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Leadership in the APS: Its influence on workplace culture

Address by Lynelle Briggs, Australian Public Service Commissioner, to the Department of Finance and Deregulation
16 October 2008

Thank you for inviting me to talk to you about leadership in the Australian Public Service (APS) and its influence on workplace culture.

Leadership and culture have an intricate relationship. Each can operate on its own, but when they operate together towards a common purpose, they become a very powerful tool. 

Culture is about shared ways of thinking, how people behave and interact, and what information and ideas they value as being important.1 In many ways it is an unspoken and unwritten aspect of an organisation—it’s the way things are done around here.  A culture can work to the benefit or detriment of organisational success.

So too can leadership. Leadership in the APS has changed over the last 20 years. It is no longer about sitting in an office, just managing staff resources and delegating tasks.

Leading when done right and well is about:

Leadership and culture interact at the point where visions turn into action. Effective leadership and a healthy culture should see all levels of the organisation working, interacting, and progressing towards a common goal. Great leadership, like a rudder, will steer a culture to organisational success, even through the roughest of seas.

More than 80 per cent of CEOs surveyed in the 2003 Hewitt’s Best Employer study stated that their organisation’s ability to succeed would be affected by three things: acquiring and retaining talent; the quality of leadership; and organisational culture.2

These elements have resonance in the APS, but, unlike in the private sector our success depends on us delivering Government commitments effectively in order to improve outcomes for the wider Australian community.

What is expected of our agencies has changed so much since the Australian Public Service began. Today the Government, community and stakeholders expect professional, responsive, intellectual and flexible agencies which can deliver quality results, at times with impossibly short timeframes and resources. To achieve this, our staff need to be agile, high performing and focussed on the end goal.

In his address to heads of agencies and members of the senior executive service, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd outlined the Government’s vision for the future of the Australian Public Service. It encompasses a public service that is innovative, courageous, strategic and committed to excellence. This is where our leaders should add value.

Recognising the extent to which leadership can influence an organisation, it forms a large part of the Commission’s work programme. Our work in leadership development is creating a picture of leadership that reflects a symbiotic relationship between leadership, management and technical skills. Each enables and influences the others and all need to be demonstrated at different times and to different degrees.

In 2007 the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran AO, proposed seven qualities for a public sector leader, and then boiled those down to three things of particular importance. These were the ability to look over the horizon to identify opportunities and threats, and not just over months or years but over decades; a capacity to construct practical and flexible options for actions; and the ability to bring people along with them. These neatly encapsulate the changing leadership landscape in the public service today.

The leadership toolbox required to operate in that landscape is a sophisticated one.

The APS Integrated Leadership System is a good indicator of that sophistication.

Leadership capabilities are assessed against five capability clusters:

These five capabilities identify in detail the skills, capabilities and attitudes we expect of leaders in the Australian Public Service.

While the tool box sets a good framework, putting it into action is where the challenge lies, and in some areas, the APS needs to do more work.

The 2006-2007 State of the Service Report revealed some concerning findings. Measuring employee engagement across 12 factors, we found that employees were least satisfied with their agency culture. Senior leaders were also one of the factors that employees were least satisfied with. This is in the context that, among the top seven issues affecting the retention of APS employees were working relationships and the quality of senior leaders.

These are important findings and send a clear message that if we want to get the right people, keep them, and meet our organisational outcomes, delivering on the people side of the business is critical for effective leadership. We cannot dismiss the fact that people want to work in positive, supportive environments, and want strong leaders.

When done poorly, leadership can strip away integrity and accountability.  We see numerous examples of risky, irresponsible leadership in organisations, often resulting in:

These impact deep within the workplace culture.

We are not immune to this in the Australian Public Service. The Palmer inquiry into the case of Cornelia Rau found that problems associated with the handling of immigration cases were the result of “a deep-seated culture and attitudes and a failure of executive leadership”.3 The culture and attitudes of senior management were seen to have a detrimental impact on operational performance.

Most recently, the Callinan inquiry4 into the outbreak of equine influenza revealed a culture lacking in communication and accountability. Failings at managerial and operational levels to adequately implement biosecurity measures had huge impact on the horse riding community and racing industry.

In both cases, acceptance of “the way things are done around here”, undermined the organisation and ultimately, their outcomes to the community.

There are a number of critical lessons for senior leaders from these failures in terms of balancing empowerment and trust with quality control; and  understanding that communications need to be delivered accurately, and in a timely fashion, and most importantly, received and understood by staff. Further lessons around governance systems which support the detection and reporting of problems, and the responsibility of senior leaders to promote, uphold and model ethical standards are key to ensuring an operational culture which can manage day to day business requirements effectively, and respond to critical incidents.

The flow on effect to the workforce of your leadership can be devastating, resulting in—poor retention of staff—poor performance—low levels of staff engagement.

Those employees who don’t check out of the organisation, turn up, but don’t tune in. No organisation, public or private sector, can operate in a culture overrun with these problems, and only leadership can turn them around.

Simply put, leadership is critical to an organisation’s survival. It is critical to the performance of an organisation, its health, its capacity to attract and retain the best staff and its ability to grow and move forward.  It’s also a fundamental component of good public governance.  If, as the OECD postulated in a 2001 report, governance is about institutionalising values, then leadership puts flesh on those bones.

We look to our leaders to get us to where we need to go. We look to them to have the vision, articulate the plan, and then find the way there.

While leadership is no longer the exclusive domain of particular top level positions, and while the APS must create an environment in which leadership can flourish at every level, these leaders are a key component of organisational capability.

Because of this, it is important that we have good leaders.

It is just as important to understand what it takes to be a good leader.

Good leadership must include good communication skills, organisational awareness and sound resource management. It must encompass strategic thinking, the ability to achieve results, and exhibit drive and integrity.  I think good leadership should also involve things like passion and empathy, wisdom and courage, vision and hope. If it doesn’t, then our leaders, however competent, won’t be leaders that anyone will want to follow.

An adjunct to being followed is having the ability and the presence to motivate others to want to follow.  Good leaders are inspirational. APS leaders should simply use the toolbox provided by the integrated leadership system to learn how to motivate and inspire.

For a long time, how we dealt with our people was left on the back burner, in favour of more pressing needs.  In many organisations, senior people have focussed on the concrete, technical, knowledge based aspects of their positions. They have been reluctant to confront the subtle and sometimes seemingly intangible aspects of leadership—inspiring a sense of purpose, nurturing productive working relationships, building a performance culture, and delivering a high potential, motivated and committed workforce.

The skills required to achieve this were erroneously referred to as ‘soft skills’, as opposed to the so-called hard skills such as analytical skills and subject-matter-knowledge. In the current working environment, the ‘soft skills’ have developed a very pointy edge.

People management really matters. In a tight labour market if we don’t get it right we lose key staff and we jeopardise our capacity to deliver government outcomes. There is no room for poor people managers in a modern public service.

Any relevant text book you pick up will talk about the importance of relationship building, and its place in the organisational matrix.  Margaret Wheatley for instance in Leadership and the New Science writes “In organisations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles and positions”.

But you don’t need Margaret, or any number of other academics, to tell you that.  You only need to look at the State of the Service Reports year after year.  Since the introduction of survey questions about employee engagement in 2003, the number one workplace attribute with respect to job satisfaction is ‘good working relationships’.

A good leader ignores relationships at their peril.  Our employees tell us each year that relationships are what is most important to their job satisfaction.  Leaders must nurture those relationships.

What makes good relationships depends on a large number of variables.  Some of it will be intuitive, but I firmly believe that as good a basis as any for sensible relationship management is the APS values.  Be open and responsive, value consultation, treat people with respect and courtesy and provide a rewarding workplace.

Good APS leaders will also appreciate that there are boundaries, and that poor behaviour, inconsistent with the values, should not be tolerated. Setting the right standards and modelling and prioritising this is an important part of that.

Leaders may often feel as though they have a lot on their shoulders, in terms of managing performance, meeting budgets and tight deadlines, and ensuring corporate governance requirements are met.  In an environment where resources are limited or shrinking, it is important to remember that people will always be the primary key to delivering on your responsibilities, so you jeopardise these relationships at our peril.

In other words, concentrating on developing positive, focussed and productive workplaces and building good and constructive working relationships will be a key contributor to getting the best out of staff and meeting your performance and accountability imperatives.

Much international research has been conducted in this area, across both public and private sectors, and consistently the factors that have been found to motivate performance most significantly are:

Essentially, employees perform better when they know that their leaders are committed to them.

In the majority of cases in the APS, due solely to the nature of who we are, existing and emerging leaders will more often then not find themselves placed among workplace cultures that are already in operation. There is an added challenge in being able to accurately assess the landscape, and determine what needs to be done to bring people on board.

Edgar Schein, a leading academic on leadership and culture talks about the need for leaders to embed themselves in the culture. What leaders pay attention to, what they reward, how they model behaviour and how they manage critical incidents are important for establishing a connection with a workplace culture.5

Guiding and developing a strong, productive workplace culture requires effort. But that effort is not about the artefacts of culture, such as structure and processes. The effort comes from within, taking a deep breath of courage and being open and honest about what is going on in our workplaces. Some of us will uncover real issues of concern that will require dedicated and strong leadership to turn things around. Some of us will find that the organisation is mostly on track, and will only require minor tweaking to reinforce relationships and communications.

It’s time now to turn that retrospection to this room.  What culture does Finance need to have to achieve better performance and to create and sustain its competitive advantage in the future? Can Finance meet the bottom line, and still motivate and inspire staff? How can leaders define and shape that culture? Maybe it includes disciplined risk-taking, restless creativity, teams passionate about delivering, resourceful agility or perhaps customer-focused innovation.

Your annual report acknowledges quite clearly that Finance’s people are the key to delivering outcomes. With 70% of staff being rated as highly effective, superior or outstanding, it is obvious that not only are employees a key resource, they are committed. Finance’s six valued behaviours: nurtures productive working relationships; communicates effectively; achieves results and demonstrates creativity; exhibits both personal drive and integrity; displays ability to learn; and demonstrates relevant skills and experience, are an excellent guide to informing new and existing employees of what is expected culturally and professionally.

Remaining competitive in the face of significant skills shortages in the finance and accounting sectors relies on making your culture visible to applicants, and most importantly, delivering on what is promised when staff walk through the door.

As an exercise, think in your own mind about the three things that you would change in your working environment to make it a better place—these may well speak of the desired culture you want which would enhance finance’s performance. If you can articulate the way things are done in your area—for better or worse—you are well on the way to molding the culture more effectively to get the best out of your people and the best outcome for your agency.

Reflect back to the start of your career and think about what it was in your workplace that lit a fire in your belly and led you to where you are now. What qualities did your leaders have that made you want to come to work and do a good job? Do you have those qualities yourself?

These questions are not just for those in management positions. Emerging leaders and employees have a role, and a right to say how they want their culture to operate.

Leadership in today’s environment is not something that is the exclusive domain of a particular office or position.  Leadership is an action-oriented concept, or a way of behaving, and employees at all levels can be leaders through their actions. Indeed, it is incumbent on the traditional leaders—those of us in senior or executive positions—to ensure our employees first understand, and are then given the support and encouragement, to exhibit leadership behaviour.

It is also a pertinent question for leaders, or would be leaders, to ask themselves: Why would people follow you, or be inspired by you, or go the extra distance for you? What is it that you do, or what is it that you are, that makes people want to have you as their leader? Why would anyone want to be led by you?

It is undeniable that our leaders and workplace cultures have a lot to do with how we perform. Leadership can make or break an organisation, and be the difference that makes a difference to who is attracted to working in our agencies, how well they perform their duties, and how willing they are to commit to the end goal. People want to have good working relationships with their colleagues, they want to be told what is going on, and they want to know whether they are on track. In denying this, leaders fail to see the bigger picture.

Good leadership means good business; both strategically and operationally. It creates healthy, resilient agencies whose workforce is engaged, flexible and committed to delivering outcomes, and with that we can’t help but succeed.

 

1. Dr Wayne Brockbank, Clinical Professor of Business at the University of Michigan Business School.

2. Bashinsky, A., 2004, Leadership, culture and employee engagement: Do CEOs and executives actually get it?, Human Resources Magazine, http://www.humanresourcesmagazine.com.au/articles/db/0c0216db.asp.

3. Palmer. P, 2005, Inquiry into the circumstances of the immigration detention of Cornelia Rau, Commonwealth of Australia.

4. Callinan, I., 2008, Equine influenza: The August 2007 outbreak in Australia, Commonwealth of Australia.

5. Schein, E., 1990, Organizational culture, American psychologist, 45, no 2, pp.109-19.

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