go to print this page

Need help?
Click here to find out more?

go to related pages

On our website:

go to on our site

go to news

Logo - Australian Government - Australian Public Service Commission

© Copyright Commonwealth of Australia - Australian Public Service Commission

Home page
> About the Commission > Public Service Commissioner > Speech
> Media
‹ Previous page

“Leading Differently”

Speech to the Graduate School of Government, University of Sydney
Friday 28th March

The CommissionerThe Commissioner

Lynelle Briggs
Lynelle Briggs is the Public Service Commissioner. She has held this position since November 2004.

See also:

Thank­you for inviting me to speak to you today about leading differently.

I do so against an exciting background for leaders, especially in the public sector, and for women leaders.  There is the serious prospect of a female American President, we have for the first time in this country a female Deputy Prime Minister as well as a female Deputy Leader of the Opposition, and we have women Ministers heading up some of the key Departments and agencies in terms of major issues facing the country – climate change and water, housing, education, health and indigenous affairs are but some examples.

So too, the number of women in leadership roles in the public sector continues to grow.  My recent State of the Service Report shows that women now comprise 57% of Australian Public Service employees, and that the growth in the number of women public service middle and  Senior Executive levels has outstripped their growth in representation at other classification levels. They now make up 44% and 36% of public servants at those levels respectively.  Now, more than ever, the challenges faced and set by government are going to be met by female leaders.

It’s an exciting time, and an exciting time to be a public sector leader.  It is also a changing time.  A changing world means “doing leadership differently”.  We live in a world which is more complex and fast paced than before.  In an era of globalisation, decentralisation and knowledge-based economies, public sector leadership has had to adapt to cope with new challenges.

As Public Service Commissioner, I have a specific obligation to foster leadership across the Australian Public Service.  I want to talk today about that, and what it means to be a leader in today’s public service and about leading differently.  In doing so, there will be many concepts that are familiar and pertinent to all leaders, male and female, public or private.  So, I’ll speak in generalisations, and we might get to some specifics about women later.

Why is leadership significant?

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.  The public sector is no different to any other organisation in this regard.

Where it is different in the public sector is that leadership is also a component of good public governance. If, as the OECD postulated in a 2001 report, governance is about institutionalising values, then leadership puts the flesh on those bones. 

Because leadership is significant, it is important that we have good leaders

When I first became Public Service Commissioner, I was asked by the Defence magazine what advice I would give to young people who aspire to leadership roles.  My advice was, and still is, to “go for it”– be open, honest and straight.

It is also worth asking yourself as a leader the question put to a room full of hypothetical executives by the Harvard Business Review a few years ago – namely, “Why would anyone want to be led by you?”  A little self reflection can be a powerful tool for change.

I don’t believe it is possible to build a leader according to a single recipe. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to identify some common underpinnings of what it is to be a good leader.  At the very least, good leaders everywhere need to:

They also need to understand the difference between leadership and management.  There is an often cited distinction: “Managers do things right; leaders do the right things”.  Leaders must manage, but they must first set the direction and then manage in order to achieve it.

My other point is that 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.

Leading Differently in the Public Sector

Good leadership has a particular place in the public sector.  The public sector occupies a unique position in the relationship between the Government and the public, and is necessary to achieve outcomes for the Government and the community.  It operates in a highly competitive and contestable environment, and one in which the expectations of Australians are enormously high about how the Government should go about its business.  Australians quite rightly expect quality service, honesty and integrity, and value for money from the public service.

Like other public services around the world, the APS has undergone a major re-thinking of its role and the way it carries out the task of public service .

The main drivers of this were: fiscal constraints, the need for additional flexibilities, new technology, and an expectation from both the community and Ministers for a more responsive, better co-ordinated public service.  There was also a push to be more competitive, more results – based and action focused. 

There is now far greater emphasis on public service leaders connecting, guiding, directing and coordinating, as more and more Government services are provided collaboratively or through third parties, and more emphasis is placed on working with the community to address complex policy issues.

The public service faces increasing competition from other sources outside the area of service delivery.  Governments have for many years used a variety of sources for developing policy options, and the Government advisory role is no longer the exclusive province of public servants.  Public servants must ensure that their advice to Government continues to be responsive and robust. 

There is a leadership theory known as the ‘contingency theory’, which holds that leadership is dependent on a particular situation or contingency.  It follows that as contingencies change, so too does the leadership born from that change, as well as the leadership required to meet – and lead – that change.

Therefore as the demands and challenges of the public sector have changed, so too have the skills required of its leaders.  APS leaders are increasingly required to think and work in innovative and more entrepreneurial ways, exhibiting and rewarding flexibility and creativity.

This flexibility and creativity and the capacity to change, is in fact what makes a public service so useful to Government.  It enables a public service to drive and deliver the Government agenda, and to meet public demands.  As the previous head of the Prime Minister’s department, Dr Peter Shergold, once noted:

A performing state is one that is continuously open to, and reading its environment, and learning and changing in response: a state "inherently in transition".

A new Government with new priorities simply adds to that transitive state.

Over the last decade the APS has been addressing the challenge of a shifting environment in a number of ways.  I want to talk a little bit more about some of these.

1.  New ways of working

Dr Shergold said in 2005 that he “believe(d) firmly that the need to build a whole of government approach to policy development and delivery is the single most challenging issue we face in public administration.” That is even truer today.

Many of the Government’s pressing problems don’t respect organisational boundaries. Certainly many of the priorities of the Rudd Government require cross–agency cooperation to enable the Government to make well–informed, strategic and longer term decisions.  To take a few examples:

These issues need innovative and longer term solutions which can only be  achieved by integrated, efficient and shared approaches, not just across portfolios but across jurisdictions.

We have already seen a new approach to the Government’s attempts to deal with these issues through the COAG cross jurisdictional working groups.  It is likely we will see more, not less, of this type of approach.

While working across government is not new, in the past we achieved it mostly by organisational restructuring and machinery of government changes.  To a lesser extent and with varied success, we also established interdepartmental committees and cross‑agency working groups.

Today’s whole of government approaches mean that our leaders need to look primarily at the development of organisational cultures, capabilities and relationships that support, model, understand and aspire to whole of government solutions to complex problems.

The challenge for our leaders in that environment is to ensure that staff at all levels work together and across government as units of a common whole – bearing in mind that the Australian Public Service is not a collection of disparate and disjointed agencies but one entity with a shared vision and common mission.

Collaboration and co-operation is critical.  There is no room for territorial protection – or the “blame game” which the Rudd Government is determined to put an end to – in a whole of government approach.

A communiqué promulgated by my office in 2005 entitled Working Together provided practical guidance on ways to achieve collective outcomes.  

I am heartened by the results of this year’s State of the Service Report which revealed that 79% of Executive Level and Senior Executive Service officers agreed that their agency’s culture always or usually encourages a constructive approach to collaboration.  Further, 57% of service delivery employees believed that cooperation between their agency and other APS agencies had improved their work area’s capacity to tailor service delivery to the needs of clients.

More is being done. E-government initiatives will further break down a silo approach to service delivery, and there is an emerging emphasis on citizen centred service delivery – tailoring services to the needs of people rather than the structures of government.

More though still needs to be done.  Of those SES and EL employees involved in whole of government work, the State of the Service Report revealed only 27% believed that financial and accountability arrangements supported that approach, and only 32% believed information and communication technology systems were sufficiently compatible to support whole of government work.  This simply confirms that systems are as big a potential obstacle as structures.

2.  Capability

The question is often asked whether leaders are born or can be made.

Certainly some qualities would appear to be, if not innate, then at least pre-conditions for being an effective leader – energy, commitment, good interpersonal skills to name just a few. These personal qualities though are not enough.  Effective leaders need organisational knowledge, various strategic and human resource tools and other abilities which can be learned.

In my view, leaders don’t need to be an expert in everything.  Leaders should identify their strengths and focus upon them.  That is not to say they don’t need expertise. Leaders are no longer considered necessarily to be part of a generic floating pool of managers without technical skills.  They need strong professional skills, which again can be learned or developed.

The Commission’s 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.  The exact balance will depend on the level of the individual and circumstances.

For those leaders at the Executive and Senior Executive levels, capabilities are assessed within frameworks structured around five capability clusters:

These five capabilities identify in rich detail the skills, capabilities and attitudes we expect of leaders in the Australian Public Service, including the emotive elements needed if leadership is to successfully drive change.

Building on this framework, the Commission’s Integrated Leadership System provides capability development guidance for individuals and agencies.  It represents a systematic approach to APS-wide leadership capability development.

This approach filters through into human resource management and recruitment.  We need our leaders to exhibit these capabilities across whatever work we ask them to do.  We should be less concerned with our leaders being able to do a specific list of duties or tasks.

The role of our leaders is to position the public service – and themselves – to meet these capability challenges. 

3.  Long term focus

A particular challenge for public sector leaders is maintaining a long term focus in the light of the three year terms of Federal government and the short term focus of the media.

Good public policy cannot only be focussed on the short term.  The Prime Minister has announced a 2020 summit, and the approach to climate change has people talking about agendas as long term as 2050.  Higher education systems are developed with an eye on children who are only just starting school.  And capital projects such as roads, power stations and hospitals take many years to plan and build.

The best way of remaining future focussed is for the APS to structure itself to ensure that it has the necessary statistical, research, and policy development capability that can analyse, conceptualise and provide innovative solutions to both short term and long term problems, as well as the communication skills necessary to manage sometimes short term relationships and take on board citizen feedback.

Feminisation

Finally, let me just close the circle and touch briefly on some female specifics as I foreshadowed at the start.

Many of the attributes and characteristics of leading differently I have referred to are what are sometimes called soft skills – negotiation, communication, collaboration – an approach that emphasises relational rather than competitive values. They are also identified by some writers in the field as feminine skills.

We all know that men and women are from different planets, and it seems to be accepted that men and women lead differently, and rely on different attributes to do so.  The male style has been described in one study (Wajcman) as being ‘directive’, ‘self-interested’, ‘decisive’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘task oriented’, whereas adjectives describing the female style are ‘collaborative’, ‘co-operative’, ‘people oriented’ and ‘caring’.  Women it was said ‘sell an idea’, whereas men tell you to ‘go and do it’.

One reason for this is that women have traditionally not had institutional power.  Another is undoubtedly the traditional roles they have filled, especially that of housewife and mother. These situations teach you different things, and they can be utilised in different environments, including the workplace.

Let’s take just one example.  Every year the State of the Service report tells me that the number one workplace attribute with respect to job satisfaction is “good working relationships”.  Margaret Wheatley in Leadership and the New Science writes that real organisational power is generated through relationships.  If so, then, as she says, the capacity to form relationships is more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.  So institutional power naturally breaks down, and the feminine skills around relationship building come to the fore.

A major task force report in 1995 into the leadership challenges of Australia into the future acknowledged the need to feminise the skills of Australian leaders, and also the need to get more women into traditional positions of leadership.  In the public sector we have been better at this than the private sector.  The Women in 2007 Report by the Federal Government noted that 34.3% of all seats on Australian government controlled boards and bodies were held by women, compared to only 8.7% of board directorships in the private sector.  Similarly, 36% of senior executive positions in the public sector are held by women, but only 12% in the private sector.

We need to do better across the board, not just for equity reasons but to ensure that the skills we need to lead differently to tackle the problems we face are available to us.  Soft skills are hard, both to apply and to learn.  Which is not to say that men don’t and can’t possess these skills – they do have one x chromosome after all!

And, in my experience, many men are showing great relationship sensitivity these days and have adopted work place practices that are very compatible with new ways of working.  I feel for those poor women who don’t fit the “soft” mould, as they tend to be judged much more harshly that their male counterparts.

Whatever the gender, it is important that people are treated with respect and courtesy and as individuals with particular needs, strengths, weaknesses, and contributions to make.

Conclusion/summary

Effective leadership for public organisations is a focus in many countries.

While there are necessarily differences depending upon national context, there are many similarities, such as global and consistent pressures of reform, technological development, and calls for improved accountability and performance.  These have all emphasised the importance of leadership in new ways.

Working collaboratively, e-governance and the need to link leaders and leadership to building institutional and managerial capacity all challenge traditional definitions of leadership.  Linking leadership to performance, and linking the performance of public organisations to greater accountability and better governance are concerns for us in the public sector, as well as elected officials, and citizens.

As leaders, we need to remember that our role is critical to an effective values-based system. There is also now broad interest in both the private and public sectors in values-based management, and recognition that, when implemented effectively, it offers organisations a framework of relationships and behaviours within which they can drive different business tasks and respond quickly to changing circumstances.

At the same time, a values-based framework has been shown to build public trust in an organisation’s activities, increasing its overall effectiveness.

I feel quite strongly that in every part of an organisation, people can and do display leadership – what is really important in my view is that leaders engage with staff  and stakeholders and that when they engage they display leadership.

go up Start of page