Civil service leadership is challenging and complex, as they work across organisational boundaries, sectors and jurisdictions to combat ongoing and emerging policy challenges and improve the impact of public services.
One distinguishing factor of leadership, especially in the civil service, is the focus on public values. Those in these positions are expected to work in ways that promote common public values, such as higher standards of accountability, transparency, equality and ethical behaviour.
Public values guide the decision making process of civil service leaders in their undertaking to produce and protect public value. The challenge they face is to manage tensions, conflicts and trade-offs among competing values.
Values-based leadership negotiate multiple and often competing values that guide their decisions making towards public interest, therefore sometimes creating tensions between administrative values and political values.
The line between these two values are hard to define, and may create inherent tensions between the common administrative value of providing impartial evidence-based policy advice and political values based on ideological conviction.
The tension between political and administrative values often clash when working on public sector innovation. Methods such as policy experimentation are often politically risky in this field, although it may have positive effects.
Politics and administration can become further blurred when civil servants design policies and services with the public that could potentially circumvent elected officials and go against political legitimacy.
When working across sectors or with different organisations in the same sector, civil service leaders also have to manage differences in values. Public services often share the same common set of public sector values, there are often some key differences that shape organisational culture in different ministries.
Another related challenge is managing values between civil societies, which may take a more narrow view of values, or with private companies that more often than not, engage in creating public values to advance private interests.
Managing the conflict between these values is part of a civil service leaders’ job. Some ways of managing these values are alternating between emphasising different values according to the conflict, distributing responsibility to different institutions or sectors, and trading off one value at the expense of another.
