Background and Challenges
Trueman Change has worked with Clackmannanshire Corporate Services, within their Performance and Partnerships Directorate, since 2021. This partnership was created to enhance internal support and services, primarily focussing on high-traffic areas such as procurement, HR management, and recruitment.
This most recent project saw us supporting the council's medium-to-long-term financial strategy, helping to streamline internal services and ensuring teams have confidence in systems and processes.
At the heart of this work lay challenges in areas such as managing change, maintaining efficiency, and balancing responsibilities across departments. The transformation involved addressing inevitable cultural resistance while introducing new ways of working.
Trueman Change Involvement
We recognised that policy and performance processes needed more alignment, so we applied strategic sense-checking methods to evidence feedback from the teams, mapping both culture and statutory risks to identify where improvements could be made.
Other key contributions included:
- Using our administrative expertise alongside a review from legal professionals to assess corporate risks.
- Recommending strategies to resolve cross-departmental relationship issues and improve trust and decision-making.
- Tackling cultural dynamics tactfully, with a focus on balancing responsibility and accountability, leadership versus management, and flexibility within strict processes.
- Helping leaders move from reactive, day-to-day firefighting to a balance of business-as-usual and transformational activities.
Outcomes and Solutions
Our findings highlighted a number of significant areas where decisions and processes could be rebalanced to boost efficiency. We used our report to address these imbalances, and provided a clear route to improving both efficiency and effectiveness within the council.
Additionally, Trueman Change equipped senior management with actionable insights into cultural and operational challenges within the organisation. These insights allowed leaders to make strategic decisions with greater confidence and clarity, enabling Clackmannanshire Council to create more sustainable and balanced ways of working.
Using insights from workforce analysis and feedback, we provided clarity on how strained capacity, budget constraints, and risk aversion impacted productivity. By laying out the current situation in our comprehensive report, we enabled leaders to make informed decisions about resource allocation and risk-taking.
Added Value
We were able to add value to the overall project by:
- Leading workshops that would help mediate any relationship challenges and encourage collaboration between corporate leaders and service departments.
- Bridging cultural gaps with open and constructive discussions, helping to reduce defensiveness and build trust.
- Suggesting practical methods to help the organisation balance responsibility, accountability, and flexibility.
- Bringing an in-depth knowledge of statutory requirements, admin expertise, and workplace psychology to provide a truly holistic approach to supporting Clackmannanshire.
