PUBLIC LEADERSHIPProf Erwin SchwellaProfessor of Public LeadershipUniversity of Stellenbosch South Africa

Public Leadership Considered

1. Public Leadership: The Context

2. Public Leadership: The Concepts

3. Public Leadership: The Challenges

4. Public Leadership: The Competencies

5. Public Leadership: The Conclusions

Public Leadership: The Context

• The Importance of Context• Understanding and Analysing Context

• STEEP Analysis• Stakeholder Analysis

• Context Examples• Geography as context

• African Public Leadership• South African Public Leadership

• Sector as Context• Public/Private/Third Sector Leadership

• Institutional Context• Question: Bad leadership and weak institutional contexts?

Public Leadership: The Concepts

• Author’s definition:

“Democratic and effective public leadership is action taken through a dynamic and transparent process involving the leader with relevant others in the inclusive setting and effective realization of legitimate, legal and socially valuable goals and objectives.

The process requires continuous democratic and organizational learning to progressively enhance effective and proper policy making and service delivery aimed at improving the quality of lives of citizens.”

Understanding Leadership: A Leadership Approaches Perspective• The Traits Approach

• Leaders are born not made

• The Behavioural Approach• Task and Relationships related behaviour

• The Situational Approach• Leadership contingent upon the situation

Understanding Leadership: A Leadership Approaches Perspective

• The Transformational Approach

• Creating and sharing a powerful vision for and of the organisation• Inspiring the total organisation, amongst others by means of

persuasive communication, to strive towards the vision• Planning concretely to realise the vision and implementing these

plans effectively and efficiently• Teaming to create and maintain strong teams to reach the

organisational vision• Motivating all towards the energetic pursuit of organisational vision• Recycling after evaluation of effort to ensure that continuous

performance improvement takes place through change, adaptation and re-envisioning

Understanding Leadership: A Leadership Approaches Perspective• The Social Learning Approach

• Linked to recycling• Requires that organizations continuously learn and experiment in order

to improve capacity and performance• Leaders not be directive and authoritarian• Leaders facilitators creating space for experimentation and learning• Adaptive versus technical problems• Adaptive problems are complex and there are no easy or ready

answers to deal with them• Leaders facilitate systems, group, team and individual learning to

create new competencies to deal with adaptive rather than technical problems

• Heifetz (1994), terms this type of leadership as leadership without authority in situations where there are no easy answers

• Leadership prescription: create space for and encourage learning to take place in the organisation by being facilitative rather than directive.

Understanding Public Leadership: A Good versus Bad Public Leadership Perspective

• Reclaiming Bad Public Leadership for learning purposes• Kellerman, Lipman-Blumen• Bad Public Leadership: Ineffective and/or Unethical• Types of bad leadership:

• Incompetent• Rigid• Intemperate• Callous• Corrupt• Insular• Evil

Remedies to Bad Public Leadership• Limit tenure

• When leaders remain in positions of power for too long, they tend to acquire bad habits

• Share power • When power is centralized, it is likely to be misused, and that puts a

premium on delegation and collaboration

• Don't believe your own hype • For leaders to buy their own publicity is the kiss of death

• Get real, and stay real• Virtually every bad leader lost touch with reality to some degree

• Compensate for your weaknesses • Stay balanced

• Balanced leaders develop healthier organizations, make more thoughtful decisions and lead more effectively

Remedies to Bad Public Leadership• Remember the mission

• Arguably this matters most when the group or organization is dedicated to public service

• Stay healthy• Develop a personal support system

• All of us should have aides, associates, friends, or family members who will save us from ourselves

• Every leader can benefit from tough love

• Be creative • The past should never determine the future nor narrow the

available options

Remedies to Bad Public Leadership• Know and control your appetites

• These include the hunger for power, money, success and sex

• Be reflective • Virtually every one of the great writers on leadership - Plato,

Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha - emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge, self-control, and good habits

• Acquiring and sustaining such virtues is hard

• Toxic Leadership: Lipman-Blumen: Why do we suffer, tolerate, accept and even support toxic leaders?

Public Leadership: The Challenges

• Increasing the understanding of the variety of developments that are frequently characterised as globalisation; the globalisation challenge

• The realisation that the public problems which governments now most frequently deal with have grown in number; they are also becoming even more complex and there appear to be no clear-cut solutions, or right or wrong answers for many of them; the complexity challenge

Public Leadership: The Challenges

• The growing gap between the rich and the poor in both the developed industrialised countries and the less economically well-developed transitional countries; the inequality challenge

• The critical need to further address issues of gender equality, especially in the area of educational opportunities in all societies; the gender equality challenge

• The growing incorporation of norms of cultural diversity into all sectors of society, with the consequent escalating demands for the direct representation of cultural and ethnic interests and heritages in the processes of public administration and governance; the diversity challenge

Public Leadership: The Challenges

• The considerable movement toward political democratisation with its greatly increased emphasis on ethical behaviour in government, civil service transparency and accountability; the good governance challenge

• The gradual weakening of state capacity and in some cases the actual disintegration of the state; the capacity challenge

• The combination of a decrease of trust in government institutions, and the growth of multinational integration, leading to the increased disintegration of the capacity of the nation state; the erosion of confidence challenge

Public Leadership: The Challenges

• The rapidly growing interest in the decentralisation of previously centralised governance institutions and the broadening of local governance capacity; the local empowerment and capacity challenge

• The continued search for optimal solutions to optimise the structures and functioning of policy implementation and service delivery systems, recently new public management approach emphasising market-based options to address public policy needs linked to significant increases in utilising private or non-profit sector institutions and/or “solutions” for delivering public programmes; the administrative reform challenge.

Public Leadership: The Competencies

• Rosenbaum (2003) lists twelve areas in which public leaders should be competent. These are:

• adapting rapidly to change and complexity,• fostering effective collaboration,• being able to see situations as others see them,• building democratic institutions,• fostering ethical awareness and sensitivity,• enhancing capacity for self-management,

Public Leadership: The Competencies

• entrepreneurship and a risk-taking ability,• strategic planning capability,• capability to enhance people development,• capacity to board and nurture of harmonious multi-ethnic,

multicultural and gender equitable situations,• ability to focus in an increasingly diffuse and complex

environment,• capacity to persuasively communicate complex messages

orally and in writing.

Public Leadership: The Conclusions

• Provide Conclusions through Discussion