Administrative Courage and Unintended Consequences

01/02/2023

I wrote this as an observation on the new free and frank advice principle in the Public Service Act 2020. Parliament had elevated free and frank advice to a principle without saying what it means, and I was worried about what the unintended consequences would be.

The practice of courage is an important trait for public servants worldwide, and a quality necessary for ethical behaviour in most institutional settings.

In the literature, courage is described as a virtue, and managerial courage is depicted as a leadership attribute that encourages others to take the morally right course of action, given the standards of the various public sector professions.

Courage is also depicted as one of the ways managerialists can appeal to and motivate the professions, which often hold ethical standards different from the manager’s own. A generalist manager who has only ever done policy work, for example, still has to make sure that social workers, teachers, surgeons, practice nurses or intelligence officials do not compromise the standards of their profession.

The literature also depicts courage as an essential competency of public service leaders, noting that most leaders must work out for themselves what it means to show their virtues in action, and in this respect the literature on guerrilla government is useful.

The guerrilla government literature shows how some institutions are better than others at moderating courageous behaviour, so that a lack of courage does not boil over into disengagement and active resistance. Its case studies come for the most part from the global North, yet they describe an increasingly tense space between the managerialists and the professions, one in which baby boomers and Generation X tend to find it hard to lead and manage millennials and Generation Z.

Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see how the literatures on administrative courage, guerrilla government and public service motivation come together through the new Public Service Act, and I rather think there will be some unintended consequences.