Elected Local Government Leadership Development

Elected Local Government Leadership Development
Robert J. Dickey Kyongju University, S. Korea Email: [e-mail]

Introduction Most of us are at least passively aware of the BBC comedy series "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister." Margaret Thatcher has been quoted as saying "it 's accurate portrayl (sic) of what goes on in the corridors of power has brought me hours of pure joy".1 What does this 1980s era political satire have to do with the issue of leadership development of elected public officials, particularly at the local government level? The fumbling and naïve efforts of the recently empowered minister (and later Prime Minister) the Right Honorable James Hacker, and the wily bureaucratic machinations of Sir Humphrey Appleby, his Permanent Secretary, seem a fair depiction of the process how many public officials learn the craft of government leadership: through the process of many "lost battles" with the permanent staff they are expected to lead. There are supposed to be other ways to develop leadership in elected local government. The focus of this paper is the (mostly non-political) leadership of government: leading other elected officials, the senior public management, the public service as a whole, and the community at large. Brief Overview of the Leadership Literature The number of papers, books, and presentations on leadership is simply staggering. In a paper presented before the 2002 American Society of Public Administration conference, Montgomery Van Wart (forthcoming) provides an excellent overview on leadership studies in general, and offers insight on where leadership studies in the public sector have taken us over the past few decades. He refers to Bass (1990), where "over 7,500 empirical and quasi-empirical references were cited" (Van Wart, forthcoming), as well as comments by Ralph Stogdill, James McGregor Burns and Warren Bennis concerning our lack of knowledge about leadership despite years of study. Others, including Saner

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