Making a Shift to a Post-Pandemic Paradigm for Public Leadership

One lesson from the three years of experience with Covid-19 and the varying responses from world leaders is that there is a need and a clear opportunity to lead in the global public interest.  Just as the classic study of social power in groups highlighted in 1959 that “the processes of power are pervasive, complex, and often disguised in our society” (French and Raven, 1959: 259), so global leadership can be described as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, represented by the acronym ‘VUCA’. Diverse sources of social power often underpin these challenges. Akin to the notion of ‘wicked problems’, responding to volatility, uncertainty and complexity will be frustrated by power and policies that are ambiguous (at best) or intentionally skewed by selfish motivation (at worst). The resolution of these problems lies beyond the gift of single agencies, calling for integrated and innovative leadership across boundaries. The impact upon and the influence of communities is of critical importance, however defined.

At the beginning of 2020, I was finalising my proposal to Edward Elgar Publishers for an edited Research Handbook on Public Leadership. This followed the book I co-edited with Keith Grint in 2010 (Brookes and Grint, 2010). The aim was to review the decade of New Public Leadership (NPL) practice since our publication and our definition of public leadership. I had negotiated my first-ever study leave through the University of Manchester to work on this and had discussed the proposal with several potential contributors. That was until 23rd March 2020, a watershed moment for us all. The UK went into complete lockdown. Within a month, my study leave was canceled, but I took the opportunity to continue the project but reframed around the pandemic challenges.

I am delighted to confirm that our book will be published in the next few weeks.

Contributions of this international research Handbook on leading in the public interest could not be timelier, given the unprecedented and potentially societal-changing Covid-19 pandemic is now driving collective leadership globally, probably for the first time in modern history. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the central role of government and public services. It is likely to shape the future of public leadership like no other driver for change, both within and across nations and regions.

If ever there was a time to promote the importance of selfless leadership and a need to reimagine public leadership, that time is now. At the beginning of the pandemic, pollution around the globe improved daily, and the collective spirit of nations and communities reached unprecedented levels. Now is the time to embrace these positive opportunities that have emerged from the outbreak's tragic consequences and learn from the more difficult challenges.

Reversing the legacy of New Public Management (NPM) and towards a new Paradigm

 In the last 40 years, the focus on public services has been related to the concept of New Public Management (NPM), which eclipsed the traditional emphasis on Public Administration. Leadership has rarely been featured in these discourses. NPM focused far more on what Einstein referred to as ‘counting what can be counted’ rather than ‘counting what counts’. At the height of NPM, as the supposed ‘good’ private sector relentlessly pursued the bottom line of profit and shareholder interests, pursuing performance targets became the main driver for the public sector, with little less emphasis on public value. These targets are in the government's interests, with measures not directed toward the public interest.

A critical question that this Handbook seeks to answer is whether this is about leading in a crisis or, conversely, whether it concerns a crisis of leadership. Given the current pandemic crisis, this question is more critical to understand and deserves a response.

 We took account of six intelligent leadership questions:

1. What is public leadership?

2. Why is it New Public Leadership?

3. When do we lead in the public interest?

4. How do we lead in the public interest?

5. Where is public leadership best practiced?

6. Who leads?

The authors considered one of three themes, taking into account our overarching question.

Part I: Public Leadership as a New Theoretical and Conceptual Framework for Leading Public Services in the Interests of the Public.

Chapter 1 introduces the six intelligent (and critical) leadership questions, taking complete account of the role of public leadership within recent and present crises. It summarises some of the authors’ specific contributions. The contributors explore the need to move towards a framework for public leadership that takes account of the critical realist nature of public leadership and how this appears. Part 1 contributors ask how public leaders construct a sense of their reality of leadership and when this occurs, ranging from cooperative and spiritualist to systematic and relational leadership. Most importantly, the focus shifts to how we can harness the collective spirit of public leadership, building on the evidence of the selfless nature that began to emerge in early responses to Covid-19. The authors also considered where leadership responses were likely to have the most significant impact, why, and what challenges occurred. Finally, the contributors ask, ‘Who leads?’ in the public interest.

Part II: International Perspectives on Leadership, Management, and Governance.

Leadership, management, and governance are three concepts often conflated, yet each is distinct but mutually important and reinforcing. The global response to Covid-19 provides the potential for a benchmark regarding the focus given to each and the extent to which the three concepts reinforce each other in tackling increasingly global challenges. We can consider this within a virtuous cycle of leading in the public interest instead of perpetuating a vicious cycle of leading in the selfish interest of institutions and individuals. The authors explored the extent to which public services are doing the right things, in the right way, by and for the right people, in the right places, and with the right impact. These questions lie at the heart of the ‘how?’ question of public leadership, drawing on the challenges of police leadership in wicked times, healthcare transformation, and political policymaking as some international examples.

Part III: Public Leadership in Practice: The ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’ and the ‘Downright Ugly’ of Public Leadership.

The authors' analyses illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of public leadership, with a renewed focus on the current responses to the pandemic and an informed view of what the future of public leadership holds for us all. The chapters consider the need to reframe ‘place leadership’ against a wicked issue of vulnerability and criminality, the need for immediate community-based response following critical incidents, and how organisational obstinacy and social, economic, and political lack of interconnectedness create barriers to meaningful change. Our public institutions often reflect our societal history, cultures, and underpinning values. What impact does this have on attitudes, behaviours, and practices? Why do some leaders respond to societal interests, whereas others do not? How do leaders lead, and what are the impacts of leadership within these different contexts and public service arenas? Who leads, and from where?

Is this a Generational Change?

In summing up the contributions, an important question to explore is to what extent public leadership will differ in our post-pandemic world, given the experiences (both positive and negative) of public leadership within the pandemic response context. The author's insights help provide an opportunity (and framework) for integrated public leadership taking account of both relational and systemic leadership, which is both shared (across collaborating institutions) and distributed (within each institution). I draw the Handbook to a close with a concluding chapter as a short epilogue. It looks forward, based on learning from the past and tackling the challenges and issues we do not know. It ends where it began by suggesting that we should not return to the solely selfish, command-and-control, so-called individualistic heroic leadership that has dominated our society for so long in our history. Neither should we reflect the neo-liberalist approach of NPM. Drawing on all of the authors’ contributions, the conclusion suggests an integrated approach to public leadership that puts innovation and creativity at the heart of leading in the public interest.

Over the next few weeks, as the Handbook approaches publication, I will post some of the challenges public leaders face and how we can respond to them.  The excerpts from my colleague contributors provide impressive support for a new paradigm for public leadership. I am also encouraging my colleagues to participate in the debate and to give their views on whether a new public leadership paradigm is emerging and what shape this should take.

Please take part in the debate and repost it across your networks. 

REFERENCES:

BROOKES, S. & GRINT, K. 2010. The new public leadership challenge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

FRENCH, J. R. P. & RAVEN, B. 1959. The bases of social power. In: CARTWRIGHT, D. & ZANDER, A. (eds.) Group dynamics. New York: Harper Row.