The Challenge of Change for Public Sector Leaders

Abstract

The UK government perceives leadership to be at the heart of public sector reform. In 1998, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the government’s Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) to carry out a project on ‘effective leadership in delivering public services’. This report, ‘Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector’, places leadership at the core of its modernisation agenda (PIU 2001). The last decade has seen a growing and sustained interest in the importance and nature of leadership in the public sector. Several texts refer to the ‘need for leaders’ in the public sector at the start of the 21st century and many Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries (OECD 2009), including the UK, assume that leadership plays a significant role in achieving both enhanced management capacity and organisational performance (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit 2004). Milner and Joyce (2005) state that this emphasis on leadership is in part a result of the problems created by the way the public sector appeared to fall behind developments in society and that public services now need to catch up (or to ‘modernise’ or ‘improve’). This particularly relates to customer service standards, performance management, strategic commissioning and the design, development and implementation of information systems (Cabinet Office 2006).