Kia mate ururoa, kei mate wheke

24/6/2018

In reviewing all the Performance Improvement Review reports, my overwhelming conclusion is this – while many of our public institutions are adept at managing urgent and short-term issues and the daily priorities of Ministers, they are less successful at building strong and enduring public institutions whose
purpose and roles are clear and whose core business is as strong as their ability to manage issues and events.

There are several reasons for this. This post suggests that one of those reasons is the lack of a good number of ambitious, confident and experienced senior leaders who don’t wait for permission to build great public institutions, who provide Ministers with free and frank advice, who build capability for the long term and who deliver good public services.

This is why I personally welcome the recent appointments by the State Services Commissioner. Good on him for using his powers in this way. We often hear about the almost irresistible pressure senior public servants are under to deliver short-term ministerial results. While this pressure comes from is a matter of hot debate, one thing the change management literature tells us is that building public institutions over the long term is demanding, challenging and takes much longer than five years. This is why I like the crop of recent appointments. They start to deliberately push against the short-term-ism embedded in the notion that fixed-term contracts for New Zealand’s most senior public servants are somehow appropriate – when they are not.

Up until now, people have argued that the three-year or five-year term builds flexibility in the senior workforce while not compromising the everyday running of institutions. It allows, they say, the institution to adapt to Ministerial preferences and ensure the institution is not short-staffed during peak times.
This might be appropriate for someone like me – a short-term consultant – but it is odd for a chief executive leading 10,000 people, delivering services to 4.1million people or governing a $1b programme.

Others say it obliges the State Services Commissioner to appoint chief executives for a precise assignment. Embedded in this idea is that there is some exact science in the recruitment and appointment of individuals and that the central agencies can know all things. Recruitment is not a science, and the central agencies – by design – do not and should not know everything.

The downsides, however, have been significant.

Short-term roles, when you are expected to deliver medium to long term value while also engaging in an ever-changing political executive, means chief executive positions in the public sector are some of the most challenging positions in New Zealand. That is why it is challenging to recruit them and why a small industry has cropped up around it.

Additionally, if a chief executive and ministerial relationship becomes problematic, either ‘fitting in’ or just not working out, then it has usually been the chief executive who has suffered. To date, all the risk has been on the State Services Commissioner and the individual chief executive – as opposed to the political executive. Said differently, the Government of the day has not been obliged to act with the same care a company board is required to operate with their chief executive.

Of course, there is the counterfactual to the example above. A good relationship between senior leaders and Ministers is vital because the Government of the day makes the decisions. Good decisions are based on sound advice grounded in an understanding of the Government’s goals and preferences and an understanding of ‘what works’ and how best to get things done. However, a problematic relationship is when senior leaders focus on ‘fitting in’ and seek permission and wait to do as they are told to not upset the Minister.

The last downside is this. Most of the value on the Crown balance sheet requires careful long-term stewardship, for example, infrastructure, defence and security capabilities, people, social and health services and superannuation. These decisions need chief executives who can convince Ministers to articulate their long-term strategy for New Zealand better. As a country, we can better articulate
our long-term capital allocation. Short-term contracts for the most senior leaders in the public service have undermined these conversations. This is one of the reasons we have the infrastructure problems we have right now.

In closing, I am pleased to see both the current and previous State Services Commissioner building a consensus and transcending the short-term-ism that pervades the thinking in our public sector. It has taken time, but as the whakatauki reminds us, fight like a shark on the end of the fishing line, not an
octopus.

Moreover, I also look forward to the next set of appointments. Appointments that appear to be a clarion call to diversity and inclusion. New Zealand now needs a cluster of appointments that look and feel more like New Zealanders. We need diverse leaders who value the shop floor as much as break the glass ceiling.