Empowering Public Servants Through Strong Leadership (LPL1-V41)

Transcript: Empowering Public Servants Through Strong Leadership

[00:00:01 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]

[00:00:06 The screen fades to Tim Pettipas.]

Tim Pettipas (Executive Member, Canada School of Public Service): Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us here today. My name is Tim Pettipas. I am a faculty member of the Canada School of Public Service and I will be your moderator for today's session on empowering public servants through strong leadership.

Before we begin, I would like to recognize that I am speaking to you from the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I express my gratitude to generations of Algonquin people, past and present, as the original caretakers of the space I occupy. I recognize that our participants are from various parts of the country, and therefore you may work on different Indigenous territory. I encourage you to take a moment to think about the territory you occupy.

Now, it's a real pleasure to welcome Tim Mau to join us today. Dr. Mau is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph, and more recently, the recipient of the prestigious Pierre DeCelles Award for Excellence in Teaching, a well-deserved recognition for dedication to students and more generally to the field of public administration which is of deep interest to all of us. Now, I should say Tim not only teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in public management, administration, and leadership, but he also works outside the classroom. He provides leadership training to senior officials in Canada and across Asia.

As you'll see, his research focuses on political and public sector leadership. It certainly sets him up very well for an engaging discussion with all of us here today. He will be sharing his insights on the foundations of leadership in the public service, how it empowers public servants to do the things we do, to give solid advice, to build partnerships, and to deliver excellence to Canadians. I can tell you I've had the opportunity to chat with Tim and see his passion for this work.

I'm definitely looking forward to the presentation. I expect it will generate a lot of thoughts for all of you. If you have questions, which I hope you do, please click on the chat bubble icon. You'll find that on the top right corner of your screen. And so, I think I will move out here, and Tim, the floor is yours. I very much look forward to this.

[00:02:22 Tim Pettipas appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Tim Mau (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph): Thank you very much, Tim. It's indeed a real pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to you and to engage in a conversation this afternoon about leadership in the public sector. Now, certainly, public leadership is a very important concept for the public service but it's also a multifaceted concept. And so, obviously, just in an hour, it's going to be difficult to cover everything and to sort of give this important topic as much attention as it certainly warrants, but I'll do my best to try to identify some of the critical elements with respect to public leadership that will give you an overview of the concept as it applies to the public sector, and then hopefully will serve as a basis for discussion in the latter part of our webinar today.

Having said that, I just want to state at the outset, I do have a lot of slides. I will go through them as quickly as possible so that we do have as much time to engage in the broader discussion around leadership in the public sector. So, I apologize in advance for that. If there's something that I have gone through too quickly, then of course, please feel free to ask me during the discussion portion of the webinar today to elaborate and to comment further on that material.

And the other thing I'd like to just sort of apologize at the outset, I understand… I'm sure there's a lot of people at varying stages of their careers in the public service with different understandings and perspectives of leadership as it applies to the work that you do. I hope that I haven't set the presentation at too basic a level but I think it's important to really have a good, solid foundation and understanding for understanding the concept before we then look at some of the more nuance regarding public leadership. So, I just begin my deck with a quotation from Harvard professor Robert Behn.

[00:04:22 A slide is shown with the quote "Leadership is not just a right of public managers. It is an obligation."]

And really, I attribute this 1998 article that he published as really kind of the awakening of the realization that there is this thing called leadership in the public sector and that it does apply to administrators, that career officials do have the opportunity, and not only the opportunity but the obligation, to provide leadership as well, and Behn, in his article, sets out seven failures of the American political system that would necessitate leadership by public servants, and I won't get into all of those failures but they would be equally applicable to the Canadian context, so things like legislative failure and ambiguous mandates, executive failure and so on, but that if public servants don't step up and provide leadership, there are other actors in the policymaking process who are probably less well-equipped and more self-interested that could potentially step into that space. And certainly, that's not the best outcome for us from a policy perspective.

So, this is really kind of… there is a wide consensus in the public administration community now that leadership is a relevant, germane concept, that it is something that is practiced by career officials and it's quite an important concept. So, why is it required in the public service? Well, again, this is where sometimes even Professor Barbara Kellerman at Harvard, she's written a few things suggesting that because there are such similarities between the public and the private sector, that we should really think about leadership in both contexts in very similar ways. I actually think that we need to really accentuate the fact that the public sector is a different space, and as such, that political element really makes leading in that context very, very different from the kinds of leadership that managers operating in a private sector corporation are really going to be engaged with.

But of course, many of the underpinning rationale for leadership would be comparable in both situations. Obviously, all organizations are subjected to rapid and continuous change and that's no more true than today in terms of the kinds of turbulence that you're facing that you have to contend with. Providing direction and vision, again, we expect all leaders that are going to, even if they aren't setting out the vision themselves, articulating and communicating that vision that others within the organization are setting or establishing. And so, again, we can get into discussions around whether it's the elected politicians that really formulate the vision, whether it's at the deputy ministerial level and with consultation amongst members of the service. But even if it is a political vision that's being articulated, then clearly the Deputy Minister and other ranks within the public service still need to take that vision and then articulate it and communicate it to all employees within the public sector organizations so that everybody can be working towards a common or joint objective and vision.

Focusing employees on that organizational mission, achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in program and service delivery, this has been a longstanding concern of the public service for a century and a half of administrative reforms. It's always been this perpetual quest to do things with greater efficiency and effectiveness. And then, of course, at the end of the day, we need to have good, strong leadership to keep our human resources motivated and inspired. Really, at the end of the day, people don't leave organizations. They leave bosses, right? They're not happy or content with the kind of leadership that they're getting from the people that they report to and they will simply seek out opportunities elsewhere.

Here's just some sort of basic points or things that I want to touch on that just talk about the changing nature or the shape of leadership and how it's evolved over time, and I think we all sort of have this understanding of what constitutes good, effective leadership based on our own lived experience. But when we try to articulate it and define it for somebody else, that's where things become more complicated and convoluted, and there's a lot of disparate definitions of what constitutes leadership, and it becomes difficult to have a conversation if there's no basis or starting point for understanding what it is, this phenomenon that we're talking about.

The one thing I would often suggest though is that people conflate leadership with a particular position within the organization. And of course, the public sector is organized, very hierarchically. And so, we look to people at the top. We look to the Clerk of the Privy Council, we look to the Deputy Minister community as the exemplars of leadership in the public sector, but it may be the case that those individuals are failing in that regard, that they're not providing good leadership, good, strong, ethical leadership that people want and expect and need within the organization. Conversely, it's not the exclusive domain. Those individuals obviously have formal positional authority which makes leading, in some respects, easier but it's not necessarily confined to those individuals.

And in fact, when we started talking about leadership in the context of the public sector, there was this recognition that we want leaders at all levels and that the public service and other organizations are explicitly recruiting people at entry level positions with pre-determined leadership skills and capacities. Obviously, if you bring people into your organization that have that potential already, it's a question of nurturing it and developing it to really have it flourish over time. And so, again, it's at all levels of the organization, not just the top. Even more junior employees have this opportunity to lead. Now, of course, their opportunities may be more limited. The ways in which they lead will invariably be different from a Deputy Minister. For example, if we take something like the leadership competency of strategic leadership, we're clearly not going to expect the junior policy analyst to provide the same kinds of behaviours with respect to strategic leadership than we would the Deputy Minister of the department, but that's not to say that we can't have a series of lower-level behavioural indicators for people at the lower end of the hierarchy to be able to provide some leadership.

The other last bullet point here that I wanted to touch on is the fact that up until very recently, leadership has really been focused on a singular individual within the organization, and sometimes we refer to it somewhat derogatorily as the heroic leader model, that it's a singular, heroic individual that's going to miraculously guide the organization and lead it to some transformational outcome. Now, the pendulum has almost swung entirely in the other direction and we're focusing on the fact that work in the public sector is increasingly done in a shared or distributed or collaborative way, not just with other people working within the same level of government but oftentimes across levels of governments, across countries with your counterparts in other levels of government, and certainly across the public-private divide, working with people in private sector corporations, in so-called public sector-private sector partnerships, or increasingly working with actors in non-profit organizations who are, in many cases now, delivering services for governments. With the new public management paradigm shift that occurred in the late seventies and 1980s, governments began to step back and not necessarily provide services themselves, but simply be that catalyst role or function just to make sure that those services were being provided somewhere in society.

The other point I wanted to make is that while it may be the case that we widely accept and embrace the notion that public servants can and should be leading, this certainly was not always the case. Now, up until quite recently, and although Robert Behn's article in '98 wasn't the first time that scholars talked about administrative leadership in the public sector, I would suggest that that article was really sort of a watershed moment in terms of a massive explosion in terms of the number of research studies that were being done and examples of public admin scholars trying to adapt and embrace the literature that was largely applied to private sector organizations and see how that would fit with the public sector.

And so, really, it was a neglected subject matter. It was mostly… the focus on the politicians, that they were the ones that led and the public servants were really, in the public administration vernacular, we say the public servants are on tap, not on top, public servants are supposed to lead, not to follow, and this was really expressed or articulated in the so-called politics administration dichotomy. And for those of you in the audience who may have studied political science or public administration before embarking on your public service careers, that term, I'm sure you're familiar with, but it's this notion. Woodrow Wilson is credited with having sort of articulated this distinction in the late 1800s when he was calling for a science of administration, but the idea here was that the politicians, because they had democratic legitimacy by virtue of being elected, they were the ones that were supposed to provide that policy leadership and that the public servants were supposed to then faithfully and loyally administer the policy choices of their elected political masters.

And so, what we had there, sort of the diagram is sort of this top-down hierarchical approach that the politicians led, the public servants followed. Very quickly, however, there came to be this realization that those politicians were neophytes. They may have been lawyers or small business owners but they didn't necessarily have much experience running a department of transportation or an environment ministry or a health department. And so, they relied quite heavily on the public service to be sources of policy, innovation, and ideas. And so, in fact, public servants in this country got promoted through the ranks and got to the rank of Deputy Minister not by their ability to manage other people or money, which you would think would be the norm for people at that level, but rather through their ability to identify and implement public policies that made their minister look good.

And so, despite the fact, many scholars have sort of talked about and written about the fact that the politics administration dichotomy is outdated and it's no longer relevant, it still persists. I still teach it. All my public administration colleagues still talk about it and still teach it. But in a recently published article that I wrote with my colleague Richard Callahan from the University of San Francisco, we talk about how this is a limiting way in terms of our appreciation and understanding of public leadership. And so, we've come up with this little diagram, and there may be other actors but this is just sort of emblematic of the scope within which public leadership now actually takes place.

[00:15:49 A multilateral model of political-administrative relations (community and business leaders, non-profit leaders, career administrators, appointed officials, public leadership, elected officials and staff) is shown.]

It's not just the elected politicians and the public servants but rather there's also obviously appointed officials. The Prime Minister has massive appointment power, chairs and boards of commissions, tribunals, agencies, and so on that all have a role to play in our broader public service. We have… in terms of obviously the elected officials and their staff, we have people out in the community.

So, I'll have a slide shortly that talks about the three aspects of public leadership more broadly, but the third aspect is civic leadership and people out in the private sector. So, we typically would think of non-profit leaders, but even business leaders, if they are dedicated towards pursuing a public purpose, as some of our owners of gin distilleries did during the pandemic, they switched over from manufacturing gin to manufacturing hand sanitizer because of this shortage of PPE, that would be a classic example of a private sector business leader who normally wouldn't be leading in a public way but doing so in that context.

[00:17:01 A slide is shown with the quote "Leadership is the most studied and the least understood topic of any in the social sciences".]

So, what is leadership? And so, again, I started out my remarks today by suggesting that it's a vastly sort of complicated and misunderstood topic because people think about leadership in different ways and have different meanings. This was a statement that Bennis & Nanus made in 1995. James MacGregor Burns, in his famous book on transformational leadership in the late 1970s, made a similar claim. And in fact, if you look in the literature, even to this day, many scholars start out by talking about the fact that we still don't know a lot about leadership despite the fact that there are literally thousands of new studies every year looking at and discussing this subject matter.

And so, again, despite the fact that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of definitions of leadership, there are certain basic things that typically recur in those definitions. And when I do teach this subject matter, I often go through and talk about distinctions between leadership and management, and they're not the same thing although at one time, it was considered if you were a good, effective manager, you were ipso facto a leader. But when we break it down, there are many common elements, that individuals have various sources of power and they use that power to influence other individuals. Really, when we talk about leadership, it's not a position, as I said before. It's really a dynamic process of interaction between individuals.

So, if you're going to be leading, there has to be at least one or more individuals who are following. Leadership is fundamentally about change and innovation. And so, there's a strong connection between leaders bringing about some new organizational outcome, and that may involve a significant cultural change within the organization. Oftentimes, we look for that inspiring vision of the future. I think this is sometimes overplayed. Whenever we hire somebody new, especially at a senior position, we ask them for their vision as though they're going to simply come in and completely set the organization off on a new trajectory. Oftentimes, the vision is perfectly fine but that new leader still needs to come in and to be able to articulate that vision and to motivate and inspire people to really pursue that vision with their full energy.

Oftentimes, we associate leadership with charismatic individuals. And certainly, in Canada, historically, there's been a paucity of really charismatic political leaders, certainly in comparison to our neighbours to the south, but charisma can obviously bring less desirable outcomes because we get swept up in the personality of the individual and they take us down a path that perhaps we don't want to go. And then, of course, we're now talking about the fact that leadership is shared. It's not just simply a singular individual but rather it's groups of people working collaboratively, perhaps across sectors, that are now trying to bring about some kind of organizational change or to deliver on some public policy or some program.

So, here's a definition that I like to use. It occurs when an individual or group of people can use their power to influence intended changes in the thoughts and actions of followers by engendering either a commitment to the leader's goals or an internalization of his or her values. And so, I haven't talked about compliance here because, again, I think that Burns' notion of transactional leadership is really about compliance, and I think it's more akin to management than it is to leadership, but individuals using offers of reward or threats of sanction to get people to behave in the way that they want them to. Now, of course, there's a place for that in every leader's toolkit from time to time but if that's all you're relying on, is your formal positional authority, and you're trying to get compliance, you're not going to get the best from your employees and really achieve the kind of effectiveness that you could potentially achieve otherwise.

This point here, so then what is public leadership? And so, as I said, I'm focusing, obviously, in your context. Your interest is the so-called administrative leadership or bureaucratic leadership of non-elected officials to be able to lead in the context of delivering public programs and services. And as I said earlier, context is important. It really does matter. The public sector is not the same as the private sector and we need to treat it as such because all of those various political elements that come into play really shape the way in which leadership can really unfold in that context that's very, very different from how your counterparts in private sector organizations are able to go about and leading.

Jean Hartley, a British academic, suggests that public leadership pertains to mobilizing individuals, organizations, and networks to formulate and/or enact purposes, values, and actions which aim or claim to create valued outcomes for the public sphere. So, as you'll see in that definition, it does embrace that example that I mentioned a moment ago of a private sector business leader transforming his or her gin distillery into manufacturing hand sanitizer, right? So, that's a public purpose of public value that was being served in that particular instance. And so, that's an example of public leadership. So, really, it's about creating public value and engendering trust. And of course, we know that trust is severely in short supply in society these days, that people are very untrusting, news media and so on or political figures. There's a real paucity of trust right now, and I would suggest that one of the big challenges for the public service is finding ways to re-establish that trust amongst the citizenry.

So, as I mentioned, there are these three dimensions of public sector leadership. There's the political leadership which has been the historic focus of political scientists and public administration scholars. Secondly, the piece that we're most interested in is this bureaucratic or administrative leadership piece. And then, the third piece comes in with civic leadership, and that could be NGO leaders, community activists, so Greta Thunberg, in terms of her pursuing environmental sustainability, Bono, Angelina Jolie, any of those Hollywood movie stars who use their money and their recognition and their influence to try to effect change would be considered a civic leader in that context, which is a branch or a subset of so-called public leadership.

Okay, so when we look about or talk about leadership, and of course, whether it's political, administrative, or civic, we can talk about leading in all three directions for each of those three categories, but I'm just going to focus on administrative leadership for the purposes of this presentation. And so, I think this is a really critical and under-studied aspect of leadership because there's obviously tension at the top. Hartley refers to it as the dual leadership of either the Mayor and CAO or the dual leadership of a minister and a deputy minister, the political and administrative head of that government organization, because they both have opportunities to lead and they need to both lead and share that leadership function, but of course, there is often a reluctance on the part of the politicians to share that space with the public servant. They feel that they have the legitimacy. So, that sort of historic rationale for political leadership oftentimes still remains in place.

But we can think about leading downwards. And so, of course, that's the traditional notion of leadership, that the Deputy Minister, the ADM, the Director's General, and so on, they have people who report to them in the organizational hierarchy. And again, that encompasses management as well, but there is those opportunities for downward leadership. And to my mind, this is really one of the reasons why the neglect of studying administrative leadership for so long is so egregious, because even if we thought that the politicians should be ones leading on policy, the public servant still had a role to play in terms of leading, in terms of the management and organization of the department, right? All of those human resources, they're in. So, the fact that we didn't give any credence to that downward aspect of leadership, I thought, was rather surprising.

[00:25:29 An administrative downward leadership graphic is shown, starting with Hon. Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Finance, then Chris Forbes, DM, then Suzy McDonald, Associate DM, then Evelyn Dancy, Assistant DM, Economic & Fiscal Policy Branch, then Samuel Millar, Assistant DM, Economic Development & Corporate Financial Branch, then Alison O'Leary, Assistant DM, FPR & Social Policy Branch, then Janelle Wright, Assistant DM, Corporate Services Branch, then the Director General.]

So, in this graphic here, I've just chosen the finance department. And so, obviously, our Minister of Finance is the Honourable Chrystia Freeland. So, she is the political head, the political leader of that particular department. And so, downward leadership for her would be over Chris Forbes who's the Deputy Minister, and then from Chris Forbes down to the associate ADM and the various assistant ADMs, and all of the other layers of that organizational hierarchy. That's really the battlefield, if you will, of administrative leadership.

And so, the other way in which leadership takes place is outwards leadership, and this is leadership that goes beyond the public service. And of course, there was a time when government employees were fairly insular in their work. And of course, the historic public service [inaudible] suggested that in exchange for providing your frank, fearless advice to those political masters, you would have security of tenure in your employment and you would also be anonymous, that the minister, through the principle of ministerial responsibility, would assume responsibility for any administrative errors within the department. So, you could sort of operate within your silos in a very anonymous way.

Well, of course, with changes ushered in as part of the new public management and the shift towards governance, which was to say that government alone could not simply provide various programs and services for the electorate but rather it required a much broader array of actors in society to do so, some of which may have been much better placed than the public service to do that service delivery, we see that now there was an opportunity for public servants to lead in an outwards fashion as well.

[00:27:24 An administrative outward leadership graphic is shown, with an image of Chris Forbes and several arrows pointing outward from it which each name a different group that may be influenced.]

And so, again, sticking with Chris Forbes at finance, I've just put together a slide here that shows some of the potential ways in which Chris could lead and influence and shape the thinking of other actors and society, so other deputy ministers within the federal government, other levels of government, counterparts in other levels of government, in academia and think tanks, the chief economists of the various major banks. And of course, each year when we're producing our budget of course, we're now in a much more sort of open exercise and consultation with the private sector, CEOs of private sector corporations, and other interest groups in society. So, that sort of network of interactions is much broader than it once was.

And then finally, and this is the most contentious aspect of leadership, is that upwards leadership, is trying to influence and shape the thinking of that politician who sits as the elected and political head of the government department. And so, in this depiction, that's the series of thick arrows upwards from Chris Forbes trying to influence and shape the thoughts and actions of a Minister Freeland in the finance portfolio.

[00:28:24 An administrative upward leadership graphic is shown, with the same names as the downward leadership graphic except there are four thick arrows pointing upwards from Chris Forbes to Chrystia Freeland.]

I have a couple of slides here and I won't say too much. I'm just trying to keep an eye on the time. I think I'm almost at half an hour, so I should probably try to wrap things up as quickly as possible so that we can get to some discussion.

[00:28:29 A survey is shown with the text:
"Assessing Administrative Leadership in the Federal Public Service"
"PSES Question (Agree & Strongly Agree)

• Immediate Supervisor:
  Immediate supervisor encourages me to work collaboratively – 73% (2022), 73% (2020), 72% (2019)
  Q28. Immediate supervisor keeps me informed of issues affecting my work – 81% (2022), 79% (2020), 77% (2019)
  Q30. Satisfied with the quality of supervision received – 82% (2022), 81% (2020), 79% (2019)
• Senior Management:
  Senior managers in my department lead by example in ethical behaviour – 65% (2022), 68% (2020), 63% (2019)
  Q33. I have confidence in the senior management of my department – 61% (2022), 66% (2020), 60% (2019)
  Q34. Senior management in department makes effective and timely decisions – 52% (2022), 57% (2020), 51% (2019)
  Q35. Essential information flows effectively from senior management to staff – 55% (2022), 59% (2020), 50% (2019).]

But I've just looked at some of your public service employee surveys. And so, there are some questions there that are explicitly… the suggestion is they are explicit indicators of leadership, so questions around your immediate supervisor and your senior manager within your department, and you'll see here there seems to be more satisfaction with your immediate supervisor in terms of encouraging collaborative work, keeping you informed, and providing good quality supervision. The numbers there are fairly high and significant. For senior management however, I think there's more signs of trouble, right? Leading by example in terms of ethical behavior, only two thirds of people agreed with that in 2022. Having confidence in the senior management of your department, just over 60%. Making effective and timely decisions drops down to 52%. Information flows being effective, again, just over 50%. So, more indication of signs where we could be doing better in terms of leading the public sector.

Now, there are other questions that weren't explicitly identified as leadership questions within the survey and there are invariably others as well, but I just picked on few here. I feel that change is managed well in my department. We talked about how change is an important aspect of being able to lead. Well, again, the suggestion here is that a lot of public servants do not feel the change is being handled particularly well in their departments. Empowerment is another significant aspect. Leaders have power but they also empower other people, not just simply delegating work to others but giving them real opportunities to express their creativity, to solve those problems in their own ways. And so, in terms of empowerment, the data is there before you as well and a little bit better than in some of those last indicators that I was referring to.

So, I'm going to go through these last few slides relatively quickly so that we do have a good amount of time for conversation. But of course, obviously, if we're concerned about leadership and we want to have better, stronger leadership within the public service, many public services, not just here in Canada but across the globe, have engaged in various training and development activities or programs to try to develop that capacity. And of course, there's lots of different ways that that can be accomplished, from formal classroom training, which people suggest is the least effective form, to experiential learning. People learn through stretch assignments, rotational job assignments, being exposed to different facets and aspects of the organization to get a better understanding, a more holistic understanding of how that organization operates. Mentorship is a hugely critical piece. Existing leaders really need to carve out time to mentor others within their organizations to help develop and foster those leadership skills.

The use of leadership competency models which I've alluded to is pretty much used right around the world. There are numerous public services that have embraced and adopted various public sector leadership models, and you'll see that some of the work I've done looks at those models, and there is a high degree of convergence with the kinds of things that are being articulated in terms of leading private sector corporations, which I think is a mistake. We need to really accentuate and draw out the distinctiveness of what it is about leading in the public sector that's different and unique and more challenging than in the private sector. And of course, these models are used most effectively when we use them in everything from recruitment to selection to promotion to training and development and evaluation of a person's abilities.

And so, if we look at all of these various models in the public services around the world, there tend to be about four that are quite common to all of them, strategic thinking or strategic leadership, leading or coping with change, being results-focused. So, again, here in Canada, we implemented deliverology which was embraced from the United Kingdom, but again, sort of accentuating the need to get results. Engaging with people both internally and externally, so again, this recognizes the fact that you are doing a lot more outward-type work with other actors in society, and I think for me personally, again, public sector values and ethics really are distinct and set you apart from your counterparts in private sector organizations. Not to say that people working in the private sector don't have values and ethics but they are quite unique here in the public service, and I know you're going through that exercise with the Clerk right now as a follow up to the work that was done by John Tait back in the early 1990s.

And so, here is the key leadership competency model that was adjusted or edited back in 2015. The previous model went back to 2004 and that was based on the leadership competency model that came out of La Relève exercise when Jocelyne Bourgon was the Clerk of the Privy Council, but these are the six competencies that you currently have in play. There were four. They sort of changed a couple of them or adjusted them and added another one. But again, I think this is a pretty solid list of things that we need and expect our public servants to be able to do effectively in order to be most effective in their work on a day-to-day basis.

So, my last slide, just keep in mind, public leadership is not the exclusive domain of politicians. There is a space for public servants to lead and it's not just an opportunity, it's a necessity. We need good, strong, ethical, administrative leadership in the public sector. And so, all public servants have the ability to lead. So, you may be a more junior public servant right now and you don't see yourself as a leader, but there are opportunities in given contexts where you can step up and you can try to shape and influence the thinking. Maybe you're working on a group project, maybe you're looking at a way in which you're delivering a service and you can identify that it's not really meeting the mark or you can adjust that process to save the government money, right? And so, taking the leadership to bring that process efficiency to your supervisor's attention and making sure that that change actually comes about.

Context matters, that political element, I think, really does make leadership in the public sector quite distinct and different from leading in a private sector organization or even in a non-profit organization for that matter. And then, again, public sector leadership competence models, they are ubiquitous. We can talk more about some of those competencies and what are required. They do, however, have their limitations. One of the big ones is the fact that they're often created based on what worked in the past or what is needed in the present as opposed to what we need into the future. And oftentimes, these frameworks don't get revised and updated nearly frequently enough. As I said, the 2015 model is now almost ten years since it was developed, and then it was about 11 years before the last change was introduced. And so, we probably need to be more on top of considering and reflecting upon those competencies and whether or not they still really reflect the reality of doing the work that you're doing in the context of the public service.

So again, I apologize for going through those slides very, very quickly but I thought it was important to kind of set out some of the key elements of understanding leadership as it applies to this very unique space. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Pettipas: Thank you, Tim. Thanks for the presentation. It covered a tremendous amount of ground, all of which, I'll be honest, is deeply interesting to me and I'm sure to others. We could probably spend another half hour just on each slide, I think unpacking them a little bit, and I know we have some questions coming in from participants.

First, I'd just like to kind of applaud your commitment to this work in public sector management. It's refreshing to hear that conversation coming from someone outside the public service. It really resonates with me, this notion of sort of the uniqueness with respect to private sector, political, and what public sector, public servant leadership looks like. I really like your idea around, we think we all know what it is until we have to explain it. And so, I think it might be in that category of, you know it when you see it, a little bit, but I also think that leads to people sort of self-defining. So, I think creating a conversation through some actual research is super helpful.

I have to admit, when I'm listening to you walk through sort of all that constitutes leadership and for the public service, whether it's looking at efficiencies and streamline, whether it's looking at setting and communicating vision, in many respects, mobilizing people seem to surface throughout your presentation, there's a lot there, and not to mention, I think, where you were ending off on the notion of sustaining trust, and as part of sustaining trust, the relevance of robust values and ethics within the community of the public service. So, I could go on. There was just so many things that struck out to me throughout all of it. I think my top-level takeaway, likely, is that public service leadership matters a lot and it occurs at all levels in the organization. That's another part that I felt kind of was a bit of an arc throughout there, and the explanation you have is sort of public service leadership over time, and the role that the shift in context plays is interesting. I like how you kind of spoke about how it intersects with the broader constellation of partners and stakeholders, which is an increasingly active part, I think, of all public servants' work, whether it's sort of on the front, on the sort of user experience, back to policy development, program delivery, and those environments are also evolving.

So, I'll be honest, I was listening through all of that and it got me thinking, there is this increasing pace and complexity of change that we are experiencing, within which this leadership, I think, is occurring. And so, I'm just wondering, I'm curious, for the work you've been doing, do you see leadership re-shaping itself? Of those competencies you kind of ended on, do they… do some of them take on sort of different significance with that pace of change we're looking at?

Tim Mau: Yeah, I mean, the challenge with leadership competencies, of course, on the one hand, they can be too parsimonious, and I think that was the elegance of the previous model. It was just four things, it was easy to remember, and you could focus on those four things. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have models like the United States which has five so-called executive core qualifications, but within that, there are 28 different competencies, six of which are considered fundamental competencies that go across each of the five ECQs, and there are other large sort of numbers of competencies that are used in other models as well. And so, some of my colleagues in the States, when writing about leadership competency models in the U.S., sort of talk about, it's almost a superhuman list of qualities, and can you realistically expect any one individual to be a master in 28 different sort of very significant aspects of behavioural interaction with other individuals?

But I think there's a number of competencies that I think the federal public service needs to think about. Obviously, resilience is kind of the new big thing with the SARS pandemic. We're back into a fiscal situation that we kind of alleviated to some extent for about a decade. And now, we're back into perpetual deficit finance spending once more, but being able to respond to that turbulence, unexpected crisis, and thinking about issues in a forward-thinking manner, how do we prevent, perhaps, some of these problems from materializing or emerging? So, we need new ways of thinking and of acting, and that requires innovation and creativity, right? So, I think that really accentuates the opportunity for people that are innovative and creative thinkers, inclusive leadership.

Now, we're seeing a backlash in the United States to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives, but this is, again, an absolutely critical aspect to leading. We historically built a public service that was a representative bureaucracy. We wanted… and so, we had to limit it to the four target groups: women, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, and Aboriginal or Indigenous Canadians, but the Clerk recently announced the call to action and to think about how can we expand and extend the way in which we think about having a diverse workforce because all of the benefits that come from diversity, right? Different ways of thinking, like do you really want a public service comprising all individuals who think about the same problems and challenges from the same lens, from the same framework? Or do we need individuals who are going to come at these problems and grapple with them and come up with solutions that that are going to differ? And so, I think there's a huge advantage to fostering greater diversity within the public service, collaboration, especially across the various sectors, right?

So, interestingly, we talked about trust earlier. The Edelman Trust Barometer, for 20 plus years now, has been doing their annual survey across the globe, and the thing that always saddens me is that people are more trusting of business leaders than they are of government officials. And in fact, in a study a couple of years ago, they suggested that business leaders should take on a more prominent role in addressing some key societal issues where governments are seemingly unable to do so, right? And so, our historic understanding or impression of business was that they're primarily self-interested, right? They're driven by the shareholder value and the bottom-line profit. And so, interestingly, citizens are willing to sort of see business leaders step into that space.

So, problem and risk identification, building public trust, I think, again, people are so cynical right now. There's so much disinformation and misinformation out there in society. Information has never been more accessible than it is right now but people need to be able to filter that information to separate the wheat from the chaff. Technological, A.I. advances, that's going to place, again, a whole new set of stresses and challenges for the public service, and we're going to need people in the public sector that have skills, not only with adapting and adopting and implementing A.I. but ensuring that it's used appropriately because it can open up a whole set of ethical concerns and issues as well.

One that both the American and the New Zealand leadership competency models touch on, which I think, again, is going back to my emphasis on the need to understand the distinction or difference between the public and the private sectors, is this notion of political savvy or political astuteness, right? The public servants are working with those politicians. Now, it's not your place to become overtly politicized, but again, every good, effective senior official understands that they have to be aware of the political constraints and parameters within which they're operating, and to be sensitive to those concerns when offering advice to the political head of the department and so on.

So, those are just some of the things. I mean, again, we can talk lots about those competencies but those are some of the ones that sort of strike me as being quite paramount, and perhaps we need to think about how to integrate those into the key leadership competency model that the federal government is currently using.

Tim Pettipas: So, I think we need to invite you back to have another conversation. There's a lot in this. There's a lot, and I really appreciate your commentary around the leadership at all levels and how that deeply relates to advancing priorities with the call to action on anti-racism, equity, inclusion and how that relates to excellence and trust, and some of those very sort of important sort of outputs on the ground in terms of delivering services and programs that would be relevant. I think that's a really interesting perspective on that sort of powerful space we need to push forward on.

And so, I do think there's a number of questions that have come in here that all kind of resonate to me in this sort of very practical, operational sort of space, and you've gotten ahead of one or two of them but I want to make sure that the audience has an opportunity to hear from you on some of this, and I think it kind of speaks to some practical ways public servants at an operational level can apply leadership skills. And equally, there's a really good sort of question here around, are leadership competencies something that are innate or are they something that can be taught or learned? And I would connect that back to another comment here around, you did talk about management versus leadership, but I'm also wondering if those live together in certain ways, like is there a relationship there as well? So, just on some of those practical aspects, if you can speak to that, Tim?

Tim Mau: Sure. Well, you've put a lot on the table there. Let me start with the management and leadership distinction, and of course, I do teach this and talk about this. And at one point, I think I mentioned, we equated, if you are a good, effective manager, you are ipso facto a good leader. And then, we went at great pains. Joseph C. Rost in his book in the early 1990s, he called that the industrial paradigm of leadership as good management, and he was quite adamant that they were two conceptually distinct things. And so, the literature kind of took a shift at that point in time and people went at great pains to separate or distinguish management from leadership, and it's interesting because if you look at how people characterize each of those things, they were almost polar opposites.

And so, I have these very interesting discussions with my students around, if managers promote consistency and limit choices, and leaders are supposed to invoke change and create new options, how is it one person can be both a manager and a leader because they apparently do polar opposite things, right? And so, this is where you have to sort of wrap your head around the fact that… typically, I know some of the creative organizations now are using the title 'leader' in some of their job positions but most organizations don't have anybody with the title 'leader'. They have sort of typical managerial designations and titles but they're not simply managers, right? They may be, they may not be effective leaders, but ideally… and John Kotter sort of talked about the need for leader managers. We need people almost like putting on different hats depending on the context or the circumstance, that in some situations your managerial toolkit is necessary and required whereas in others, you're going to be engaging in some of those leadership-oriented behaviours. The more strategic, long-term visioning, and planning sorts of functions versus the short-term operational concerns which are going to be more driven by your managerial needs and so on. So, I think that's an important distinction. But of course, they build on each other.

That's not to say… and so, students get wrapped up in, are you exclusively a manager, exclusively a leader? Can you be both? Do you have to be a good manager before you can be a great leader? And of course, we can find exemplars of each, right? You could have someone, and I think it probably is more readily available in an entrepreneurial sort of initiative, but you can have someone that's that big picture thinker, creative, comes up with the new… the Steve Jobs sort of Apple kind of guy that maybe isn't a great manager but as long as there's someone within the organization that can handle those aspects of the organization, because any organization cannot survive without management and leadership, both are required. The question is whether you're going to have the capacity to deliver both of those things within the same individual or not. And so, it may be that different circumstances may require a different person, right? So, you may need a different set of skills in place to handle a different kind of organizational circumstance.

And so, the other point you made was with respect to… one was management and leadership and the other, what was the other issue you raised there? Sorry, I've lost my train of thought.

Tim Pettipas: Sorry, this notion of, are these things that are innate?

Tim Mau: Yes.

Tim Pettipas: Can it be taught or learned?

Tim Mau: Being taught versus being born, right? And so, again, this is a perennial debate in leadership studies, are leaders born or are they made? And of course, I think it's both a nature and a nurture argument, that at the end of the day, you can provide two people with the exact same set of experiences and opportunities, and one will invariably be a better leader than the other, but that's not to say that we can't work on some of the things that are encompassed in good, effective leadership and make a concerted effort to try to become better leaders.

I always say… I used to teach in the Masters in Leadership program at Guelph, and in my fourth-year seminar in political science when I teach this subject matter, I tell my students, just by virtue of having taken this class, you're not going to be a better leader automatically but you now have some of the theoretical underpinnings and understanding of what constitutes good leadership, and with some thoughtful reflection and some concerted action on your part, you can go about trying to improve upon and change those behaviours. So, in the literature, we often talk about, leadership can't be taught but it can be learned, right? So, it's a subtle distinction perhaps but the reality is that people can undertake change and become more effective as leaders but it does require self-reflection. It does require concerted action on your part to get those better outcomes that you're ultimately looking for. So, I hope that answered the questions.

Tim Pettipas: Yeah, I just think to build on it, and I know we only have a couple of minutes remaining, but I mean, you just really got me thinking around… I mean, you referred to mentorship a couple of times, and I think it's fair to say leaders mentor, and in return or as a result of that, mentorship can create leadership. And so, I find it sort of an interesting arc you're creating there. I guess my other question would be, and maybe it goes a little bit to the leadership competencies you referred to or maybe some of your work you've done in other jurisdictions even, but are there certain conditions that allow leadership to flourish more so than others, sort of within an organizational context?

Tim Mau: Well, I think this is where the public sector space is quite unique, right? Because at the end of the day, part of the ability for administrative leadership to flourish in public sector organizations is having enlightened ministers who are willing to embrace and accept leadership on the part of public servants. And so, both the minister as well as the deputy minister, that leadership at the top can really help establish or set a culture or climate of leadership to grow and to flourish. But of course, we talk a lot about how the public sector is risk averse, right? And so, we can't innovate in the public sector because we can't take risks because risks will sometimes lead to failure, and there's nothing that a politician hates more than failure, right? Because it's going to lead to uncomfortable questions during question period in the House of Commons.

And so, for some people, that's just enough disincentive to not really encourage and promote leadership in innovation from happening within their organizations. And so, I think we need to… and again, interestingly enough, a colleague who's one of the five Jarislowsky Chairs in Political Leadership and Trust at Trent University, she was talking about how they're creating some training programs to get public servants… or sorry, to get politicians to participate in these things too, right? We have training programs for public servants but everybody kind of expects that these political leaders, by virtue of being community activists and having gotten elected, that they know everything they need to know about leadership, right?

Well, they may be, in some respects, great leaders but they don't necessarily know much about how those political leaders need to interact with and collaborate with the career professional public servants. And so, I think there's a great opportunity there for enhancing their understanding as well. But yeah, I think political leadership is absolutely critical for administrative leadership to flourish in the context of government departments and organizations. So, it really… the people at the very top, it's really about setting the culture for taking risks and still being accountable for those risk-taking, and taking calculated risks, not reckless innovation or creativity, but when introduced properly and being held accountable, I think there's obviously lots of opportunities.

Sandy Borins, a retired prof at the University of Toronto, he was a global pioneer in work on innovation in the public sector, and again, sort of disabusing people of this notion that people in the public sector can't innovate. Well, there's all kinds of innovation happening in the public service. We just don't talk about it as much as we should. IPAC has an annual award program recognizing gold, silver, and bronze Innovation Award winners each and every year. And interestingly, in Borins' work, he discovered that, yes, while some of the innovation may have been top-down, driven by a minister or a deputy minister newly appointed to those positions or in response to an emerging crisis, but a lot of the innovation, in fact, a majority of it, came from front-line workers and supervisors who were right there at the heart of service delivery, who best understand where those changes and innovations can actually occur to make a difference.

Tim Pettipas: I really like that concluding remark on your part, Tim. Yeah, I think innovation is often doing something differently, and I do think there's a leadership continuum. I'm hearing from you that sort of it's identified that operationally, we've identified something. And then, there's a leadership continuum that moves out along to a larger change which is really interesting.

Just in wrapping up a little bit, you started by talking a little bit about, it's hard to define, so you said about defining it a little bit, I mean, there's a lot of attributes that I'm walking away from this with, I think just in terms of some words that resonated for me. I mean, starting around this sort of culture of inclusion and belonging you referred to as sort of the ingredients for a lot of other important aspects around this, on leadership. Creativity, innovation, particularly appreciate your comment that it is happening, and it's an interesting comment, that maybe we don't spend enough time recognizing the small innovation. Trust, collaboration at this multi-dimensional level sort of, I think you have it sort of up, down, and across, and within a very complex space and within changing times. And so, I think that ultimately all of that leads to better results and outcomes.

And so, I have very much appreciated spending the last 55 minutes getting to benefits from some of your perspectives on this. We do need to conclude today's event. On behalf of the School, I'd like to thank you, Tim, in particular, for the rich conversation, and I'd really like to thank everyone for tuning in across the country and being part of the discussion and raising some questions. It's got me inspired a little bit. I hope it has for others and I hope this isn't our last opportunity to engage on this subject for others. And so, thank you very much, Tim. I would just encourage everyone to visit our website here at the Canada School, keep up to date, register to future learning opportunities. I do think I heard learning mindset in a part of Tim's comments. And so, thank you everybody very much, and everybody have a wonderful day.

Tim Mau: Thank you.

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