A fortnight ago I extolled on the need for renewal of purpose and commitment to that purpose in the public sector. I wish to follow that up with a discussion of leadership roles in that commitment to organizational purpose. I will begin by briefly reflecting on what we always assume to be leadership roles in public sector organizations. In the general we take leadership to be some kind of work, a specialised activity that few in the organization are trained and skilled to perform; and a particular function that provides a focal point of organizational self sustainability and directional purpose. Implicit in these is the understanding that leadership roles are inherently embeded in the character, scale and focus of particular organizations social context. This is particular so for public sector organizations which deal with a great deal of citizen services that are supposed to be culturally, traditionally and socially relevant and definitive of the larger social environment. In this case leadership becomes a type of function performed to ultimately meet the needs of a defined social situation and public sector organizations are typical of this type of setup.
What the above suggests to us is that whilst we have heared of generic leadership characteristics and styles, it may as well be that public sector type of leaders are inherently attuned to the environment of government administration and therefore the types and characteristics of required and relevant public sector leaders ought to be different from those coming from the private sector.
This draws from the old debate as to whether private and public sector management practices are fundamentally alike or different. I will not revisit that debate here except to state that in the context of today’s discussion, if leadership patterns and characteristics are any different, then leadership becomes a specific relation of persons in one social institution and therefore persons who are leaders in one social setting may not necessarily be leaders in other situations.
The above contention brings to light what I consider to be of fundamental effect in the general practices of our public sector. I would take it beyond the differences of private and public sector practices, to say even within the practice of public sector organizational setups, there are fundamental differences among and between government organizations and their specific focus or purpose will inturn define the type of leaders required for those organizations. Let’s accept upfront that there are certain general activities or functions of leaders that will remain relatively generic across sectors and even across public sector organizations, such as the facilitation of communication, data preservation and utilization systems. Central to note would be the variation of other leadership styles and types that are purely a function of the purpose of the organization. The purpose here basically includes vision and miision statements as well as stated organizational goals and objectives.
Commitment to the purpose then becomes the regulator and determiner of what type of leaders are needed and what kinds of roles they shall perform. It is probably more relevant if we understand the scale of public sector organizations because by nature large scale organizations present different leadership dynamics and therefore tend to challenge us to accept that within public organizations, leadership may not necessarily be equivalent to simple office-holding and the associated high prestige and authority and sometimes even decision making. We should note that not all decisions made in organizations are made by leaders and therefore it becomes absolutely necessary for us to clearly understand and know which decisions within our public service organizations are to be made by leaders. To this end some have argued of the need to separate and make a distinction between “routine” and “critical” decision making functions. Invariably the expectation is that routine decisions are most made across the entire spectrum of our public services whereas the critical ones ought to be the responsibility of organizational leaders. This is why it is important to know the levels of accountability and responsibility of public officials.
I am mentioning this because I think sometimes we allow decisions to be taken all over the levels of our public organizations with little care of the implications on which officers couild make those decisions.
If the above holds any semblance of acceptable perceptions on leadership, we can then safely say the expectation is that within our public service organizations, leadership is and should be dispensable, such that we can distinguish its presence from its absence. In doing so then we can also begin to effectively attribute both inefficiency and effciency to the role our public organization leaders are playing and the extent to which we can attribute success and failure to either the presence or lack of leadership in the overall delivery processes of our public institutions. It then becomes logical that we assess the role of public service leaders by firstly understanding the broader context of the experiences within the public organizational set up. Our understanding of the type and role of leaders in our governmental structures then becomes sensible only because we fully understand that this activity, function or work called leadership derives its meaning and content from a broader understanding of the field within which it takes place.
The failures of ourpublic institutions can in part be explained by lack of leadership when it was needed, resulting in organizations drfting away from their purpose, becoming exposed to vagrant pressures and invariably being easily influenced by short-run opportunistic and individualistic trends. This can be compounded by the failure to set realistic goals and failure to clearly define organizational purpose. I want to argue that many atimes our administrative analysis of public institutions takes goals of public institutions as given and this is precisely what makes it difficult for us to apportion blame or even credit to the role played by leaders. What then are the key tasks of leaders in public services? I will argue that leaders must first build and inculcate special values and distinctive competences built around the purpose.
Secondly, as said by experts, a leader is an agent of institutionalization, who offers guidance to the organizational processes that would otherwise occur more haphazardly and be prune to accidents of circumstances and history. This is the type of leadership we require in our public service institutions.
*Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
