This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.
We speak a lot about how the public professions – primary school teachers, nurses, doctors – are driven by their vocation, and how they must play a key role in reforming our public sector. But what is your vocation if you are a public servant?
There is no shortage of analyses of the importance of “the welfare state’s core workforce” when it comes to transforming the public sector. I have pointed towards this group myself, the front-line workers with profession-specific qualifications who have key responsibility for producing our welfare services. In a fine new book entitled ”Velfærdsinnovation – en introduktion” (Welfare Innovation – An Introduction), Nikolaj Lubanski and Birgitte Klæsøe, both of whom who have background from Metropol University College, also focus on this particular group of professionals. The authors write:
”We need to involve the many people (including those with profession-specific qualifications), whose daily work grants them insight into the potential for innovation, and who need to be involved in the process of getting good ideas and translating them into improvements in practice.”
The book goes on to suggest that the front-line professionals in particular should bring forth their creativityforces to tackle the challenges our society faces, such as inclusion in state schools, new welfare technology or strengthening rehabilitation in areas such as care for the elderly.
I pretty much agree. The potential in supporting teachers, nurses and pedagogues is enormous. These professionals are crucial if citizens are not only to have a positive experience of public welfare services, including learning, health and well-being.
Is there a financial manager in the room?
I find myself wondering whether we might be forgetting the thousands of administrators, managers, financial and HR managers and the people who work for them? The ones that we refer to as (for want of anything better) the managerial layer of the public sector. Every now and then, I am reminded that they may also have a crucial role to play in turning the promise of welfare innovation into reality.
Some years ago I was reminded of this at a conference about innovation in the public sector, where a participant dryly remarked that it would be nice if a few financial managers had been in the room. There weren’t. The only people attending were the already-converted development consultants, who excitedly corroborated each other in the notion that new ideas are always good, whatever the cost.
Last week I was party to a new episode, which once again led me to consider the role of managers in the development of the public sector. This was at the end of a seminar we held in my own organisation, MindLab, which was attended by researchers, designers and public servants. There was an ambitious atmosphere about the use of new design methods to create positive change in the public sector. But then someone dropped a remark that I have not been able to stop thinking about . A designer said:
“What if the decision-makers just don’t have the same ambition as we do when it comes to creating tangible change for citizens?”
Taken to the extreme, you could ask: Do public managers have a vocation? And if they do, what motivates them?
The managerial vocation
I think that there is more than one possible answer. My experience is that there are several kinds of ”vocation” (if you can call it that) in the world of public management ( a world to which I belong myself). It’s just that these vocations are not particularly concerned with citizens:
There’s a ”geek vocation” which is all about coming up with the most elegant and professionally sharp policy analyses imaginable.
A ”political vocation” which is about the adrenaline kick of being part of a political process and of being near the power centrer (be it a municipality, a ministry or in the Parliament).
A ”power-trip-vocation” which is linked to the previous one, but is more about the satisfaction of exercising power with consequences for many people.
A ”career-vocation”, which revolves around such things as prestige, positioning, salary and influence.
These are all legitimate motives for going to work every day. But if you ask if there is such a thing as a public manager with the objective of really, really making a difference to citizens and communities, I would contend that they are surprisingly few and far between. Few have what we could really call a ”social vocation”.
What significance does this have for the possibility of transforming our public sector? I see two scenarios:
1: That there really is very little material to work with among these people who make major decisions, manage budgets and staff functions. Thus, the prospects for increased welfare innovation are far worse than imagined by people like Nikolaj Lubanski and Birgitte Klæsøe.
2: That there is a large untapped potential to be unleashed by enabling ”the societal vocation” of more public managers. I believe that this vocation is deeply latent in many and is essentially just about asking the question: “How do I contribute to improving this society, both for the individual citizen and for all of us?”
Thankfully it was the second of these scenarios that dominated the debate at MindLab’s recent seminar. And it has also attracted international attention.
In a speech to the nearly 100 assembled participants, the Chief Executive of the City of Odense Jørgen Clausen announced his intent to create a local government in which all administrative processes citizen-centric: An organisation that focuses on citizens in everything it does.
Now, there’s a public manager with a vocation. Perhaps there is hope after all?
