Simon Baddeley ‘Political-Management Leadership’

Palgrave Leadership: Knowledge into Action 2008

PALGRAVE LEADERSHIP BOOKS: KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION

POLITICAL-MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

(this document includes links to film clips

related to several of the quoted transcripts)

Simon Baddeley

Institute of Local Government Studies

School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham

Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT

0121 554 9794 mobile 07775 655842

Campus 0121 414 5002

Baddeley, S (2008) Political-Management Leadership, in James, K & Collins, J (eds.)(2008) Leadership Perspectives: Knowledge into action (PalgraveMacmillan) pp.177-192


POLITICAL-MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

Any student of public sector leadership who does not recognise and endeavour to unwrap the confusions and tensions that arise from the overlap of political and managerial spheres of action, and their shared relationship to the professional core of government, is pointing their torch in the wrong place. They are focusing, separately, on managerial or political leadership but not on their combined dynamic. Politicians and managers have described their working relationship as a bridge, an exchange, a source of tension, a blend of political and administrative contributions, a trading space divided by a line that should not be crossed, but, now and then, is. For over twenty years I have been studying relationships between elected politicians and managers by filming them talking to each other. In this chapter I will use extracts from a small sample of these conversations to explain how politicians and managers jointly create government - a perennial puzzle of increasing consequence for local government.

THE CURRENT CHALLENGE

If local government is to exercise greater autonomy, political-management leadership must spread beyond the top. At an international conference on ‘Leading the future of the public sector’ a colleague observed that ‘leadership development is replacing management as the focus of training’ (Coulson 2007). In 1999 the government paper ‘Modernising government’ (Cabinet Office 1999) announced ‘a long term project which will transform the face of public services’. The Local Government Act 2000 made dramatic changes in the executive structures of local authorities. The Deputy Prime Minister declared ‘effective local leadership is at the heart of our vision for sustainable communities’ (ODPM 2005). The White Paper, ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities’ (CLG 2006), assumes leadership of a kind not conceived at local level since municipalisation brought public health and civic pride to the industrialising populations of Victorian Britain.

The challenges to local leadership are, even more than in the 19th century, the product of global trends. Cultural heterogeneity, confusion about identity and increasing individuation add to the challenge of negotiating social contracts between citizens and government (Baddeley 1995, 1997). Representative democracy seems sluggish. Success creates ever more expectation. Wealth disparities explode - sometimes literally - across national borders (Baddeley 1995, 1997). ‘Localism’, matching the European term ‘subsidiarity’, and the environmentalist axiom ‘think globally, act locally’, pervades thinking about where government can best meet these challenges. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels launched the US Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement on 16 February 2005 and on 17 Feb 2003, on the initiative of Mayor Ken Livingstone, London became the largest city in the world to ration road space. Private, public and voluntary partners have been steered by local authorities through the slow burn reinvention of post-industrial wealth creation.

COMBINING POLITICS AND MANAGEMENT

The 2005 SOLACE commission’s report - ‘Leadership United’ – concluded that good government is where ‘the best of politics and management combine to be greater than the sum of the parts’ (SOLACE 2005). One does not have to be a constitutional puritan to recognise that achieving this admirable combination is tricky. The sense that in government, politics and management should be separated can be traced back to the Maud-Trevelyan reforms of the British civil service in the 1850s when exams for civil service recruits limited nepotism as a route to jobs, and successive governments, seeking mandates from an expanding electorate, aimed to distance themselves from patronage. The local government lawyer Tim Harrison displays a cautionary skull and crossbones below the red lettered title ‘Danger Zones’ on the cover of his book for politicians and managers (Harrison 2001), drawing attention to the importance of political-management separation.

Yet Churchill remarked, ‘the English never draw a line without blurring it.’ Norton’s interviews with chief executives concluded that ‘the most intimate responsibility of a chief executive in decision formation is that to the council leader’ (Norton 1991). Newton reported a senior politician in Birmingham saying ‘a good officer should be like a good politician and a good politician should be like a good officer’ (Newton 1976). Such opinions are echoed in research I have conducted over twenty years (Baddeley and James 1987a, 1987b, Baddeley 1989, 1998, Baddeley and Wall 1998). For ten of these I was making films which relied on asking individual leaders to tell me about their understanding of leadership. I progressed to asking elected Leaders and CEOs to tell me how they worked together. After a workshop on methods of ‘intersubjective enquiry’ (Reason and Rowan 1981, Chamberlayne and King 1996), I shifted from filming people telling me about their working relationships to filming them having those relationships. This is not ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary. I want people engaged in a living aspect of their working lives to know that as they speak with one another, they speak to other practitioners:

David Blunkett, after becoming Leader of Sheffield in 1980, denied ‘any clear-cut idea that there are two separate groups, the politicians who get on with formulation and direction of policy and officers who are aloof from this, who have nothing to do with the political arena and actually get on with implementation…both officers and members know that isn’t true and that officers are inherently involved in the formulation of policy because of the nature of information giving…’ (Blunkett 1980)

[See: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp68z-gZd1o]

[In this and other transcripts, dots mark an editorial cut; dashes mark a pause]. Jim Brooks, CEO of Poole, told me ‘the relationship between policy and administration is as nebulous…as the distinction between officer and member at that level. Brian (Leader) is a politician and I am an officer - we inhabit each other’s worlds. Brian helps me to make the administrative systems work better… I can help the political wheels to go more smoothly’ (Clements & Brooks 1995). In 1996 the lead politician and manager of the largest local authority in the country spoke of politicians who manage a process, and managers who give shape to policy:

Michael Lyons (CEO, Birmingham City Council): …it’s very difficult to actually map out where the boundaries lie and that is particularly the case when you talk about the relationship between chief executive and leader, and I’m quite clear that the process for making decisions on behalf of the council lies with the elected members and the leader manages that process. I‘m equally clear that officers who are worth their salt do try to help the controlling group of the day - to give shape to their policy aspirations and to deliver…so there is a dialogue not only at an early stage but continuing…at all stages in the policy process. I do think there is some challenge there as well, which -

Theresa Stewart (Leader): Very important.

Michael: - is a bit of a tension in the relationship. Perhaps in a minute we might come on to talk about the party politics of this because I do see that as being a delicate matter, but actually an area in which we have some fairly clear idea of where officers stop and members - and that’s wholly the territory of members, but again it’s not easy to define the boundaries.

Theresa: …Sometimes I talk to the chief executive about management - a bit apologetically sometimes…It isn’t straightforward...It isn’t that I have this pile of policies that are at my side of the table and he’s at his side, either receiving them or saying ‘Well, we’ll take this this way or that way’. Because it is an exchange… (Lyons and Stewart 1995)

[See: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HwV4Gofejxw]

For a time I mistook the contradiction in these observations for a widely accepted form of shared leadership. David Blunkett claimed officers and members ‘know’ that separation between their activities ‘isn’t true’. But if that was the case at his level, it was not further down the system, nor did most managers in Birmingham think they should be ‘like a good politician’. Indeed separation between political and managerial spheres was assiduously maintained, to protect the political neutrality of managers and their loyalty to the whole council, not just its elected majority.

Lyons said ‘mapping’ the boundaries of the relationship was particularly difficult at the top. Brooks said the relationship between policy and administration and between manager and politician was indistinct ‘at that level’. Why are rules about separation relaxed at the top? Why, if Brooks could claim that the roles of managers and politicians were different, the relationship between policy and administration was undifferentiated ‘at that level’? Blunkett, Brook, Stewart and Lyons made these contradictions plausible. Because their relationships were evidently working, I was curious as to why what they were doing could not work further down. How far is living with fuzzy boundaries between politics and administration an element of the leadership needed to drive the government of ‘strong and prosperous communities’?

My conclusion is that most politicians and most managers are excluded from an area where politics and management coalesce, because it is a hazardous terrain, demanding skills that take time to refine and which need constant honing. Self suggested the political-management relationship could be viewed as a ‘bridge’(Self 1972) suggesting a structure made stable by opposed forces on a keystone, with a potential for catastrophic collapse if their equilibrium is compromised. Stewart saw tension as a condition of the political-management relationship, with ‘problems…built into the system because councillors and officers are cast for different roles and…drawn from different backgrounds’ (Stewart 1994). Weber suggested relations between democracy and bureaucracy create ‘the most profound source of tension in the modern social order’ (Giddens 1972) - a discordance made hilarious in the TV comedy ‘Yes Minister’, and the focus of intense public interest when interactions between the Prime Minister and the Joint Intelligence Committee prior to war in Iraq were submitted to forensic investigation by Lords Hutton and Butler (Hutton 2004, Butler 2004).

MODELLING POLITICAL-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS

Agneta Blom asked chief executives how they related to politicians (Blom 1970). Her classical neutral executor observed the rules in an impartial way, with politicians deciding policy and managers carrying it out with detached neutrality. Her expert civil servant put loyalty to profession above loyalty to politicians, helping confirm the view that government is too complex for politicians by maintaining their ignorance. A third type - the political servant - emphasises ‘taking initiatives…making policy for the activities inside her area of responsibility.’ Blom described a politically skilled manager who is not party-political, ready to negotiate with politicians about her role in government.

Mouritzen’s and Svara’s massive study of leadership found it exercised via four political-management constructs (Mouritzen and Svara 2002). Their first involved politicians and managers in separate roles, with separate norms, and subordination of managers to politicians. Their second involved an autonomous manager, with politicians distanced from management. Their third sees a responsive manager, subordinate to politicians. A fourth relationship involves reciprocal influence between politicians and managers. They concluded that leadership at the apex is evolving towards overlapping roles, where something is made that is neither management nor politics alone.

Data is scanty on how this happens. Political biography describes political leadership, but narratives of political-management leadership go untold. This is partly because reification focuses on leadership as a property of individuals. It is also because we are still inventing ways of looking at shared leadership in the conversations of people rooted in separate spaces. Indeed, spatial metaphors are useful. Taylor suggests ‘spatial orientation lies very deep in the human psyche’, part of Western self-understanding (Taylor 1994). Harrison warns of ‘danger zones’. When people say ‘I see where you’re going’, and ‘I know where I stand’ they refer to a moral or psychological position.

Ray Morgan (CEO, Woking BC): …what I would call the dinosaur regime - officers in this box and members in that box. The reality is -

Sue Smith (Council Leader): It doesn’t actually work like that.

Ray: - the leadership is in this trading zone. I won’t call it grey zone. I call it ‘trading zone’ because that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re trading off what’s possible administratively.

Sue: Yes

Ray: What’s desired polit -

Sue: - ically

Ray: - and how are we going to get a balance where we’re both going to survive.

Sue: That’s right. And sell -

Ray: Sorry to describe it that way.

Sue: - selling it back down the line both ways as well. (Smith and Morgan 2007)

[See: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9yLZpXga8lw]

The diagram refers to spaces within which manager and politician experience their work and act on the world, conversing in a political-management zone - ‘selling’ what they have negotiated ‘back down the line both ways’.

[Diagram: Governmental spaces]

Core expertise exists in professional space surrounded by politics. A boundary protects professional activity from politics, yet without the resources obtained from political space, professional space could not exist. Political space is where people decide what gets done and who gets what, when and where; where power is mobilised and force made legitimate; where who is ‘them’ and who is ‘us’ is determined and where public discourse takes its character; where ends are invented, pursued and agreed; where values are set; where the role of luck in human affairs is acknowledged along with the paradox of unintended consequences. Professional space supports practice based on scientific enquiry and persistent attention to detail, producing and circulating evidence over large areas at great speed to support policy. Professionalism values ‘professional’ demeanour; is friendly to grass-roots innovation; maintains values regardless of the resources needed to pursue them. From political space come aspirations untested by the prioritising emphasis of management; from professional space comes the confidence and reliability of accredited practitioners committed to empirically based understandings of their expertise. Politics makes values; professionals profess them