Leadership and the Senior Service
from a Comparative Perspective
John Halligan
The leadership of the senior service has been subject to substantial change that reflects the era of public sector reform, environmental trends and new thinking about how civil service systems should operate. The environment that was once relatively stable for public organizations has become more competitive, public private differences have narrowed and the constraints and rules that once dictated much of the character of public organizations have less importance, with the notable exception of those reflecting democratic governance. Senior services are becoming more open, managerial and generalist and placing greater emphasis on leadership development.
Nevertheless, there continue to be wide variations within senior services and between country systems. The nature of the senior service and the significance of leadership development vary with administrative traditions, societal factors, institutions and level of reform. Two patterns can be discerned for some purposes: the first, of senior services that are being modernized but within state traditions, and which may be relatively closed and somewhat impervious to extensive change; and the second, of services that are more receptive to change, including management and new leadership concepts, and are more open.
The newer concepts of leadership are not universally accepted and applied in similar ways. Leadership frameworks have been developed and tested in a number of countries, and several have established a senior executive corps. For other countries senior services remain more in alignment with their administrative traditions.
A number of leadership issues remain salient, reflecting the special character of public organizations, challenges of new leadership demands, the results (often inconclusive) of management experiments and the unresolved tensions between neutral and responsive competence. This chapter reviews these dimensions of the changing approaches to leadership and the senior service within a comparative perspective that recognizes different patterns and the role of institutional factors.
SENIOR SERVICES
Defining the senior service
The senior service comprises heads of departments, bureaus and agencies within the core civil service (variously known as departmental or permanent secretaries, chief executives, director generals etc.) and other senior officials as designated within the central government of each country. The 'higher' components of Anglo American civil services have ranged from 0.13 per cent to 2.1 per cent, with 1 per cent being suggested as an ideal size (Hede, 1991: 505).