KOSHEEK SEWCHURRAN: What do we really need from a professional public service?

For more than a decade professionalising the public service has been raised in SA as a critical accomplishment to build a capable state. This was mentioned in the most recent state of the nation address by President Cyril Ramaphosa, and more recently he announced that this initiative is in draft legislation. 

Researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab  have highlighted “collapsing state capacity” in SA for more than a decade. This assessment describes the sinking feeling most South Africans have about the state of our public service organisations.   

Despite the desire to professionalise the public service for more than a decade, this has hardly happened. Could the ambiguity of what we mean by professionalising be affecting progress? How might we clarify what we need from professionalising the public service?    

It might help to use “leadership" instead of “professionalising the public service" to appreciate the biggest levers that produce the results we want. Understanding of leadership has evolved to express more than the role or person. It also stands to represent processes of accomplishment. 

French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) explained the agency we desire with leadership: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."   

Fundamental act

Giving people a desire to long for is perhaps the most fundamental act of leadership to produce a striving nation, organisation or team. This is the crucial work of skilled leadership.    

William Gumede, associate professor at the Wits University School of Governance, observed recently that the public service is “critical in diffusing and normalising good moral, democratic, responsive and accountable behaviour, or not, to citizens”. He reminds us that this is the most important engine to install a spirit, or not, in society.   

Gumede highlights the lack of leadership that we seek to address with professionalising the public service. When we think about the essence of leadership there are fundamental effects we desire that are common to both public and private sectors.

Given this context, a vital question to be asked is, is this framing of excellence with reference to professionalising any different to expectations private enterprises have of leadership?   

There are good arguments to highlight that there are no essential differences, while there are certainly differences in contexts. After all, to produce momentum and directionality in human systems is similar regardless of context.  

The earliest understandings of leadership emphasise two critical roles; to infuse a value system and an accompanying aspiration to win at something. Winning is more about mastery of a relevant set of practices to undertake actions that are needed, than outdoing a competitor.

Austrian-American management consultant Peter Drucker reminded us about leadership's role in organising when he said: “The purpose of an organisation is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things”. Leadership, as an effect, grows the responsibility of the many to pursue collective purpose that is both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.   

Private enterprise

From the decades of effort put into understanding and reflecting on what amounts to skilful leadership practice in private enterprise three key maxims are identifiable. These explain how organisations steward changes in direction, generate and sustain momentum and evolve moral norms (values) intentionally.  

A focus on strategy is essential to frame an aspiration to win at something that people care about. Space has to be created for this dialogue to be sustained in parallel with normal operational functioning. 

English poet Robert Browning, writing about a good life, expressed the importance of sustaining dual focus on the immediate and the desired end when he wrote: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”. 

Strategy when expressed gives a pattern to desired collective actions that enable winning. The pattern of action generates an accrual of organisation capacity, resilience and relevance. When there is reference to building the capacity of a developmental state it is likely that this is what is being described. 

While strategy is fundamental to produce directional aim, it is not enough to grow the connection and momentum that spurs people to pursue excellence, creativity and meaning. To enable this leadership has to be understood as purposing too; that is, organising processes that induce inquiry, clarity, consensus, accommodations and commitment to accomplish something that is both meaningful to the self and of consequence to others. 

These acts of leadership concurrently create faith in the integrity of a common purpose for personal aim. To have meaningful purpose is to have a context that fully uses people and captures why it matters to be committed to something bigger than oneself. De Saint-Exupéry would see this as creating the, “longing for the endless immensity of the sea”. 

It is essential to appreciate leadership, as purposing grows people from within. In addition to knowing what to shoot for, people need to know what they stand for and why this matters — this is to grow from within to produce existential connection which summons energy, discretionary effort and striving. 

People become more alive with such emotional connection. These maxims, together with their processes and consequent artefacts, produce the commitment among people to keep alive the ongoing transformation, and the improvements that are valued.  

Cultural system

Is this what professionalising the public sector is aiming to deliver on? I have doubts. Private enterprise operates in a cultural system that makes the practice of these maxims mandatory to allow enterprises to remain competitive.

There are of course various levels of skilful practice of these maxims since leadership is both art and science — it is hardly a profession. Consequently, there are examples, perhaps too many, of less than skilful leadership too.   

A natural evolution or creative destruction does favour those showing more skill in private enterprise. However, in the public service this amounts to a stubborn reality of declining effectiveness, financial viability and commitment to a desire for excellence.   

When we compare the efficiencies, agility and effectiveness between public and private enterprise we should understand that the desirable differences result from processes of skilful leadership, not professional management. These bring about the crucial difference we desire in the functioning of public enterprises such as Eskom, Transnet or the Post Office.   

Private and public service leadership are similar at the fundamental level of organising directional aim and having human beings purposefully engaged.   

Skilful leadership has the largest effects on efficiencies, effectiveness or sustainability. Importantly, they frame what we try to win at and become masterful doing. Without this framing there is ambivalence and decay. 

Policy has a role to play in this process, but it does not create the outcomes that create meaning for people to strive for. Constant monitoring and heightened visibility also have a role to play, but on their own they produce no desire to strive; skilful leadership does.   

SA desperately needs many such acts of leadership. By becoming more specific about what we mean by leadership or professionalising the public service, we might shift our gaze to the key levers that give us a chance, like the three maxims described above.   

Let’s lead SA skilfully. The evidence of declining effectiveness in public service organisations is overwhelming.  

• Sewchurran, a former director of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business Executive MBA programme, is associate professor of strategy & leadership practice at the GSB.