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Chancellor helps launch £12m leadership initiative

A £12 million initiative to promote management and leadership excellence in the creative and cultural sector was launched last week.

Trustees and staff of Creative & Cultural Skills, the sector skills council for the creative and cultural industries, were at Number 11 Downing Street last Thursday to help chancellor Gordon Brown launch the initiative.

The two-year Cultural Leadership Programme aims to develop leadership which is dynamic, diverse and world-class.

Creative & Cultural Skills anticipate that over 2000 people working in the creative and cultural industries will directly benefit from leadership opportunities development opportunities through it.

Gordon Brown said: "Culture in the UK helps to define and shape and deepen our lives as individuals. It also makes a significant contribution to our nation's prosperity.

"If this significant part of our economy is to prosper and grow, we must recognise the role of our cultural leaders in delivering that success and ensure the emergence of a talented and diverse group of future leaders."

The programme is jointly led by Creative & Cultural Skills, The Arts Council of England and The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.

Creative & Cultural Skills said the programme will focus on four key areas:

• Ensuring that the skills base and support networks for creative leaders are fit for purpose
• Enabling a more diverse range of people to be leaders
• Providing development opportunities for current and prospective leaders at different stages of their careers
• Securing a long-term legacy for cultural leadership by connecting the programme to other major skills developments

Among the speakers at the breakfast launch event was David Kershaw, partner at top advertising agency M&C Saatchi and a trustee of Creative & Cultural Skills. He said: "In the face of increasing global competition, complacency is not a luxury we can afford.

"We are successfully opening markets worldwide, including in the growing economies in the east - India and China. But as we access these markets, we will continue to find increasing competition from the bright young and hungry talent those countries have to offer.

"To meet this competition, we need to expand the diversity of our workforce across the board but particularly at the highest leadership levels. While we support an equal opportunities agenda, our real focus is commercial success. We need to create a diverse workforce to respond most effectively to diverse markets - in the UK and abroad.

"The advertising sector has a history of recruiting the best. That best will look increasingly multicultural in years to come, reflecting a talent base across the population. The Cultural Leadership Programme can help us fast-track some of that talent."

Creative & Cultural Skills said opportunities will be open to people throughout the UK working in the wider creative and cultural industries as well as the core cultural sector of crafts; libraries and archives; museums and galleries; music and the arts.

The organisation added that it will be delivering a £2.5 million online careers portal, called Creative Choices, that's designed to enable current and future leaders to make informed decisions about courses and personal development options.

Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House and chair of Creative & Cultural Skills, said: Leaders above all must see the bigger picture, what's happening in the wider world, and be ready to respond.

"The challenge of that is now even bigger: we are lucky to be doing what we are in a period of enormous technological and social change.

"We don't - so far - train our leaders or our managers. All the business school models of leadership are from the commercial world. We need to develop thinking about what we need to manage creativity. In the end, creativity is where the UK's future lies."

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