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Creating Leadership for the Twenty First Century

Part 2 of 4

Building the Public Manager's Capacity for Leadership

Still, we do understand some concepts that can help public managers to actually be effective--some principles of leadership and management (other than risk aversion and hoop jumping) that they can employ to improve the performance of their agencies. These are not scientific formulas that when applied accurately produce precisely predictable results. Public management is not even an inexact science.⁴³ A public manager's professional repertoire is very difficult to codify, if only because the variables that the manager must take into account when scanning this repertoire for likely similarities are so diverse, so ill defined, so illusive.⁴⁴

Nevertheless, every public manager, like every professional in any field, possesses a large repertoire of skills and strategies. Over years of practice, each public manager has built up his or her repertoire, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Few may be able to explain the distinct items in their repertoire, even though they use them frequently. Nevertheless the professionals with the broadest, the deepest, and the most analytical repertoire will be the most effective; they will possess the capacity to respond most competently and creatively to a very diverse set of challenges.⁴⁵

Thus, to fix public management, we ought to take three explicit, conscious steps to expand the capacity of the individuals who lead (and will lead) our public agencies:

We ought to rotate public managers through a wide variety of assignments to give them the broadest possible set of experiences from which to develop a robust professional repertoire.⁴⁶
We ought to create a wide variety of formal learning opportunities to give public executives the chance to test and expand the cause-and-effect lessons in their repertoire and to develop a more sophisticated appreciation for the conditions under which these theoretical linkages do and do not hold.
We ought to establish explicit mentoring relationships within every public agency (and even across agencies) to create the implicit expectation that one of the responsibilities of any public manager is to mentor subordinates.⁴⁷

Each of these three steps is designed to broaden and deepen every public manager's professional repertoire by providing them more diverse experiences and by helping them to codify explicit cause-and-effect lessons.

Articulating a Mission, Managing Symbols, and Setting Performance Targets

What moves do public executives need to improve the performance of their agencies? Lots of moves, of course. Still, some are more important than others. Some have more significant cause-and-effect linkages than others. Here I will outline just three. The leaders of public agencies who have these three moves in their managerial repertoire and who use them--not necessarily brilliantly or exceptionally, just competently--can improve the performance of their agencies significantly.

First, effective leaders create a mission for their agency. Why? What is the cause-and-effect connection? A mission establishes an agency's moral imperative. It tells multiple audiences why the agency exists--what it will accomplish, what it will do to help improve the lives of citizens. To the people who work in the agency, it signals what activities are most important. To the people who are thinking about working for the agency, the mission signals why they might (or might not) want to do so. To superiors, legislators, stakeholders, and citizens, it signals what value the agency will contribute to society. The mission is one (but not the only) mechanism for recruiting resources. Nevertheless, the better the mission--the better it reflects (or leads) the aspirations of employees, potential applicants, superiors, legislators, stakeholders, and citizens--the more resources the leaders will be able to mobilize.

This mission is first expressed in words. But these words must be reinforced by symbols. Unless the agency's leaders demonstrate their personal commitment to their own words through their own deeds, no one will pay any attention. Indeed public service employees (just like their private sector equivalents) will automatically assume that the words are just that--just words. They will ignore them. They will not contemplate and then dismiss them; they will dismiss them from the beginning. Thus the second move that an effective leader must master is to reinforce the words of a mission with symbols dramatizing his or her commitment to the mission.

The most visible symbol is time. How does the manager spend his or her time? Does the parks commissioner trumpet a bold agenda for cleaning up the city's parks but spend little time developing and evaluating alternative strategies for keeping them clean? Does the public safety secretary proclaim a new program to reduce highway fatalities but have no idea how many people were killed on the state's highways last week, last month, or last quarter? People are observant. They will get the message--not the message expounded in a mission statement but the message inherent in the manager's daily schedule and personal knowledge. If the leadership team spends time pursuing the agency's mission, the rest of the employees will, too.

The second, most visible symbol is reflected in rewards. What kind of behavior is rewarded? I do not mean who gets the performance bonus or the merit raise. I do mean who is publicly recognized for what accomplishment. Did the public safety secretary visit a state troopers' barracks to publicly praise its commander for implementing an innovative and effective strategy for driving down the district's traffic deaths? Did the parks commissioner have a pizza party for the dedicated team that kept its park free of litter?

Again, the cause-and-effect linkage ought to be clear (though the behavior of many public managers would suggest that it is not). People will work to achieve results that are appreciated, not because they want or need the material reward, but because they crave the recognition that the reward provides.

What, however, should the public manager reward? How will the leader of a public agency know if a unit within the agency has accomplished anything significant? The answer is the third move in a performance-management repertoire: Set specific performance targets for these units to achieve.

What is the theoretical linkage here? Why, in addition to articulating a mission and managing symbols, does a public manager need to set performance targets? What is the cause-and-effect connection between performance targets and improved performance? Because neither the agency's leadership nor its frontline employees can use the mission statement to determine if they have done a good job this year. The performance target provides the short-term, operational definition of success. The mission statement is aspiring and transcendent; a performance target is concrete and doable. And the causal linkage psychologically potent: Give people a challenge, and the operational capacity to meet that challenge, and many people will pursue it, if only because it is there.

The causal linkage of this small, three-move subpackage of performance management is even more potent: Give people an important societal mission, a significant but attainable target, and reward them with recognition when they achieve the target, and you will motivate people to pursue both the mission and the target energetically, seriously, and innovatively.

Why should public managers be willing to believe that these causal linkages hold? Because we have seen them work repeatedly and in a wide variety of circumstances. And because what we have learned from the social sciences about human motivation supports this linkage.

Yet these moves, and the causal reasons why they work, come alive only through detailed examples. Indeed practicing managers will think about experimenting with such moves (and, if they appear to work, will add them to their repertoire) only if given a compelling example--or, even better, several compelling examples--that illustrate how the move can work in different circumstances. Moreover these examples need to not only describe the managers' moves and what happened next; they must also contain enough detail to permit people to infer (based on this example plus previous experience) their own causal linkages about why a particular move produced a particular result in a particular circumstance. Such examples, such stories or cases, make the move come alive, demonstrating that the move can work and suggesting why; These examples provide the raw material from which practicing public managers can learn lessons and ground their own management repertoire.⁵¹

Next: Expanding Every Public Manager's Repertoire

Creating Leadership for the Twenty First Century

Building the Public Manager's Capacity for Leadership

Articulating a Mission, Managing Symbols, and Setting Performance Targets

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