall over in the process. We need new practices.

As someone whose career has moved between private and public sector it fascinates me to witness how little each learns from the other. There is an equivalent private sector process – mergers and acquisitions (M&A) – and there are some particular trends emerging from that in recent years from which we might learn.

Traditional M&A practices used to focus on static variables such as valuations and deal structuring, but in the face of similarly disappointing results, practice in recent years has shifted to greater activity prior to merger; an emphasis on scenario planning, value creation, relationship building and cultural integration.

Many firms in high profile mergers (such as Salesforce and Slack, Disney and Pixar, Amazon and Wholefoods) have used a ‘value stack’ approach as described by Benjamin Gomes-Casseres in the book Remix Strategy – The Three Laws of Business Combinations. Working together prior to merger day, the organisations identified target competencies, things that the new organisation would have to be able to do, and then systematically evaluated what each organisation has that would contribute to that. From assets and infrastructure to data, systems and processes, networks and relationships, key capabilities and so on. The capacity to hit the ground running is greatly enhanced.

Anyone who has ever worked with the dynamics of mergers will be familiar with the need to counter the crippling perception of the ‘take over’. It is natural amidst uncertainty for people to believe that a threat is looming and no matter what the size differentials, each will feel taken over by the other. Who gets the jobs? Where are the offices? and so on, all become pivotal symbols.

True leaders will know that what is done at the outset will set the culture for years to come, the founding stories will become encoded in the mythology of the new organisation and will be difficult to change later.

The human systems practitioner, Barry Oshry, states that a robust system is one able to cope (be resilient in the face of challenges) and prospect (seek out and grasp new opportunities). He warns therefore against the corrosive impact of building a culture based on dominance of one organisation over another. ‘Where dominance reigns’ he says ‘difference is feared, defended against and controlled’.

Whereas in the development of a positive culture it is ‘welcomed, valued and utilised’. This is the human version of the value stack, which allows everyone to feel included, to have what they have been proud of recognised and integrated, repurposed for the task ahead. If this is not done, he warns, the result can be ‘apathy, reduced creativity and, in the extreme, crushed human spirit’.

I have in the space available only scratched the surface of what needs to be done in order to quickly create new and effective organisations. Does the context of LGR (and the creation of new strategic authorities) allow this? That, I think, is a question of how much leaders are willing to challenge orthodoxy.

Post-decision, the contest in the political realm may continue, but it is in the interests of everyone in the long run that the authorising environment allows political and organisational agendas to operate in parallel, not in sequence. Collaboration in advance of merger is possible, the task facing the new councils is well known, the picture on the front of the box is recognisable, even if we do not know precisely which jigsaw pieces will make it up.

The key in actual fact is to move beyond notions of winning and losing, moving to some form of rapprochement, using approaches like value stacking and robust systems development is an imperative for the future, and leadership choice for our times.

Max Wide is Associate Director of Developing Strategic Authorities at the Leadership Centre and Transformation Advisor at East Hampshire DC.

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