Understanding Public Leadership

Paul 'T Hart, Lars Tummers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781352007633
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350311961
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A new edition of a popular textbook that provides a systematic and up-to-date introduction to the different approaches to understanding leadership in the public sector. This text draws together a wide range of enduring and cutting-edge scholarship to provide a clear and concise overview of the area. Written by two of the field's leading experts, it uses real-world case studies to unpack the dilemmas and complexities facing leaders in contemporary democracies. Now streamlined to further help students navigate this widely debated area, this is the ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate modules on leadership on public administration and management courses. Moreover, with its balance between theory and applicability it is also a valuable resource for training courses for public sector professionals. New to this Edition:
- Streamlined chapter structures and improved pedagogical features that are even more useful for students
- A new co-author bringing added insights from organizational science and quantitative methodologies
- Revised to address the most up-to-date developments in thinking about leadership in the 21st century

1Introducing Public Leadership

PUBLIC LEADERSHIP: PIVOTAL AND TRICKY

Every group or society needs to be governed if it is to survive and its members are to thrive. And every system of government requires what we have come to think of as ‘leadership’, at least from time to time, for protection, direction, order, inspiration, challenge, transformation. Institutional rules, procedures and routines alone are never enough to tackle the conflicts, changes, surprises, opportunities and challenges that groups and communities encounter. Judging when and how to design, protect, supplement or change governance institutions and creating momentum to act upon those judgements are key functions of public leadership. In most governance systems there are designated roles – high offices in politics, government agencies and professional spheres – that come with a warrant for their bearers to exercise such leadership. But these offices also come with constraints – institutional, professional, ethical – on the ways in which leadership can be exercised. Societies need the creative force that is leadership, but we should also be acutely aware of the risks of channelling too much power, authority and public adulation towards only a few people.

From the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day, many observers of public leadership have chosen to portray it as an art. Leadership, this view holds, cannot be captured in scientific generalizations based on cool, detached observation (Wren 2006). And, by inference, it cannot be taught in the cerebral environment of an academic classroom or executive seminar. Max Weber (1970: 115) was right on the mark when he suggested that the challenge of leadership is to forge warm passion and cool judgement together in one and the same soul – and that in practice this condemns those aspiring to leadership to a life of tough judgement calls between the passion that fires them up, the feeling of personal responsibility that drives them on, and a sense of proportion that is necessary to exercise good judgement.

Leadership as conceived by some of its most authoritative scholars involves a large component of practical wisdom: insight that can only be obtained effectively through direct personal experience and sustained reflection. The vital intangibles of leadership – empathy, intuition, creativity, courage, morality and judgement – are largely beyond the grasp of systematic inquiry, let alone comprehensive explanation and evidence-based prescription. Understanding leadership comes from living it: being led, living with and advising leaders, doing one’s own leading. Some understanding of leadership may be gained from vicarious learning: from digesting the experiences of other leaders. Hence the old-established and steady appetite for (auto-)biographies of CEOs and politicians, and the more contemporary market for ‘live encounters’ with high-profile leaders during seminars and conferences. And if we cannot gain access to ‘the real thing’, we are still willing to pay buckets of money for the next best thing: books and seminars by the exclusive circle of leadership ‘gurus’ who do manage to observe and interrogate up close the great and the good.

Defying this entrenched view, a ‘science of leadership’ sprang up from the latter half of the twentieth century. Thousands of academics now make a living treating leadership as they would any other subject in the realm of human affairs – as an object of study, which can be picked apart and reassembled via systematic inquiry (whether of the classical ‘scientific’ or more interpretive kind), filling journals, handbooks, conference programmes and lecture halls. Many among them make inroads into the real world of public leadership as consultants and advisers, often very well paid. Surely all this would not persist if the kind of knowledge they offered was useless in solving at least some of the puzzles that leaders face and leadership poses?

It is this kind of leadership that we now see echoed in widespread attempts to erect a leadership profession. The language of leadership has pervaded the job descriptions, training and performance management systems of public servants, even at junior management levels. Many public service commissions or equivalent bodies have embarked on developing integrated leadership frameworks in which set bundles of leadership skills are linked to the successful performance of different leadership roles, usually indicated simply by general hierarchical rank rather than specific job characteristics.

People wanting to move up the professional hierarchy must jump through the hoops thus constructed: they must attend set courses, adhere to a set of shared values, write structured job applications and be subjected to standardized tests. When they manage to get all the boxes ticked, they are ushered into a fraternity rather like a Masonic Lodge. Uniformity is nurtured and celebrated through rewards packages. Leadership education is ubiquitous. Everyone attends meetings where leadership gurus perform. The aim is not to impart knowledge, but rather to solidify a shared notion of professionalism. The means for such sharing are the latest nostrums, models and metaphors. The audience is captive, and willingly so, though one might – like leadership scholar Barbara Kellerman (2012) – wonder for how much longer.

Clearly, when taken to extremes, each set of assumptions about ‘understanding leadership’ leads to preposterous results: the mystification of idiosyncratic ‘charisma’ in a nearly evidence-free environment versus the imposition of a quasi-scientific ‘one size fits all’. Both privilege one form of leadership knowledge over the other. Both generate their own quacks and true believers, who both do very well out of the transaction – but with dubious results as far as quality and particularly diversity in leadership are concerned.

This book shies away from these extremes. By its very nature as a text designed to convey ‘what we know about leadership’ to a range of students and public sector professionals it embodies the second approach more than it does the first. But we recognize that there is only so much ‘understanding’ of the subtle, complex and often paradoxical process of public leadership that academics and other observers can distil and transmit.

DEFINITIONS

The terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are incredibly popular. Consulting Google in February 2019 we got more than 1.6 billion hits for the search term ‘leader’ and more than 1.2 billion for ‘leadership’. People pay hefty fees to attend seminars by ‘leadership gurus’, whose books are stacked up high in airport bookshops worldwide. They feed aspiring leaders concepts, stories, maxims and prescriptions. Their work is designed to empower and inspire. In the stories they tell, the roles are clear: there is one leader who knows, questions, analyses, decides, talks, acts, and inspires their staff, supporters and stakeholders to follow them. As we will see, in reality and especially in the public sphere things are a lot more complex. In most polities, political power is never concentrated in a few hands, in most public organizations much leadership work is performed regardless of their formal structures, and citizens groups and social movements tend to have quite diffuse and not seldom fractious collective leadership structures.

Public leaders are people who exercise considerable influence over the way in which communities deal with issues. Such public leaders are often found in high places – holders of public offices: presidents, mayors, ministers, agency heads, members of constitutional courts, police commissioners. Their office accords them certain formal powers as well as the capacity to mobilize attention and resources. By virtue of their positions they are authorized to make strategic decisions. They can initiate policies, change the strategy of the organization, strengthen alliances with important stakeholders, make resources available for large new projects, change the rules for decision-making, focus the agenda of their system on particular issues and get them to disregard others.

But there are also public leaders that are not in formal positions of authority. Public leadership can be exercised by people who do not hold a political office or a senior position in a government organization. These ‘informal leaders’ can be found across public organizations, in civil society groups, in the media, in academia, in the online world. The sources of their ability to influence others vary. They may boast a record of many years of public service, be highly passionate about a particular public issue or possess deep knowledge about an issue. Some are famous, and thus attract a lot of public attention to the causes they pursue. Some are simply highly extraverted, highly energetic and enjoy being with others (Figure 1.1).

How can we tell when public leadership is being exercised? Many scholars have tried to define leadership, but a single dominant definition has never come to pass. In fact there are hundreds, as we show in Box 1.1. Bennis (1989: 259) observed that ‘the concept of leadership eludes us or turns up in another form to taunt us again with its slipperiness and complexity. So we have invented an endless proliferation of terms to deal with it … and still the concept is not sufficiently defined.’ Leadership theorist Fred Fiedler likewise noted that ‘there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are leadership theories – and there are as many theories of leadership as there are psychologists working in the field’ (1967: 1). In other words, leadership is a ‘magic’ or ‘golden’ concept, one that inspires scholars and practitioners and that everyone is for. But it also vague, meaning everything and nothing at the same time (Pollitt and Hupe 2011; Pressman and Wildavsky 1984).

Figure 1.1 Varieties of public leadership

Two public leaders are shown above (Malala Yousafzai and Angela Merkel). What makes them so? What are the sources of their influence?

Source: Yousafzai: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development; Merkel:

Getty Images/Feng Li

Box 1.1 Leadership’s definitional bonanza

Many scholars have tried to define leadership. Here is a number of classic and relevant – but also quite diverse – definitions of leadership.

‘Exercising leadership is trading in hope.’

Ascribed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who by any standard was a gifted practitioner of leadership, this notion suggests that the key function of leadership is to imbue followers and constituencies with a sense of direction and a sense of optimism and empowerment about their ability to make progress, even in difficult circumstances.

‘Leadership is an interpersonal relation in which others comply because they want to, not because they have to.’

Echoing Napoleon, sociologist Robert Merton (1969: 2615) highlights that leadership is a form of persuasion that drives on psychic rewards and positive interventions, such as inspiring speeches, bonuses and recognition. A leadership relationship therefore differs from an authority relationship.

‘Leadership is the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.’

In a large project systematically studying leadership in 61 nations, Robert House and colleagues (2002: 5) look especially at the individual within organizations. Leadership is also defined by its outcomes, but given its positive slant it is difficult to integrate ‘bad’ leadership in this definition.

‘Leadership is a process of attributing causation to individual social actors.’

In an influential article in the Academy of Management Review, Jeffrey Pfeffer (1977: 104) suggests that it is often problematic to pinpoint whether leadership truly moves others or has societal effects. It is more interesting to study leaders as symbols and when and why people attribute something to leadership. Whereas it is hard to establish with certainty whether a particular policy success or organizational failure is truly the fault of the leader, it is more valuable and feasible to analyse how different constituencies hold their leaders accountable for successes and failures.

‘Leadership is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing process that occurs between a leader and a follower, group of followers, or institutions.’

Gleaned from a recent overview book by Antonakis and Day (2017: 6), this definition emphasizes that leadership is rooted in a particularly context, and manifests itself in group and/or institutional settings.

‘Leadership is about disappointing people at a rate they can stand.’

Where Napoleon creates an understanding of leadership as leading from the front, showing the way and inspiring people to follow, Harvard scholar Ronald Heifetz argues that heroic conceptions of leadership breed ‘inappropriate dependencies’ on all-knowing, all-powerful authority figures. This is particularly so in complex situations where no single person can be expected to have all the answers and progress can only be made by the system as a whole stepping up and learning. Leaders can prompt this to happen by asking hard questions and keeping people focused on the issues, but purposefully not articulate a vision and set direction.

Box 1.1 demonstrates just how versatile – or, if one wants to be less kind, how opaque – the phenomenon of leadership and our ways of understanding it really are (see also Bass and Stogdill 1990). Yukl (2012) studied the various definitions used by scholars and noted that many conceptualize leadership as a process whereby intentional influence is exercised over other people to guide, structure and facilitate some common purpose or endeavour. We will place ourselves in this tradition and broadly conceive of public leadership as a process of influencing people to think or act differently concerning public issues from what they would otherwise have done. Hence effective leaders are able to move others – for good, as when Martin Luther King inspired around 250,000 people of all colours and creeds to walk with him during the Freedom March, as well as for bad – think of Hitler’s mesmerizing of the crowds at massive rallies in the late 1930s.

As far as leadership in (public) organizations is concerned it is furthermore important to distinguish between the work of leadership and the work of management. According to Barnard (1938) leadership is a strategic activity focused on determining the direction of the organization. Management is operational: it involves developing a structure of rules, penalties and rewards that ensures that the organization can continue to work well. Likewise, for Kotter (1996) ‘management’ encompasses all activities that ensure that an organization continues to perform in its current form: hiring and firing, measuring performance, analysing budgets, maintaining relations with the press, conducting performance interviews with staff, attending network meetings and so on. In this vein, public management aims to bring a degree of order, consistency and rationality to the administration of public programmes and the delivery of public services. Kotter then goes on to say that ‘leadership’ is about dealing with change and its implications for the future of policies, programmes and systems. Such changes are manifold. The world is confronted with abrupt as well as creeping technological, demographic, economic, strategic-military, regulatory and sociocultural changes that put pressure on existing public policies and institutions. Discerning them and working out what they might mean and how existing systems should adapt to them or be transformed by them is extraordinarily challenging work.

Note that the Kotterian distinction between leadership and management does not amount to saying that every leader is, or should be, an agent of change. The work of public leadership is subtler than that. Exercising public leadership can be about the preservation as much as it can be about the transformation of public institutions, policies, programmes, organizations and networks. Making such a definitional distinction does not mean that when your job title is ‘manager’ you cannot exercise leadership. ‘Managers’ are required to undertake leadership work from time; and the reflection, direction and dynamism that leadership can bring to a group or system amounts to nothing if there is not also a degree of ‘management’ to make sure that the system pursues its goals in an orderly fashion. For example, the success of the African National Congress (ANC) in breaking the spine of apartheid was not just due to Mandela’s front-stage charismatic and moral leadership; it was also due to the careful back-stage management of the resistance work and the delicate relationships, finances and logistics involved by people such as Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and Walter Sisulu.

We know that when senior public servants describe one of their colleagues as ‘a good manager, but not a leader’ this is not even faint praise and this colleague’s chances of promotion are dead. However, we think this reflects an underappreciation of the immense value-creating role of sound management practices. It is important not to downgrade the signific...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Introducing Public Leadership
• 2 Varieties of Public Leadership
• 3 Leadership as Relational Work
• 4 Leading with Others
• 5 Leading in Time
• 6 Leading Change
• 7 Leading in Crises
• 8 Evaluating Public Leadership
• Appendix: Ten ‘Must-Reads’ on Public Leadership
• Bibliography
• Index