Developing Public Sector Leadership: New Rationale, Best Practices and Tools

By Petri Virtanen and Marika Tammeaid

This book presents tools, techniques, and best practices to develop public-sector leadership. Based on scholarly research as well as the authors’ professional experience as leadership trainers and consultants, it offers guidance and practical know-how for public-sector managers, civil servants and policymakers in public administration on how to create and develop leadership skills and practice.

By analyzing the particular nature of political processes and public policy decision-making as well as the complex challenges of public organizations, the authors identify competencies, leadership skills and methods required for successful governance, administration, and management of public organizations. The authors also discuss different leadership styles and philosophies, cover topics such as public sector leadership training of 2020’s, and present case studies on successful public-sector leadership development and future-oriented leadership models.

Balancing public-sector leadership theory with practical illustrations and examples, tools and techniques, the book helps managers master the art of public-sector leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030423117

Book preview

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

P. Virtanen, M. TammeaidDeveloping Public Sector Leadershiphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42311-7_1

1. Introduction

Petri Virtanen¹, ² and Marika Tammeaid¹  

(1)

ITLA Foundation, Helsinki, Finland

(2)

University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland

Marika Tammeaid

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

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.

1.1 The Approach of This Book

It is important to ask—from the perspective of every professional book—why any book should be written in the first place. From the perspective of public sector leadership, this question is particularly relevant. From this perspective establishing, the purpose of writing a book is significant because the definitions of public sector leadership are already plentiful. Public sector leadership is a vast and highly complex social and organisational phenomenon, and there are many theories available to explain it (e.g. Joyce 2017).

By looking at the sheer volume of academic literature as well as the wealth of quasi-academic output in this field, one can see that the field of public sector leadership has expanded significantly since the 1980s and 1990s. Despite this increased interest, the theoretical, conceptual and practical world of public sector leadership is, however, far from finalised. Our book tries to provide a rationale for this and tools to develop and nurture public sector leadership at a very practical level—from the perspective of how to develop it.

Given this background, this book is written for public sector leaders and for those who work with these people. Among those who work with top public sector executives are political decision makers and various societal stakeholders. In addition, in writing this book, we have also included in our target audience those people who work for top executives—middle managers in central government ministries and government agencies, as well as potential future civil service leaders, climbing the first steps up the leadership ladder.

Public sector leadership will become a key societal issue in the coming years. Public administration has assumed a growing role in the betterment of society by co-creating value through public services and public interventions with other societal partners from the public, business and non-governmental sectors. We see a distinctive leap occurring from a ‘night-watchman state’ towards a more active and participatory state, in which public administration serves society profoundly and pervasively.

The approach adopted in this book links the betterment of public sector leadership to UN Sustainable Development Goals 16 and 17 in particular. Leadership development in public institutions and organisations is rooted in the principles of building effective, accountable institutions at all levels of governance as well as in fostering partnerships between governments, the private sector and civil society. At its best, public sector leadership enhances these inclusive partnerships built upon the principles, values, shared visions and objectives that underline the goal of human-centric public policies across all levels of governance.

This book is about leadership tools and practice and, as such, it omits, for the most part, the conceptual discussions around leadership itself and the evolution of public management theories. This does not, however, mean that this book is put together ‘without the context’ or that we debunk the merits of public management and leadership scholars—on the contrary, we build our arguments upon these scholarly achievements but intentionally leave them ‘backstage’, hopefully, to ease readability thus benefiting our readers.

By leadership tools and practice, we refer to the practical link between public sector leadership challenges and the means and mechanisms deployed to strengthen leadership capacity both at the individual and collective levels. If we are asked to cluster these tools together and find one common feature in them, we would say that it is learning. While leadership tools and practices enhance learning, they also build public sector capacity from the public institutions’ and public organisations’ points of view.

The aims of our book are as follows:

To introduce a new rationale, practice and tools for creating and developing public sector leadership from the perspective of leadership training. This book offers new views about learning and unlearning in public organisations—an approach, which draws on a new understanding of the role of the public sector in society as well as new competence contents of top public sector executives. The approach adopted for this book draws heavily on service science and service-dominant logic (SDL) theory, in particular, agile government theory and the leadership philosophy based on strength-oriented leadership development, authenticity, positive psychology and systemic social construction practice.

To provide a case study of the public sector leadership development programme implemented by the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, during the period, 2016–2018 for the top 140 Finnish civil service leaders, introducing its theoretical roots, learning aspects, practical pedagogy, practical module structure and feedback and effectiveness metrics, as well as benchmarks with international executive civil service global best practices (from INSEAD, the Government of Singapore, the Government of Canada, the Dutch Government and the Government of Estonia); and

To provide additional case examples and narratives about future-oriented leadership models adopted within the domain of public administration from various OECD countries and from the business sector (such as Buurtzorg from the Netherlands).

In short, this professional book is written with the intention of offering an analytical, detailed and practical description of the current transformation process in respect of public administration from a bureaucratic state model towards an ‘enabler’ state, topped with new insights as regards leading people (including the principles of self-directing, self-direction and self-management of successful teams).

In summary, this book is about the tools, techniques and practices used to develop public sector leadership. Based on scholarly research on leadership development as well as the authors’ professional experience as leadership trainers and consultants, this book offers guidance for public sector leaders, managers, civil servants and policymakers in public administration on how to create and develop leadership skills and practice. At the practical level, the book intends to identify the competencies, leadership skills and methods required for successful governance, administration and management of public organisations.

This book’s case study from the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra (i.e. Chap. 6 in particular) aims to provide a successful introduction to public sector leadership development and future-oriented leadership models. The case study balances public sector leadership theory with practical illustrations, practical learning activity examples, tools and techniques, helping public sector managers to master the art of public sector leadership.

In this book, classical Weberian organisational theories, concepts and approaches are converted into science-motivated service applications and organisational practices within the domain of public administration, which manifest not only in the implementation of public services but also particularly in relation to public sector leadership. The main storyline of this approach concerns the new rationale for and contents of public sector leadership, how leadership is developed at a very practical level and how public sector leadership development is incorporated in the systemic changes relevant to public sector institutions.

Finally, it should be kept in mind that this book does not put too much weight on the idea of what the role of leaders in the public sector will be vis-á-vis political decision makers. Therefore, it takes for granted the idea that civil service leadership at the different vertical and horizontal dimensions can or will solve the problems political decision makers may, or will, create. It is the political leadership that dictates, via whatever convictions, arguments or claims they make, and they do this in the name of representing the public, the electorate.

1.2 Leadership as the raison d’être for Public Administration

Governments, public institutions, public organisations—and public sector leaders—face overwhelming challenges with the 2020s almost upon us. Public sector specialised management scholars have addressed the fact that societal megatrends and systemic change drivers have a considerable effect on private sector business models, value-creating service ecosystems, public institutions and organisations (e.g. Greve 2015; Van der Wal 2017; Virtanen and Kaivo-oja 2015; Doppelt 2009).

On a more concrete level, Van der Wal (ibid.: 36–48) notes that certain global megatrends affect public organisations comprehensively and pervasively: they include ‘the new network society’ in which enabling technologies and social media have the most pivotal role; the rise of individualism and growing demands for unlimited transparency, demographic changes (ageing on the one hand, a ‘forever young’ mentality on the other), economic interconnectedness and shifting trade balances; and austerity policy for the public sector; global power shifts and the rise of multipolar world politics; ultra-urbanisation; and ‘more from less’ ideology stressing the roles of environmental depletion and climate change.

It is important here to understand—echoing Bourgon (2017: 29–30)—that no institution, organisation or governing system can be effective across time and space. The options in terms of resilience are, in fact, rather simple and few in number—some will adapt without problems, others will adapt with great difficulty, some will fail to adapt, and others again will not even understand the need for adaptation. Overall, there is definitely no shortage of turmoil and change in the world in which we live.

The implications of systemic changes are already present. The issues of communication and dialogue capacity, variety within and between organisational systems, new levels and intensity of machine–machine and machine–human interaction in the fields of ubiquitous robotics, the Internet of Intelligent Things (the Io[I]T) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the quality of participatory processes and participatory management skills call for an analytic treatise of the existing body of literature related to organisational and leadership theory—as well as new practical insight into developing and nurturing public sector leadership.

It seems, for instance, that the change management logic related to public institutions, classical motivation theories and leadership models should be recalibrated to render them better able to cope in a world engulfed by systemic governance challenges (e.g. Fernandez and Rainey 2006). The reason being that today’s public sector institutions are adaptive complex systems, integrated into society in a variety of ways. Adaptive complex system theory is thus more relevant—alongside service science concepts and new institutional organisational theory—than conventional organisational theories which assume the existence of simple, hierarchical and closed systems and organisational entities without complex or even chaotic systemic interaction (e.g. Uhl-Bien et al. 2007). In the light of complex systems, leadership is emphasised as a process rather than an activity exercised by top public sector executives (Van Wart 2017: 169–170).

It should also be emphasised here that the public sector, public policies and institutions of public administration have an enabling role in terms of many of the functions of business life, they constitute the basic conditions of reasonable living and wellbeing, they provide public services for service users, and they guarantee the value for money accountability of public resources deployed to political decision makers, the media, societal interest groups and the public. Public sector leadership thus provides much of the raison d’être for public administration. This is because public sector leaders and managers are in charge of the matter in public organisations and institutions. However, given the new nature of political decision making, the nonlinearity of political processes, encompassing societal change factors (such as digitalisation, the progress of technology, robotics, ecommerce, the platform economy and the demands for open government in particular), overwhelming financial constraints, and the plethora of existing co-creation models, the roles and competencies of public administration leaders and managers need to be rethought and reconceptualised. This is because this rethinking is linked with the practicalities of how to develop public sector leadership.

1.3 Leaders as Human Beings

People tend to overestimate their ability to accomplish things. Leadership skills are not an exception to this general rule. Kets de Vries (2009, 2014) has written about the gap between the leadership skills displayed by people in leadership positions vis-á-vis the leadership skills these people actually possess. The nature of this gap, he suggests, is outrageously wide: top executives think so positively about their skills—much more positively it turns out than reality merits. Committed to psychoanalysis, Kets de Vries thinks that childhood experiences and personality traits matter greatly because they tend to repeat themselves day after day, week after week, year after year. Leaders are no exception here because they also make mistakes and easily repeat the routines they have performed since their childhood. They also constantly repeat previous mistakes. Kets de Vries thinks this is because they are human beings—not superhuman beings.

This book asserts that top executives can change and improve their capabilities only if they can commit to change. This means that improvement is not possible if you are unwilling to take a chance. Willingness to change embodies changes on two interlinked dimensions, which probably makes the improvement rather difficult for leaders, because learning happens both on an emotional and a knowledge-based level means that they have to feel and test their emotions in different leadership situations and that they need more information about the frames of reference and circumstances that affect their leadership modus operandi. In practice, this refers to the fact that leadership development is about adding knowledge and developing yourself at very emotional levels—and exposing yourself to criticism.

When developing yourself as a leader on an individual level, the crucial point is to understand and conceive of this development process as a continuum and as a dynamic process, which—by its nature—is never fulfilled and finalised. This is an important point of departure also from the perspective of organisational culture: it places learning as mechanism up front and also highlights the collective learning aspects in organisations: it reflects how learning is contributed to and addressed in the organisation, how important competencies are in the organisation’s performance, how much the leaders and personnel encourage others to learn (and unlearn) and so on.

Leadership know-how is based on knowledge and is primarily about challenging your emotions. Knowledge itself, however, is insufficient. A leader who knows a lot is not useful to themselves or to their organisation if they cannot apply their leadership capabilities. Leaders—to be truly successful—also need the capability to apply their competencies. Leadership development and renewing your leadership competencies is a matter of emotion and deed. To be a successful leader, you have to open yourself up emotionally. From a more practical perspective, you will have to recognise your limitations and be able, particularly, to pinpoint your professional and personal strengths. It is useful to begin your leadership learning journey by focusing on your personal strengths and increasing the use of thus far unused strengths. Why? Simply because you are already competent in your areas of strength and they provide the base from which you can most speedily grow and succeed in your work.

Just placing emphasis on pouring in new information is of no use from the perspective of learning. It does not work for teaching purposes in pre-schools, schools, high schools or universities. This applies to leadership development also: constantly pouring new information into ‘the heads of top executives’ seldom generates successful learning experiences. When, however, new information is accompanied by emotional aspects, bringing theoretical and conceptual lessons learned into practical leadership contexts, the preconditions for fruitful learning multiple dramatically.

In what follows, we will present a set of conceptual dimensions or theoretical propositions which we have deployed as our framework for leadership learning. Our idea has been to provide practical insights into public sector leadership development by combining three ‘domains’ which will have a strong effect on public sector leadership practices and tools in the coming years. These ‘domains’—deriving their origins from the theoretical and scholastic experience of the last 15 years—include the following dimensions:

The service-dominant logic (often referred as the SDL);

The theory of agile government and public organisations;

The leadership philosophy based on strength-oriented leadership development, authenticity and positive psychology.

1.4 Key Conceptual Dimensions of This Book

Service-dominant logic (SDL) is grounded in the development of service science, which refers to the study of complex service systems (Maglio and Spohrer 2013; Maglio and Breidbach 2014), reaching out from the circles of the private towards the public and non-governmental sectors of society.

In the area of business studies and marketing theory, the role of customers, co-creation-based service planning and delivery, the joint use of know-how and financial resources, the very essence of marketing, the accountability aspects towards service users and various stakeholders, and the development of new service culture have emerged as vital research topics since the 1980s. SDL makes explicit an approach which integrates services and products/goods as part of the service process and addresses the idea of leaders and managers as servants of the service users and service delivery stakeholders (e.g. Vargo and Lusch 2008, 2014, 2015). SDL constitutes a new framework for public interventions, underlining the role of public institution and policies in different parts of the service processes and made possible by new forums provided by public-private-people-cooperation and various ecosystem activities.

Consequently, this new role of the service user, combined with new participation modes and co-creation models in public administration as well as new demands for inter-departmental cooperation between public institutions, has meant that public services are held more accountable by service users and stakeholders than was previously the case (see, e.g. Schillemans 2011; Virtanen and Vakkuri 2015). This horizontal accountability view maintains that accountability is conceptualised and practised as a flow incorporated and embedded within public institutions, service systems and facilities; that is, that there is a flow between agents, the content of which includes not only knowledge on the outputs of public services but also on values, empathy and so forth, thus creating a multi-layered understanding of accountability. Overall, this approach comes close to what has been addressed as the systems leadership model, which encompasses collaboration and the needs of the service users at its core leadership philosophy (see, e.g. Joyce 2017: 307–308).

Theory of agile government and public organisations sets out a new governance framework (as well as a New Public Management and leadership doctrine) for public policy, public administration and public institutions, based on the concept of strategic agility, the agile nature of structures in public administration, collective wisdom and insight in terms of leading organisations, as well as the more appropriate use of organisational resources both in terms of competence and financial matters.

Strategic agility refers to the ability to exploit or create to one’s advantage changing patterns of resource deployment in a thoughtful and purposeful—but also fast and nimble—way, rather than remain hostage to stable pre-set plans and existing action models (e.g. Doz and Kosonen 2014). The concept of strategic agility stems from research concerning the experience of large mature business corporations that have navigated major disruptions and systemic transformations (Doz and Kosonen 2008; Doz and Wilson 2018).

Strategic agility of an organisation (private, public or non-governmental) does not exist in a vacuum nor is it a static entity. On the contrary, strategic agility stems from the dynamism and interplay of three separate capabilities: firstly, from strategic sensitivity (i.e. the ability to engage in foresight and real-time strategic sense making), secondly from resource fluidity (i.e. the ability to reallocate resources to new opportunities and emerging challenges in a timely fashion) and thirdly, out of collective commitment (i.e. the ability to make and implement decisions that mobilise multiple sub-units to engage in sustained integrated action). (See, e.g. Doz et al. 2018.).

Strategic agility refers to the capability to restructure organisation on the basis of strategic insight (caused by external and/or internal pressures, challenges and demands), collective leadership activity based on common sensemaking, troubleshooting, and innovation-driven ‘trailblazing’ (made possible by joint understanding of the challenges brought about by changes in the operating environment) and finally resource (re-)allocation (deriving its origins from the adopted principle of resource fluidity in organisation).

From the perspective of usefulness and operational scalability, the strategic agility framework (albeit remaining something of a ‘newcomer’ in the management and leadership field) has been adopted and used successfully by the OECD in its country governance assessment work (OECD 2011), further applied in empirical academic research on governments (e.g. Doz and De Clara 2013), public policy (Virtanen and Stenvall 2018), public organisations (e.g. Virtanen and Kaivo-oja 2015) as well as in relation to ‘hands-on’ leadership, management and leadership competence development guides in public administration restructuring and systemic transformation (e.g. Doz et al. 2018.)

Leadership philosophy based on strength-oriented leadership development, authenticity and positive psychology stems from three distinctive conceptual roots: authentic leadership theory, the transformative leadership approach and positive psychology.

Authentic leadership theory addresses the fact that public sector leaders are self-conscious actors in their institutions who constantly pay attention to their habits, self-regulation, values and moral issues (e.g. Snyder and Lopez 2009; Kinsler 2014). The notion of an authentic leader, echoing to a certain extent, competency-based leadership approaches (e.g. Conger and Ready 2004) and servant leadership (e.g. Sun 2018), focuses on the personality of leaders as a part of their organisational context.

Transformative leadership, then, builds upon the idea of a public sector leader providing guidance to his/her followers from the perspective of organisational vision and objectives, and motivating his/her followers in attaining organisational goals (e.g. Bass 1985a, b; MacKie 2014, 2016; Mills et al. 2013; Avolio 2007; Avolio and Yammarino 2013). Transformative leadership theory is also relevant in terms of the self-management of public organisations analysed from the perspective of, for instance, self-management team theory and practice (e.g. Katzenbach and Smith 1993; McChrystal et al. 2015). Moreover, there is empirical evidence supporting the notion that the transformative leadership approach is valuable, especially in service organisations, because it helps to enhance the service personnel in attaining their organisational objectives and achieving high-level service user satisfaction (e.g. Liao and Chuang 2007).

Even though positive psychology does not form a comprehensive scholarly theory, it still offers a fresh perspective, a place from which to rethink the aspects of organisational motivation in public sector institutions. Positive psychology draws on the personal strengths of public sector leaders and their organisational followers and stakeholders. Within the domain of public institutions, positive psychology aims at finding personal strengths and flow mechanisms, and thus, it underlines the idea of the comprehensive development of organisational wellbeing, both at the individual and collective levels, as well as bringing new dimensions to the value public sector leadership can offer at its best (see, e.g. Csiksentmihalyi 2014; Proctor 2017). Positive psychology has provided new conceptual frames of reference in terms of gaining a better understanding of how work changes by looking at the role of positive emotions, individual strength-based competencies, and individual and collective resilience processes and models