Effective leadership in public administration: The great leader is seen as servant first, Robert K. Greenleaf

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Effective leadership in public administration: "The great leader is seen as servant first", Robert K. Greenleaf

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Abstract

Globalization, decentralization, economic uncertainties, and other contemporary challenges ask for a new kind of governance and a new role for public agents in every country. Governments have to reshape the public sector to cope with this environment that requires civil servants to assume new missions. With this aim in view, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development proposed in 2001, to create and re-inforce a model of public sector leadership. Nevertheless, what a model of public sector leadership could be, remains unclear. If leadership can characterize political leaders, speaking about leadership in the public administration means dealing with high-ranking civil servants, often regarded as reserved and discrete. The following work is about what an effective leader in the public administration is. First, after a review of some definitions of leadership and the problem they pose for the public administration, the main characteristics of a specific leadership model in the public sector will be evoked. In the second part, this model will be more concretely linked with the new needs of administration as a very specific organization, and with the needs of society. It will be the occasion to stress some of the limits and conditions attached to leadership in public administrations.

Leadership and public administration
1. A problematic concept
2. The need for a specific leadership in public administration
Public administration and leadership in a changing world
1. How must the leader act with his environment?
2. What must the public administrative leader avoid?

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[...] The characteristics of the leader in public administration In theory, leadership in administration appears to be a transforming leadership. Burns actually distinguishes two kind of leadership, according to the relationship that exists between the leader and his or her followers: the transforming leadership and the transactional leadership (Burns 1978: 19-20). The latter is based on an exchange of interests between the leader and the followers. In public service, where employees are supposed to be devoted to people and common good, such seek for mutual interest is not desirable. [...]

[...] Studies of leadership in the public administration focus on organization alone, and on the role of the leader as manager in the organization and as an educator for the values it embodies. After working on the subject, I think this approach is incomplete. High-ranking civil-servants, in spite of their high education and experience, are not only educators, they are learners; they must remain students themselves during their entire career. They must demonstrate great courage in their will to change the system and in their will to learn and to acknowledge the mistakes of the past. [...]

[...] To some extent, a strong leadership exercised by a civil servant could be regarded as illegitimate: only elected statesmen have the legitimacy to exercise leadership, since they received through elections the trust of people to decide what is right for the public good. Civil servants employed in administration do not benefit of this type of “public leadership” (Maltais, Leclerc, Rinflet, 2007) and are bound to the strictly hierarchical scheme characterizing public administration. In this scheme, they are considered as managers more than leaders. [...]

[...] Leaders in administration are “increasingly public in nature, attached to such interests and dealing with such problems as affect the welfare of the entire community” (Selznick 1957: 2). It is particularly true in times of crisis. In the light of this new role played by society, the importance of the media must be underlined. Governing without free media is impossible today. The media is a powerful way to present the actions that an administration wants to undertake, to explain them to people, to get critical feedback on it and to answer to these critics. [...]

[...] Finally, the idea of values is a fundamental component of leadership in a public administration. More than an organization whose aim is to provide a public service, a public administration is an institution. An institution is embedded in society and valued for itself. Leadership in administration is admittedly a transforming leadership, which carries values throughout the organization and allows better management, but it is also what allows the public administration to be a real institution by infusing the organization with value, beyond the technical requirement of the task at hand” (Selznick 1957: 17). [...]

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