PUBLIC LEADERSHIP
Prof Erwin Schwella
Professor of Public Leadership
University of Stellenbosch
South Africa
Public Leadership Considered
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Public Leadership: The Context
Public Leadership: The Concepts
Public Leadership: The Challenges
Public Leadership: The Competencies
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
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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