Civil service leaders translate complex political objectives such as developmental goals, public health, local poverty or climate change into new forms of policy delivery. More often than not, one unit under a single leader is unable to achieve these objectives alone.
In today’s public sector governance, groups need to unite and work together in new ways to achieve their goals. This often includes collaborations between multiple ministries and agencies, levels of government and the private sector. The government cannot act alone, and needs the help of others as well.
To be effective in this environment, civil service leaders influence a vast system of actors, engage and work with a wide scope of stakeholders. This requires leaders to be able to see and understand their own role within a larger system and to identify other actors in the system. By building a relationship with these actors, they can then develop a network to share information, generate common understanding and work together on effective responses.
One of the complexities of leadership in the civil service is that all leaders report upwards to a political authority. The ability to be politically perceptive and work collaboratively with the government while bringing additional insight and technical or policy expertise is a fundamental civil service leader capability.
Civil service leaders are required to collaborate across organisations and sectors, to communicate desired outcomes and to facilitate partnerships with strategic collaborators, through networks of actors. The division between political and administrative leadership is often unclear, therefore instead of a line, the political and administrative split is more of a zone in some contexts.
Working through networked collaboration requires an adjustment to the traditional leadership styles, in which they cannot depend solely on formal mechanisms of consultation of transactional methods of leadership. At the same time, traditional ways of exerting influence can no longer be applied similarly.
This method of working is difficult because it forces civil service leaders to leave their comfort zones and deal with the often messy realities of policy implementation. It requires a careful evaluation and alignment among collaborators, and a way of distributing and sharing accountability.
