Oliver Robbins, the newly appointed Director General for Civil Service Reform, is the fourth official to lead civil service reform in the Cabinet Office since the plan was first launched in June 2012. Is he set for the challenge?
Recently, the Institute for Government and PWC brought together an eclectic mix of current and past officials, ministers and non-executive directors to discuss how best to lead transformation from the centre of government.
The participants provided four pieces of advice for Oliver Robbins to ponder in his new job.
1.Create a more compelling vision of where the civil service is going.
"If you get the elevator speech right... then you have much more ability to let go and be confident that the whole will add up to more than the sum of the parts."
“Change does not happen at the centre, it only happens if people in the operations are being recruited into a mentality that says ‘I believe where I am going, I know what my part is and I want to make it happen where I am’."
2.Focus on a small number of important issues that matter for public service outcomes.
“Pick a few things and focus on them.”
"Start with… what we are looking to deliver better than we deliver today and… what we need to change to be able to do that."
“Focus on ‘game-changers’… the emphasis needs to change from civil service reform as the driver, to seeing public service outcomes as the driver of reform.”
3.Promote collective leadership by permanent secretaries.
"There has been no collective call to arms, and so there is no collective understanding of what [we want] to achieve."
"You'd expect the top team to be aligned and driving this agenda forward, but we are nowhere like this. The permanent secretaries are not a cohesive top team."
"Join up the permanent secretaries, as this is vital to success."
4.Make sure the centre supports what departments are trying to achieve.
“Willing facilitation is better than compulsion from the centre.”
"In some areas a whole of government approach is useful, such as commercial skills. But we need clarity over who is doing what, where, why? The centre holds us to account for the wrong things.”
"There has to be a degree of trust and a degree of stepping back because only those people [in operations] can deliver the change. The more you sit on somebody's shoulder whilst they try to do something, the more they revert to letting you do it for them and the less they do for themselves."
These points echo some findings from forthcoming Institute research into the leadership of change and reform.
Ministers and officials remain frustrated by the pace, impact and value of many centrally driven reforms. The overriding impression is that the centre of government is not leading reform well enough.
Today’s leaders of reform face a double challenge: how to get the most out of reforms already underway; and, how to get set for the implications of another five or more years of unprecedented pressure on public spending and civil service budgets.
With little more than one year left until the election, the centre needs to step up and find a better way to lead reform.
- Topic
- Civil service
- Keywords
- Civil service reform Civil servants
- Administration
- Cameron-Clegg coalition government
- Department
- Cabinet Office
- Publisher
- Institute for Government