Stronger together: modern city leadership in Sheffield
Leader, Sheffield City Council
The privilege of city leadership is to be able to provide help for people today, and also make changes that will shape the city for decades to come. At Sheffield City Council, our mission is ‘Together, We Get Things Done’. It’s the name of our Council Plan because everything we do requires partnership working, whether that is tackling immediate pressures around homelessness or undertaking major long-term regeneration projects.
We see the Council’s role as ‘convenor of place’. Local government has a unique ability to bring people and partners together to seek to achieve shared outcomes and create conditions for future success. We know that tackling complex challenges is only possible with collaboration between local, regional and national government, all parts of the public sector, businesses, residents and the voluntary sector.
In 2022, Sheffield began a process to establish a set of City Goals; goals that would serve as our ‘North Stars’ to describe the city we want to be and the outcomes we want to achieve. Over 18 months, a conversation took place in the city. Thousands of people took part and the city adopted the goals earlier this year.
As important as the goals are the structures around them. New goals require new ways of working. This month we convened the Sheffield Stronger Together leadership group; senior leaders from anchor institutions, business and the voluntary sector who have come together to help shape the city’s work towards meeting our goals. Chaired by myself, and with cross-party representation, we are pioneering a new style of collaborative city leadership to use our collective resource, capacity and influence in pursuit of our goals.
City leadership requires being tactical and strategic. It requires moving quickly to tackle new challenges, but also staying on course with long-term plans to remove the barriers that hold people back. Moving our focus to early intervention and prevention is crucial to achieving this, but to make this shift, public services have to come together and work differently.
In underfunded and overstretched systems this can appear daunting, but leadership requires us to be optimistic, to be creative and to be willing to experiment and learn. That’s why our City Goals and the new collaborative, shared structures we are putting in place are critical. With a government that is serious about public sector reform, Sheffield stands ready to work together to get things done.