Leadership In Public Services Essay

The first issue of Public Administration Today highlighted the tremendous complexity and diversity of issues public sector leaders must manage today. Are current approaches to leadership development adequate to meet this challenge? Our experience would suggest they are not. In spite of sustained efforts in the 1980s and early 1990s to shift from control of inputs to managing for outputs, there is still much emphasis on cost and efficiency rather than effectiveness of interventions to produce results. More recent attempts to shift the focus of managers from outputs to outcomes are proving even more difficult. We anticipate that a further shift from outcomes to value creation will be needed in the future if the Public Service is to maintain its relevance.
Perhaps the most dramatic contemporary examples of value destruction through inadequate leadership are the continuing disasters in the rail and hospital systems in NSW. Despite repeated public enquires,
recommendations for fundamental systemic changes have not been implemented; suggesting the capacity to lead organisations through the necessary transformations is lacking.

In this article, we first relate our approach to the Integrated Leadership System introduced by the Australian Public Service Commission in 2004. We then briefly describe a developmental theory known as the “Leadership Development Framework” (LDF; Torbert, 2004). Unlike other approaches to development, the LDF is based upon a measurement tool that has been extensively researched and validated over 30 years (Hy & Loevinger, 1996; Manners, 2001). Such a well-validated measure is required to ensure organisational development efforts based on these ideas are appropriate and effective. Throughout the paper, and in the concluding section in particular, we explore the implications of this framework for leadership development in the public sector in Australia.

The Integrated Leadership System: What type of leader is capable of “Shaping Strategic Thinking”?
The Australian Public Service Commission introduced the Senior Executive Leadership Capability Framework in 1999. In 2004 this framework was expanded to provide detailed descriptions of key capabilities together with behavioural definitions at leadership levels ranging from EL1 to SES Band 3 (APSC, 2004). The Integrated Leadership System (ILS; APSC, 2004) specifies the type and level of capabilities required to lead effectively in our complex and dynamic world. However, while the ILS specifies some of the desirable behaviours of effective leaders, it says little about how leaders make sense of the world and the consequences of this “meaning making” process for behaviour.
The “Leadership Pathway”, as the capability framework is now known, specifies five main leadership capability clusters: Shapes Strategic Thinking, Achieves Results, Cultivates Productive Working Relationships, Exemplifies Personal Drive and Integrity and Communicates with Influence. The first of these, “Shapes Strategic
Thinking” is proposed as the primary capability for leadership, technical and management roles and will be our focus here.
Particularly at the more senior levels, the capacity to “Shape Strategic Thinking” requires an appreciation of the interconnectedness and dynamics of relationships not only within particular organisational units but across units as well.
Inspiring a sense of purpose and direction, considering multiple perspectives and stakeholders (including “Whole-of Government” and, indeed, the whole of society), and creating sustainable and effective organization-wide systems become key activities.
Whilst experienced leaders can often identify good leadership capabilities in others, this is usually based on distilled experience and gut-feel rather than an explicit model of the type of thinking required for effective senior leadership in the public service. Because this understanding is tacit, it is difficult to identify those who might have the capability to be developed and who might not, and to develop people in whom these skills are nascent. A theory of leadership development is essential for informing these
decisions.
We contend that in order to understand what such key capabilities as “strategic thinking” mean at the more senior levels, there is a need for an understanding of the ways in which people typically evolve through their lifespan in terms of their capacity to “make meaning”. The Leadership Development Framework (Torbert, 2004), described below, has proven to be extremely useful for understanding characteristic growth patterns and their implications for leadership.