7. The Future of Public Sector Leadership

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.