Extract
Chapter two – Managing Accountability
‘If we don’t have any terrorist attacks for a year, how do I know whether we’ve got lucky or whether we’ve been brilliant?’
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City
This chapter concentrates on how to achieve better managerial (as opposed to political) accountability. The questions it deals with are:
- How do you ensure that the people working for you feel accountable for what they are doing?
- How do you achieve this when:
o it is hard to measure the success of what they do
o it is hard to untangle their direct contribution to your goals from the contributions of others
o the impact of what they do may not be felt for many years to come
o their success or failure depends on the performance of partners or else on external factors beyond their control?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction – the unaccountable lack of accountability
Shortly after the 1997 election, Jonathan Powell, the new Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff and his boss were briefed at 10 Downing Street by officials from the Home Office.
It was not good news. Crime was likely to rise as the success of the economy created greater divisions and more desirable goods for people to steal.
What, asked Jonathan Powell, would happen to crime if the economy started performing poorly?
Ah, well in that case, came the reply, crime would also go up as increasingly desperate people would resort to increasingly desperate measures to support their families.
So, Powell concluded, no matter what happened, crime would rise and there was nothing that could be done about it.
This episode comfortably fits the stereotype of a public sector which is not accountable for what it does. This is the stereotype of a public sector in which public servants have jobs for life and fiddle around with bureaucratic processes which protect their backs whilst having little direct impact on the public.
It is the stereotype captured in General Sir Walter Walker’s aphorism from the 1970’s when he said ‘Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called a civil servant – it doesn’t work and it can’t be fired’. And it is the stereotype that remains a mainstay of much of the political comment that we currently read. ‘If a private company is found to be catastrophically incompetent by producing a lousy product, it goes bust’, writes Melanie Phillips in one such article in the Daily Mail. ‘But when the public sector is so incompetent...it treats this as a signal for paying itself even greater sums of public money’[1]
There is much anecdotal evidence to support this stereotype. ‘There are very few people that get sacked in the way that you would in the private sector’, says Peter Rogers, former chief executive of the City of Westminster and the London Development Agency, ‘and there are very few people that are held to account for poor performance. And if you doubt that, have a look through any public sector body and find anybody that’s really been dismissed for very poor performance - they are the exception rather than the rule.‘
Hayden Phillips, a distinguished former permanent secretary, adds some weight to this view: ‘The size of the civil service afforded me the luxury of being able to shuffle the pack and move people I found difficult or incompetent into roles that were either unimportant or else had no direct contact with me.’
One manager I spoke to was hired by a large central government department to set up a new communications team. The idea was that, like her, this team would be smart, ambitious and dynamic. It soon became clear to her that the department simply didn’t have enough staff with the requisite skills. What is more, the department wanted her to hire from the internal pool of staff who were already without a position. This pool – which exists in a number of departments – is usually a mix of staff waiting for a short time for a new position, but can also be a way to deal with poor performers whose managers find it easier to move them sideways into the pool than to sack them or to invest time developing them. The staff are often on full pay but not working. For a year she struggled to train her inexperienced staff, some of whom had to be persuaded of the value of communications and therefore their own role, before they could even start to make progress. She left the department within a year. The failure of the department to make people accountable for poor performance had the knock-on effect of blocking her ability to do a good job.
Good numerical evidence is harder to come by but data produced by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) lends some support to this picture. Using the numbers in its annual Resourcing and Talent Planning report we can surmise that on average over the last four years 6.7% of the private sector workforce left their jobs involuntarily compared to 5.3% of the public sector workforce[2]. However it is of course hard amongst these aggregate figures to identify the people who were fired for performing poorly as opposed to being part of an organisation experiencing general cuts.
In any case, the number of sackings is only one way of assessing levels of accountability albeit the most visible. The proper test for good accountability should not be whether your staff feel nervous about losing their jobs but whether they feel as if what they do matters. ‘People want to know two things’ says the Wandsworth Chief Executive Paul Martin, ‘how their work fits into the organisation as a whole and that their colleagues are interested in the quality of their work’. However, as the next section explains, there are some inherent characteristics of the public sector which make it hard to achieve such accountability.
[1] Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, December 15, 2008
[2] Calculations based on figures taken from the CIPD ‘Resourcing and Talent Planning’ Surveys; 2009-2012
-------------------------
[Extract from later on in the same chapter in the section 'How to create accountability']
Get people as close as possible to the impact they are having
'The trick is to make the accountability as personal as possible. This gets over the inevitably unquantifiable aspects.’ Hayden Phillips
As well as access to almost limitless comparative data, the public sector has another asset when it comes to enhancing accountability – the majority of the work the public sector does is ultimately for the benefit of other people and for the people doing the work that should be very motivating. The managerial challenge is how to squeeze the most out of this natural advantage.
On March 23rd, 2012, the comedian John Bishop was taking part in the BBC’s Sport Relief night. He had already raised millions of pounds by cycling, rowing and running over 295 miles from Paris to London in five days. His next task was to persuade the British public to donate more money for Africa. He talked about the challenges that some Africans face and the good work that Sports Relief does. He then went onto acknowledge how remote all this must seem to us as we sat watching our televisions in the UK. ‘But’, he concluded, ‘if someone said to you that someone on the other side of the road would die if you didn’t give them five pounds, you would.’
In using this personal language, John Bishop was doing his best to make us feel accountable for a problem that was many thousands of miles away. He was appealing to our better nature and bringing the impact that we might have as close to us as he could. Public sector managers have it easier. Typically the impact of what they are doing is much closer to hand. At the same time they will often, like Sport Relief, have an inspiring cause to motivate people.
Getting close to this impact happens automatically in some jobs. Doctors are good examples of this. I spoke to one who has been working consistently more hours than he is paid for throughout his career. ‘You just have to get the job done,’ he reflects, ‘because the consequences of not doing it are so obvious.’ In terms of making him feel accountable, being face to face with his patients and their families is hard to beat.
This is harder to achieve in other areas of the public sector. Even jobs that are considered frontline do not necessarily bring staff into direct contact with the people who are benefiting. At one extreme frontline, the armed forces are face to face with the enemy often thousands of miles away from the people they are protecting and in a very alien environment. Perhaps this is why so much effort is put into reminding them of the support they have back home. We need to remind them what they are protecting and why they are doing the job that they do. At another extreme, traffic wardens will spend most of their time dealing with angry motorists rather than the local people whose parking spaces they are preserving. And of course there are whole rafts of the public sector – not least the managers themselves - who rarely if ever come into contact with the people who are benefiting from their actions.
Michael Bichard describes how he thinks about this challenge and how he applied it when he was Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education. ‘The really effective public sector managers are the people who can connect their teams with outcomes and with outcomes on the ground. I always think it’s a hugely undervalued skill of public sector leaders to connect their people with the reality of their impact. I always found it odd in the department [of Education] when I went there that initially I had to legitimise civil servants going out to schools because they hadn't done that. As they saw it going to Croydon for a couple of hours to sit in on a class, which meant you had to spend an hour to get there and an hour to get back, was half a day out of the office. But when it did happen the impact on people could be absolutely electrifying. Sitting in on a literacy and numeracy class with a young teacher can be inspiring. It is partly about getting people to understand just how powerful they are, where so often we hear complaints about not having enough power. People, actually very young people, particularly in the Civil Service, have a lot of power and influence and that's something which is very exciting. I don't always see public sector leaders bringing that out.’
Helen Carter described an episode illustrating how proximity to an issue brought about this level of personal accountability in a prison.
‘When I was at my last prison there was an 82 year old man who was due to be released. However, he was at the end of his sentence and so not on any form of reporting to probation. But the staff came to me and said “We can’t just release this guy. He can’t look after himself.” He had been assessed for a residential care home, but they wouldn’t take him because he was a high MAPPA [multiagency public protection arrangement] risk which meant that he was a risk to other people even though he was quite elderly.
So they won’t take him in residential care. But we couldn’t just let him go, we couldn’t just put him in a taxi and send him to the train station saying there’s your travel warrant. And staff stayed several hours beyond their shifts until they found him somewhere to go, as even though it was not our statutory responsibility it was the right thing to do. In situations like this you will always have the staff who go above and beyond and take things on as a real sense of “This is my job and I will not let this person down.’
In this last example the accountability the prison officers feel is naturally towards the prisoner. They can immediately see how their actions affect the prisoner’s wellbeing. But prison officers are also having a positive impact on two further groups of people. First of all the victims of the crime for whom the prison provides some retribution. Secondly, the reformed prisoners who go on to lead fulfilling lives which contribute to society. If prison officers were to spend time with both these groups in addition to the existing prisoners then it would in all likelihood improve both their enthusiasm and their ability to do their job well. In particular by spending time with reformed prisoners – instead of just welcoming back re-offenders - they would see the fruits of their labour and also learn what has worked so that they could transfer those lessons to their daily work.
By thinking where the ultimate impact of their work is felt and how to bring this vividly to life for their staff, managers can ensure that staff have a clearer sense of their accountability, are more inspired to do their job and do it more effectively.
‘If we don’t have any terrorist attacks for a year, how do I know whether we’ve got lucky or whether we’ve been brilliant?’
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City
This chapter concentrates on how to achieve better managerial (as opposed to political) accountability. The questions it deals with are:
- How do you ensure that the people working for you feel accountable for what they are doing?
- How do you achieve this when:
o it is hard to measure the success of what they do
o it is hard to untangle their direct contribution to your goals from the contributions of others
o the impact of what they do may not be felt for many years to come
o their success or failure depends on the performance of partners or else on external factors beyond their control?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction – the unaccountable lack of accountability
Shortly after the 1997 election, Jonathan Powell, the new Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff and his boss were briefed at 10 Downing Street by officials from the Home Office.
It was not good news. Crime was likely to rise as the success of the economy created greater divisions and more desirable goods for people to steal.
What, asked Jonathan Powell, would happen to crime if the economy started performing poorly?
Ah, well in that case, came the reply, crime would also go up as increasingly desperate people would resort to increasingly desperate measures to support their families.
So, Powell concluded, no matter what happened, crime would rise and there was nothing that could be done about it.
This episode comfortably fits the stereotype of a public sector which is not accountable for what it does. This is the stereotype of a public sector in which public servants have jobs for life and fiddle around with bureaucratic processes which protect their backs whilst having little direct impact on the public.
It is the stereotype captured in General Sir Walter Walker’s aphorism from the 1970’s when he said ‘Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called a civil servant – it doesn’t work and it can’t be fired’. And it is the stereotype that remains a mainstay of much of the political comment that we currently read. ‘If a private company is found to be catastrophically incompetent by producing a lousy product, it goes bust’, writes Melanie Phillips in one such article in the Daily Mail. ‘But when the public sector is so incompetent...it treats this as a signal for paying itself even greater sums of public money’[1]
There is much anecdotal evidence to support this stereotype. ‘There are very few people that get sacked in the way that you would in the private sector’, says Peter Rogers, former chief executive of the City of Westminster and the London Development Agency, ‘and there are very few people that are held to account for poor performance. And if you doubt that, have a look through any public sector body and find anybody that’s really been dismissed for very poor performance - they are the exception rather than the rule.‘
Hayden Phillips, a distinguished former permanent secretary, adds some weight to this view: ‘The size of the civil service afforded me the luxury of being able to shuffle the pack and move people I found difficult or incompetent into roles that were either unimportant or else had no direct contact with me.’
One manager I spoke to was hired by a large central government department to set up a new communications team. The idea was that, like her, this team would be smart, ambitious and dynamic. It soon became clear to her that the department simply didn’t have enough staff with the requisite skills. What is more, the department wanted her to hire from the internal pool of staff who were already without a position. This pool – which exists in a number of departments – is usually a mix of staff waiting for a short time for a new position, but can also be a way to deal with poor performers whose managers find it easier to move them sideways into the pool than to sack them or to invest time developing them. The staff are often on full pay but not working. For a year she struggled to train her inexperienced staff, some of whom had to be persuaded of the value of communications and therefore their own role, before they could even start to make progress. She left the department within a year. The failure of the department to make people accountable for poor performance had the knock-on effect of blocking her ability to do a good job.
Good numerical evidence is harder to come by but data produced by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) lends some support to this picture. Using the numbers in its annual Resourcing and Talent Planning report we can surmise that on average over the last four years 6.7% of the private sector workforce left their jobs involuntarily compared to 5.3% of the public sector workforce[2]. However it is of course hard amongst these aggregate figures to identify the people who were fired for performing poorly as opposed to being part of an organisation experiencing general cuts.
In any case, the number of sackings is only one way of assessing levels of accountability albeit the most visible. The proper test for good accountability should not be whether your staff feel nervous about losing their jobs but whether they feel as if what they do matters. ‘People want to know two things’ says the Wandsworth Chief Executive Paul Martin, ‘how their work fits into the organisation as a whole and that their colleagues are interested in the quality of their work’. However, as the next section explains, there are some inherent characteristics of the public sector which make it hard to achieve such accountability.
[1] Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, December 15, 2008
[2] Calculations based on figures taken from the CIPD ‘Resourcing and Talent Planning’ Surveys; 2009-2012
-------------------------
[Extract from later on in the same chapter in the section 'How to create accountability']
Get people as close as possible to the impact they are having
'The trick is to make the accountability as personal as possible. This gets over the inevitably unquantifiable aspects.’ Hayden Phillips
As well as access to almost limitless comparative data, the public sector has another asset when it comes to enhancing accountability – the majority of the work the public sector does is ultimately for the benefit of other people and for the people doing the work that should be very motivating. The managerial challenge is how to squeeze the most out of this natural advantage.
On March 23rd, 2012, the comedian John Bishop was taking part in the BBC’s Sport Relief night. He had already raised millions of pounds by cycling, rowing and running over 295 miles from Paris to London in five days. His next task was to persuade the British public to donate more money for Africa. He talked about the challenges that some Africans face and the good work that Sports Relief does. He then went onto acknowledge how remote all this must seem to us as we sat watching our televisions in the UK. ‘But’, he concluded, ‘if someone said to you that someone on the other side of the road would die if you didn’t give them five pounds, you would.’
In using this personal language, John Bishop was doing his best to make us feel accountable for a problem that was many thousands of miles away. He was appealing to our better nature and bringing the impact that we might have as close to us as he could. Public sector managers have it easier. Typically the impact of what they are doing is much closer to hand. At the same time they will often, like Sport Relief, have an inspiring cause to motivate people.
Getting close to this impact happens automatically in some jobs. Doctors are good examples of this. I spoke to one who has been working consistently more hours than he is paid for throughout his career. ‘You just have to get the job done,’ he reflects, ‘because the consequences of not doing it are so obvious.’ In terms of making him feel accountable, being face to face with his patients and their families is hard to beat.
This is harder to achieve in other areas of the public sector. Even jobs that are considered frontline do not necessarily bring staff into direct contact with the people who are benefiting. At one extreme frontline, the armed forces are face to face with the enemy often thousands of miles away from the people they are protecting and in a very alien environment. Perhaps this is why so much effort is put into reminding them of the support they have back home. We need to remind them what they are protecting and why they are doing the job that they do. At another extreme, traffic wardens will spend most of their time dealing with angry motorists rather than the local people whose parking spaces they are preserving. And of course there are whole rafts of the public sector – not least the managers themselves - who rarely if ever come into contact with the people who are benefiting from their actions.
Michael Bichard describes how he thinks about this challenge and how he applied it when he was Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education. ‘The really effective public sector managers are the people who can connect their teams with outcomes and with outcomes on the ground. I always think it’s a hugely undervalued skill of public sector leaders to connect their people with the reality of their impact. I always found it odd in the department [of Education] when I went there that initially I had to legitimise civil servants going out to schools because they hadn't done that. As they saw it going to Croydon for a couple of hours to sit in on a class, which meant you had to spend an hour to get there and an hour to get back, was half a day out of the office. But when it did happen the impact on people could be absolutely electrifying. Sitting in on a literacy and numeracy class with a young teacher can be inspiring. It is partly about getting people to understand just how powerful they are, where so often we hear complaints about not having enough power. People, actually very young people, particularly in the Civil Service, have a lot of power and influence and that's something which is very exciting. I don't always see public sector leaders bringing that out.’
Helen Carter described an episode illustrating how proximity to an issue brought about this level of personal accountability in a prison.
‘When I was at my last prison there was an 82 year old man who was due to be released. However, he was at the end of his sentence and so not on any form of reporting to probation. But the staff came to me and said “We can’t just release this guy. He can’t look after himself.” He had been assessed for a residential care home, but they wouldn’t take him because he was a high MAPPA [multiagency public protection arrangement] risk which meant that he was a risk to other people even though he was quite elderly.
So they won’t take him in residential care. But we couldn’t just let him go, we couldn’t just put him in a taxi and send him to the train station saying there’s your travel warrant. And staff stayed several hours beyond their shifts until they found him somewhere to go, as even though it was not our statutory responsibility it was the right thing to do. In situations like this you will always have the staff who go above and beyond and take things on as a real sense of “This is my job and I will not let this person down.’
In this last example the accountability the prison officers feel is naturally towards the prisoner. They can immediately see how their actions affect the prisoner’s wellbeing. But prison officers are also having a positive impact on two further groups of people. First of all the victims of the crime for whom the prison provides some retribution. Secondly, the reformed prisoners who go on to lead fulfilling lives which contribute to society. If prison officers were to spend time with both these groups in addition to the existing prisoners then it would in all likelihood improve both their enthusiasm and their ability to do their job well. In particular by spending time with reformed prisoners – instead of just welcoming back re-offenders - they would see the fruits of their labour and also learn what has worked so that they could transfer those lessons to their daily work.
By thinking where the ultimate impact of their work is felt and how to bring this vividly to life for their staff, managers can ensure that staff have a clearer sense of their accountability, are more inspired to do their job and do it more effectively.
