Posts Tagged ‘public sector leadership’

As someone who worked within the public sector for over half of my career in accounting and consulting, it is fair to say that leaders in the sector face some enormous challenges.

The traditional approach when it comes to expenditure reduction is to come up with a list of initiatives that deliver the required levels of savings.

The trouble is that these lists rarely deliver to the promised or expected levels.

Right now all of the messages are indicating that cuts in the region of 25% are going to have to be made to deal with the level of the deficit in public finances.

Given this level of challenge, there may well be a need for leaders to start asking a very different question.

Rather than asking the question what cuts can we make, perhaps the question to be answered is what level of services can we afford to provide with this level of money available.

Taking this approach will require courage from leaders, not just those employed in the public sector but also from the politicians too.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders. You can sign up here for his free audio e-course.

Comparisons are often made as to whether the private sector is better than the public sector. Having had the opportunity to work in both, I believe that there are some unique challenges of leading in the public sector.

So what are my top 5 unique challenges?

1. Size

A vast number of public sector organisations are huge compared to a lot of private sector organisations. As a result, making what can even seem like a small scale change can require huge amounts of co-ordination across the many different parts.

2. Politics

Whether it is right or wrong, the reality is that politics and the political agendas have a huge impact on what public sector organisations do or don’t do.

3. Media Attention

Rarely a day passes by without a story about one or more aspects of the public sector being reported. The balance often tends to lean towards the bad rather than the good news stories, which naturally creates less appetite for balanced risk taking.

4. Range Of Stakeholders

While most organisations have people who take an interest in them, few have the vast proportion of the population contributing to the organisation directly in financial terms. As a result, the public obviously have a huge say in what does or does not happen.

5. Negative Perceptions

There may have been a time (although I doubt it) when public servants took it easy and spent time drinking tea. These days however this is just not the case and in my experience people give much more than could reasonably be expected for the rewards they get.

The Bottom Line

Leading in the public sector brings with it some unique challenges and is not for the faint-hearted.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here