Developing Public Sector Leadership

This opening chapter provides an introduction to the contents of the book. This chapter maintains that public sector leaders do not assume greatness in leading people at birth or by accident. This applies to all leaders—ranging from the private sector to the public and non-governmental sectors. A leader’s charisma develops over time and in accordance with their experience. To achieve it, you will have to put yourself in ‘front of a mirror’ and to ask yourself what you are good at and what you are ready to do in order to make yourself a better leader. The future of public sector leadership notably differs from ‘old-school’ New Public Management. The world is now more complex and managing people and performance in it requires a new kind of mindset based on cooperation, mutual trust and learning. Public sector leaders are in a key position in the development of our societies. More is yet to come, however, if we listen to what future studies’ scholars say. According to them, the pace of change is set to increase dramatically; our world will change more in the coming decades than it has over the last few centuries. This chapter views future public sector leadership as becoming increasingly dependent on how the mindset of public leadership evolves and develops. The chapter introduces service-dominant logic, the theory of agile public institutions and organisations as well as strength-based positive psychology, which together constitute the foundations of public sector leadership. Together these elements help to nurture greater motivation among public sector employees and better service delivery to service users. Most of the ongoing and indeed forthcoming societal changes relate to technology. An essential element in these change processes is the reconfiguration of state and public institutions. The essential questions are: what will the role of the state be in future and how will public sector leaders perform their duties in this new and complex societal context? Focus, therefore, shifts towards the available tools and practices public sector leaders can deploy in developing their leadership skills.

The role and approach of public sector leadership change rapidly because everything else is changing around it—public institutions, public organisations, users of public services and the role of the media. This ongoing change calls for new understanding as regards learning mechanisms in relation to public sector leadership, specifically, how and why it takes place. Pragmatist philosophy and complexity theory strongly affect public sector leadership. These conceptual entities offer a fresh way to understand how and why public sector leadership development takes place and why it has to take into account the wide range of criticisms targeted at ‘old-school’ New Public Management and its construction of rational, positivist and quantitative approaches of evidence-based accountability. Good leaders are good because they have developed themselves to be better human beings and better at leading people. To develop yourself as a leader is a conscious act, it is a ‘mindset’ thing, which poses questions about open-mindedness, learning capability, honesty to yourself, interactivity, understanding of the conceptual relation between cause and effect and the skills to conceive of emerging issues from a ‘birds-eye perspective’. This chapter asks how leaders learn while identifying the organisational mechanisms that boost learning—and unlearning. By structural learning, we refer to the mechanisms of those leadership tools and practices which are directly linked, relationally and interwoven with each other, with the structures of public organisations and the positions leaders possess in their organisations (e.g. recruitment principles, rotation and job-switching mechanisms, and position-based requirements which provide an operational framework for public sector leaders to lead people). By dynamic learning mechanisms, we refer to the contents of leadership development tools, derived primarily from the changing mode of the operating environment, from leaders’ own experiences, from the personalities of leaders, learning-by-doing practices and the ways leaders learn and unlearn.

Complexity creates change challenges for public institutions, public policies, public administration and thus for public sector leadership. This chapter asks how to nurture and strengthen leadership development with the use of new and upgraded leadership tools and practices in this context? The public sector’s role in society is constantly evolving. At the moment, governments are being transformed in the direction of a more active role for government. The narrative about the idea of an enabling state is that active government enables diverse development across society, including new innovations and the strengthening of the ‘whole of government’ agenda. This calls for a new rationale and development tools for public sector leadership. Service-based production and action logic calls for a more nuanced role for public administration to ensure better public service delivery and thus the betterment of society. In practical terms, public administration is challenged to take a more active part in fostering innovativeness in society through the deployment of various ecosystems and value-creating cooperatives. This chapter describes these challenges and the changes taking place at an accelerating pace and discusses how they affect public sector leadership and how public sector leadership development tools and practices should be adjusted accordingly.

This chapter discusses how public sector managers and leaders think about their work and their organisations and with what kind of mindset reformulation should be developed to adjust to the demands of a changing society. The ability to perceive our organisations will also define how we observe and develop them. These skills can be developed, but the process requires an ‘open-minded’ attitude, a realistic understanding of one’s personal strengths and weaknesses and the ability to see future possibilities from a new perspective. Broadening one’s mind-related diversity is essential for top-level public sector executives; how to do it, relates to leaders’ personal habits, preferences, and competencies. The contents of work, human resource management and competence building have changed markedly in recent decades. This relates to all types of organisations from business to public administration and further to the non-governmental sector. In the context of this chapter, cognitive ergonomics refers to the reorganisation of one’s mind and to putting aside current ways of learning and ways of looking to the future, embracing the diversities of future life by accepting the complexities of society as the cornerstone of our wellbeing and everyday life. This chapter addresses the questions which deal with the perceptual distortions leaders may experience in leading their organisations. Cognitive ergonomics is also a lens through which to understand how public sector leaders’ identity traits evolve. As a result, collective self-steering increases at all levels and sectors in public organisations.

In order to begin the transformation journey towards the public institutions of the 2020s, the key question is what kind of behavioural changes are required at a practical level and how to steer public sector leaders themselves to develop, learn and act in this brave new world. Another relevant question is how to help leaders to enable others (staff and cooperating partners) to develop and learn so that the new way of thinking and learning is transformed into everyday practices producing better administration for citizens and service users. To enable public sector organisations to better fulfil their societal tasks and create an environment for people to flourish in public organisations, at least two measures are required: first, the need to take a closer look at the generic meta-skills required regardless of which branch of government we are speaking about and, second, starting multiple actions for behaviour and skills development. The focus on senior civil service competence development should be shifted to raising capabilities transferable from one sphere to another and building readiness to tackle varying issues. The ability to transfer skills and capabilities from one context to another is a key element of successful leadership and even more importantly the key element of any impactful learning. At the heart of learning is the idea of deliberately exploring new horizons and taking action in order to be prepared or to be a forerunner in creating a better future. Meta-skill capacity involves the ability to use overarching skills to learn other skills and proactively engage others in skill development and new learning. It is a holistic view of competences characterised by the capacity to evaluate what and how one is doing and thinking and defining priorities, as well as building capacities in relation to learning to learn. This chapter focuses on meta-skills and asks how we can build them into public sector leadership development. Several examples were put forward illustrating how to embed such skills into organisational and leadership development working practices and decision making more generally.

‘I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think’ is a proverb from Socrates which is also a very good motto for designing training for a VUCA-world. It is also something that is rather different from the traditional approach to leadership training which continues to support the rather naive idea that there is a knowledge-based solution to every problem, preferably provided by some researcher or external expert. The key issue in facing an unknown future and complex challenges is to realise that there are no ready or simple answers for how to think, or how to take action. From the perspective of learning, listening to lectures does not necessarily open new horizons for thought nor does it generate new kinds of action. In practice, solutions and real changes arise when knowledge, skills and experience are combined in a manner that is different from how this has been done before. This requires bringing knowledge to a personal level and the interactive building of understanding. It also calls for the taking of a step away from the temptation to draw quick conclusions from contradictory opinions or facts and seeing bewilderment as a fruitful condition. Long-term training provides an ideal platform to learn when it is designed in such a way that it develops the ability to think and seek solutions together. When the training is not delivered from an expert position, but instead as an open-ended dialogue with and between the participants, it also creates a great opportunity to practise all the important meta-skills discussed in Chap. 5. In this chapter, we describe in detail how the Route for Renewal© training programme (2016–2018) was designed and conducted in Finland by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. The main aim of the leadership training was to precipitate a systemic change in terms of leadership for the 2020s within the Finnish Central Government. Eight specific learning activities are described in detail, as well as the solutions-focused paradigm of change and facilitation.

As an anecdote and reference to George Lucas’ Star War movie saga, we might say that the bureaucratic nature of public sector institutions and organisations has been an approaching (and to certain extent prevailing, immanent, though taking place step by step) ‘death star’ for generations, with major debates about time-consuming decision processes, corruptive behaviour mentality, bad service experience, old-fashioned and not-fit-for-purpose operational protocols—and good-for-nothing or next-to-nothing leadership. Leadership issues have not, however, been discussed in a detailed manner thus far—not least from the perspective of leadership development in the public sector. The good news is that this death star nightmare has perhaps finally come to an end. Not necessarily because of the Sitra leadership training programme, but because we foresee that public sector leadership and leadership development in particular will attract exponentially growing interest in the coming years.