Rose Peller, the newly appointed Chief Executive of East City Council, had a mandate to restructure the city's local government. One of her first tasks was to set up a quality committee of senior managers to transform the Council's culture, employee attitudes and performance. Her objective was to introduce total quality management (TQM) throughout the Council's administration. Workshops on TQM started with the senior management team and department managers. Some of the workshops on leadership aimed to turn oldfashioned local government managers into 'active leaders', trying to enthuse instead of dictate.

The proposed changes are physical and cultural. Part of the restructuring is to introduce open-plan working throughout the Council's buildings, in terms both of dismantling counters between staff and customers and of getting managers out of their offices. It is envisaged that the manager's role will become one of facilitator, and employees, after they become organized into quality teams, will have greater autonomy and no longer hand the