Last year, I worked with an engineering team struggling to reconcile their work programme with the fickle demands of meddling politicians. We had a workshop on the complexity of public service and it was a good chat, but it got much better when their manager stood up, cleared his throat, and summarised it thus:
βI think we just need to accept thereβs a layer of crazy here, and move on.β
Perfection.
There are three key ways that managing in the public sector is different to a private business. Together, these make up the "layer of crazy."
- Transparency β The level of media and public interest in your work is higher, upping the ante on your decisions.
- Democracy β You work with elected politicians who might have little operational or subject matter expertise.
- Bureaucracy β And lots of it. All that transparency and democracy needs process, policy, and paperwork to function.
Public sector management is a hard job. Professor Simon Collinson, pioneer of the Global Simplicity Index, found in 2012 that public sector agencies in the UK are 30% more complex than some of the worldβs largest companies. Under these conditions, management theory lifted from the private sector doesn't always cut it.
In From Strategy to Action, I canvass this frustration - why we persist in applying commercial ideas to non-commercial organisations, and how to make progress in this environment.
For our engineering team, the path forward is imperfect but practical:
- Think of your relationship with politicians and the media as an arranged marriage β not your ideal partnering, but you can learn to love them.
- Understand that politicians will take the flak for your recommendations, regardless of how logical or well-reasoned they are. Take the time to build engagement accordingly.
- Identify ways to leverage the input of politicians. For example β many local Councillors are well connected to the community, which can make them your greatest asset in testing ideas and building buy-in.
Good luck.
