The Public Sector Fox - Twelve ways to become a brilliant public sector manager

INTRODUCTION

Our three objectives

When we decided to write this book we set ourselves three objectives: first, the book had to be short; second, it had to be of practical use for managers working in the public sector or involved in providing public services; and third, we wanted it to start a bigger conversation.

At under 120 pages, we have met our first objective. We hope this makes it easier for you to read the book in its entirety and to find relevant ideas and tips quickly.

You must judge whether we have met the second objective of making the book useful.  We have avoided social policy and management jargon and focused instead on the real challenges that public sector managers face day in and day out, and on the skills needed to overcome them.  The style is informal and the advice ranges from the technical to the personal, from the specific to the general, from the obvious to the unusual.  

Our advice is drawn from our 30 years' combined experience working in or with over a dozen central government departments and hundreds of local authorities, as well as in schools, colleges, universities, jobcentres, regulators, inspectorates, police forces, prisons, the military and with MI5. We have seen the public sector at work first hand, from presenting to the Prime Minister in Downing Street to managing training programmes for the unemployed in East London. We know the theory, and have lived the reality. But we are also aware that we can only have a partial view of what millions of people in the public sector do. We certainly do not have all the answers. 

This brings us to our third objective.  We want this to be more than just a book. We hope it can be a catalyst for others to share insights and experiences about working in the public sector and improving public services.  We hope you will talk to each other about the challenges you face, and visit www.publicsectorfox.co.uk to join us in this mission.

The Public Sector Fox

In his 1953 essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’  Berlin argued that some people were like hedgehogs and viewed the world through the lens of a single defining thought.  Others were like foxes and experienced the world through a varied range of ideas.  Berlin claimed that some moments in history suited the hedgehog, while others suited the fox.

The modern public sector is the land of the fox.

In the post-war 1940s single-minded hedgehogs were required to build universal education and a National Health Service within a clear, centralised hierarchy. In the 1990s hedgehogs welcomed New Public Management and its focus on measuring the inputs and outputs of public services.  Both developments were vital.  But times have changed. 

In the twenty-first century, public services are provided by organisations across the private, voluntary and public sectors, with complicated layers of accountability between them. Technology gives

us radically new ways to offer services to the public and has revolutionised how we work and communicate.  Relationships between people are now as significant as formal public sector governance structures. And, most importantly, the real but hard-to-measure social outcomes of our work have rightly become our proper goal, rather than hitting procedural targets or achieving narrowly-defined outputs.

For the modern manager, whether you formally work in the public sector, or you work in a charity or company that provides public services, success now depends on performing expertly in a number of different environments and across a range of situations.  You need to change your style, draw on various techniques and have more than one way to adapt and perform.  You need to be flexible. You need to become a fox.

The twelve skills

Twelve skills will transform you into a twenty-first century Public Sector Fox; four are personal, four are primary and four are practical.

The personal skills are qualities that you should take with you into every situation you encounter.  In the past, these skills were seen as intrinsic and immutable.  But we now know that they can be developed and enhanced, just like any other skill.  They are:

1) Commitment. You must have drive, ambition to achieve and belief in what you are doing.

2) Experimentation. Your curiosity and adaptability must keep you and your work improving.

3) Resilience. You must be determined, able to overcome obstacles and bounce back from failure.

4) Perspective. When under pressure, you must have the judgement to make the right decisions.

The primary skills are the building blocks that help you to work out what to do and how to do it.  They are:

5) Strategy. You must define what needs to happen in the face of uncertainty.

6) Planning. You must turn your strategy into something practical and achievable.

7) Information. You must understand and exploit the data and knowledge around you.

8) Responsibility. You must take and give responsibility in the right way and at the right time.

The practical skills will make sure that you achieve what you have set out to do.  They are:

9) Finance. You manage public money effectively, efficiently and credibly.

10) Commerce. You must understand how to get the best from your private and voluntary sector partners.

11) Communication. You must exploit all the channels available for you to get your messages across.

12) People. You must get the most out of every person who works with you.

The remainder of this book goes through these twelve skills one by one, giving you examples, advice, hints and tips about how to improve your abilities in each of these areas.  Every paragraph has a reminder of

the practical things you can do to step back, try something new, and get better at your job.

As you progress through your career, some of these skills will become more relevant than others. We hope you will keep in mind the range of skills outlined here, and come back to particular chapters as you encounter new situations across the public services you work in.

To help you assess the level of your current skills, at the beginning of each chapter there is a little quiz. Are your skills in that area weak, average, strong or excellent? Once you have read the descriptions, you will be clear where you may need to develop. But remember that you do not need to be excellent at every skill to do your current job.

The thirteenth skill

Mastering twelve skills is challenging.  Very few of us have the time and talent to develop them simultaneously. 

That is where the thirteenth skill comes in.

One of the joys of working in the public sector is that we are all on the same team.  We all want to improve the lives of our fellow citizens.  And all of us – or at least most of us – are happy to share our experiences and expertise.

The thirteenth skill is knowing how to make use of the goodwill and experience across the public sector.  Time and again in this book you will read about the merits of building relationships with your peers, with experts inside and outside your organisation, and with mentors.  These relationships are a key resource to help you to forge a successful career. They should not be left to chance. Invest in developing relationships, just as you invest time in other training.  This is not about networking for its own sake.  By using the goodwill and experience available to you from these relationships, you will do more to improve services for the public, and you will enjoy your job and have more fun at work too.

So as you read each chapter, take time to think about how you can apply this thirteenth skill, particularly in those areas where you feel relatively weak or inexperienced.

This book is for you

There are almost a million people with management responsibilities in the UK public sector. This book is for you. Maybe you are at an early stage of your career, wanting to learn more about your sector and how you can make a difference; or you are joining a public body mid-career from another sector; or you are more experienced and want to plug gaps in your skills. Maybe you are excited by what you and others can achieve; or you may need to rekindle your enthusiasm.  Whatever your background, we hope you are sufficiently ambitious and curious to read this book and think about how you can do your job better as a result.

Throughout the book there are case studies of five people like you. They are anonymised, but drawn from real life. Niki works at the Home Office on policies to reduce vehicle crime. Tom manages education support services in Somerset. In a Lincolnshire NHS hospital, Jack is the operations manager for an endoscopy unit that diagnoses and treats cancers. Rashida has gone from an East London childhood to work with the Metropolitan Police on counter-terrorism.  And Heather has just taken up her first post as a prison manager in County Durham. We are confident that you will see some parallels between their experiences and yours.

We hope that this book meets your needs. We want it to be practical and inspirational. We want to remind you what you can achieve by working in public services. And we want you to share your skills and experience with others so that this book is just the starting point of wider improvement in the way that public services are run across the whole country. But that can only be done with your help and dedication.

To get the most out of the book, focus first on particular skills you most want to improve. Assess yourself in the quiz at the beginning of each chapter; then try out the suggestions in the following pages. Come back to the book whenever you start a new job, and you will see how much you have improved.

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