Administrative reform in the federal public service: the first faltering steps

Administrative reform in the Wdter Baker* I federal public service: the first

Abstract. This paper is complementary to one by H. L. Laframboise published previously in CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (14, no. 3, fall 1971, pp. 305-25), 'Administrative reform in the federal public service: signs of a saturation psychosis.' Where Laframboise stresses the serious concerns that have arisen on the part of many managers over an accumulation of initiatives in administrative reform and seems generally to be advocating that we slow down the pace of such reform, the position taken here is that in our managerial practices we are very seriously below the level required to handle the enormous and complex demands facing the federal public service and therefore must attend far more energetically to administrative reform, albeit more expertly.

The paper identifies four key needs to be met in managing public organizations effectively, and treats each of these in some detail: placing men and women of appropriate managerial mind and bent in managerial positions; identdying, developing and using appropriately the growing range of managerial support specialties; facing up to and countering the insularity that seems to dict even the best of managers; and assuming a managerial approach suited to the dynamic nature of what Wanen Bennis has termed 'the t e m p rary society.' The paper concludes with a discussion of managing as a set of paradoxes.

Sommuire. Cet article traite du m h e sujet qu'un autre article que publiait dans ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA (14, no 3, automne 1971, pp. 303-25) par H. L. Laframboise, intitulk a Administrative reform in the federal public service: signs of a saturation psychosis .. Alors que Laframboise souli- gnait les prkscupations skrieuses de plusieurs administrateus devant le grand nombre d'initiatives en matitre de rkforme administrative et semblait prkconi- ser de facon gknkrale Ie ralentissement du rythme de cette rAforme, Yon SOU- tient ici que nos mkthodes de estion sont bien loin de pouvoir rkpondre a w

partant, nous devons poursuivre la rkforme administrative de facon beaucoup plus dynamique et plus experte.

L'article determine quatre exigences primordiales de la gestion &cam des administrations publiques et traite chacune d'elles en ddtail : affecter A des postes de gestion des hommes et femmes d'esprit et de tendance idoines; determiner, ktablir et employer A bon escient l'bventail de plus en plus vaste des s$cialit& du soutien administratif; combattre la tendance que semblent avoir les meilleurs de nos gestionnaires de se renfermer dans leur coquille;

The author is Assistant Deputy Minister (Planning and Systems), Department of Public Works, Government of Canada.

exigences nombreuses et compexes K de la fonction publique fakrale, et que

WALTEH BAKEH

adopter une mkthode de gestion adaptde B la nature dynamique de ce que Warren Bennis appelle a la socikt6 temporaire B.

L’article se termine en assimilant le processus de gestion A une skrie de paradoxes.

Introduction: signs of a saturation psychosis?

The title of this paper clearly reflects that of an earlier one by H. L. Laframboise, ‘Administrative reform in the federal public service: signs of a saturation psychosis.’l It is not, however, an attempt to present a detailed alternative to the major propositions contained in the Laframboise paper, and indeed makes no explicit reference to them throughout. Nevertheless, it is in a key sense complementary: where Laframboise stresses the serious concerns that have arisen on the part of many managers over an accumulation of recent initiatives in administrative reform and seems generally to be advocating that we slow down the pace of such reform, my own position is that in our managerial practices we are very seriously below the level required to handle the enormous and complex demands facing the federal public service, and therefore must attend far more energetically to administrative reform albeit, as Laframboise suggests, more expertly.

The subject of administrative reform is an extremely difficult one to deal with adequately. It is full of paradoxes, and not the least of these is that we seek to move ahead strongly when there is room for serious doubt concerning whether we do indeed yet have the capacity to deal sensibly with the complexities involved. I return to the question of paradoxes later, but it seems fitting to present at the outset three quotations, drawn from quite different sources and addressed to widely diverging matters, which appear to highlight the question of the scope and potential for achieving planned and well-managed progress in managing our affairs generally and, by implication, public service activities.

The first captures the shift that can take place from a starting position of great expectations to one where reform objectives are rapidly adjusted downward as the harshness of the real world is met:

The Rabbi of Zans used to tell this story about himself: In my youth when I was fired with the love of God, I thought I would convert the whole world to God. But soon I discovered that it would be quite enough to convert the people who lived in my town, and I tied for a long time, but did not succeed. Then I realized that my program was too ambitious, and I concentrated on the persons in my own household. But I could not convert them either. Finally it dawned upon me: I must work upon myself, so that I may give true service to God. But I did not accomplish even this.2

1 H. L. LAFRAMBOISE, ‘Administrative reform in the federal public service: signs of

pp. 305-25). 2 An extract from the Hasidic Tales, quoted in DANIEL BELL, The End of Ideology, Free Press, 1962, p. 275.

a SahXatiOn psychosis,’ CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 14, no. 3 (fa 1971),

382 CANADIAN PUBLIC ADhfINISTRATION

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM

If that message does not daunt the eager performer, Edmund Burke’s classic defence of the ‘wisdom of the ages’ against presumptuous meddling well may:

... Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a penna- nent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stu- pendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy. ... We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. [Yet] ... the whole clan of the enlightened ... have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufEcient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery.3

As an alternative viewpoint Neil Armstrong‘s comments on the Apollo program, below, reflect the conviction of the committed administrative re- f omer :

Our goal when we were assigned to this flight last January, seemed almost impossible. There were a lot of unknowns, unproved ideas, unproved hard- ware ... Then came the flights of Apollo IX and X, which were so magnificently sue cessfu1. It began to seem that we really would get a crack at a Ianding. From that point on, preparations became relentless. We were not concerned with safety, specifically, in these preparations. We were concerned with mission success, with the accomplishment of what we set out to do. A successful lunar landing I felt might inspire men around the world to believe that impossible goals really are possible, that there really is hope for solutions to humanity’s problems. The amazing thing about the whole space enterprise from its very beginnings some ten years ago was that practically everyhng required to make it succeed had be invented, discovered and mated - new materials, new equip- ment, new vehicles, new forms of organization and new management methods.

This paper is in the spirit of the last quotation, although written with a recognition of the truths inherent in the first two. While it expresses a concern with our lack of preparation to meet managerial responsibilities that are increasing in complexity at an exponential rate, it stresses that there has been extremely encouraging activity over the past ten years, across the industrialized world, in seeking to come to grips with the common problems of managing in a complex industrial society, and that if we want to

3 D- BURKE, Rejkctions on the Revolution in France, Dolphin Edition, 1961, pp. 45-6, 74, 91, 100-1.

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learn from and act upon them, valuable insights and experiences are there for application.

Four key factors in managing public organizations

In Canada, the Glassco Commission4 caught and crystallized a growing concern in the federal public service over the failure to place a high pre- mium on managing well, and since 1962 we have increased our efforts to deal with what now must rank as a key priority. Yet one would have to look back over the past ten years with some concern at how little progress has been made, when viewed against what is possible.

There have been striking contributions to effective government by individual administrators over the years since Confederation! It would be a rare and imperceptive observer of the Canadian public service who had not seen the positive impact of many in senior executive and other managerial positions, even ‘flying by the seat of their pants’ as they have had to do and in a public service environment not particularly hospitable to those of managerial bent.

Yet managing well is more than good people working with insight, intelligence, and integrity to help develop and implement public policies, and until we are clear on what it does involve, we cannot seek systematic- aIly to achieve it. To my mind, it has four major facets: ( i ) placing men and women of appropriate managerial mind and bent in managerial positions, and freeing them to manage in an over-all milieu conducive to sound management; ( ii) recognizing that ‘management’ comprises many strengths working in concert, and is not therefore merely good people in managerial positions, with freedom to manage. There exists a growing range of managerial support specialties, equipped to supply key ingredients in managing well, and as appropriate these should be made available to managers; (iii) facing up to and in consequence making institutional provision to counter the insularity and parochialism that seem to atflict even our best managers. The economists’ term, ‘sub-optimization,’ is used to describe this phenomenon, below; (iv) recognizing the accelerating rate of change as a central fact of today’s public service, and assuming in consequence a managerial approach suited to what Bennis has termed ‘the temporary society.’6

4 1962-3, vols. I-v.

Royal Commission on Government Organization, Repwt, Ottawa, Queen’s Printer,

5 Udortunately, in light of the paucity of Canadian administrative histories, these are not well documented. 6 WAFWZN G. BENNIS and PHILIP E. SLATER, The Tempmuy Society, New York, 1968, particularly the Bennis selection ‘New Patterns of Leadershi for Adaptive Organiza- tions,’ pp. 97-123. A companion piece is F. c. MOGHER, ‘Tie Public Service in the Temporary Society,’ Pubtic Administration Review (JanJFeb. 1971 ).

384 CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION


1 Getting managers into managerial posit ions

We have only belatedly recognized the value of good managers in the federal public service, and especially at the most senior levels. In the British tradition, we have looked first for skills in dealing with the interface between the political level and the public service. These are of great importance in themselves to the tasks we have had to accomplish, and without any doubt will continue to be required. Yet such skills do not cover the fun range of those long seen as required of the most senior personnel in large private sector organizations; and organizations that are essentially not too dissimilar from their public sector counterparts in the claims they make on managerial skills. While in no way meaning to under-stress the policy role of senior public servants, therefore, this has been given due emphasis on many previous occasions, and my intention in the present paper is to apply a needed corrective by extending the discussion of the managerial role to include and emphasize its executive and administrative aspects.7

Recognition of the importance of the managerial skills does not extend widely, even now, and among civil servants questions are still raised concerning the need for a special stress on managing, as such. It is almost as if, despite the evidence to the contrary, many still believe that anyone of reasonable education, maturity, and common sense can, properly moti- vated, move into a managerial role and perform creditably, and that it is more important to bring to the tasks of managing a sensitive understanding of the public domain and a sound grounding in one of the more ‘acceptable’ academic programs, than to bring the speciaI discipline, attributes and skills of those of managerial mind and bent.8

In the ideal situation, the managerial functions will be performed by those of managerial mind, who derive their work satisfaction from managing rather than the degree of perfection with which they practise a particular profession or specialty. Yet the conversion of first-rate profes-

7 when I use the term ‘managerial’ it is meant to convey the complete spectrum of policy/executive/adminisbtive wncems that face ublic service managers. As a

deeply invofved in policy and executive issues, as well as those in the middle and lower level positions. 8 I intend to develop at some length the point that governmental effectiveness has suffered from a lack of emphasis on executive/administrative concerns and therefore on the managerial functions in total. In discussing the importance of the managerial role, however, it seems wise to emphasize at the outset that it is only one role among many that are critical to successful performance; the mix of occu ations in the federal public service is enormously varied, and each plays its essentifpart in cany- ing out governmental functions. W e need first-rate managers, and we should invest heavily in getting them; we also need first-rate en eers, economists, sociologists,

occupational category that comes readily to mind.

class, mana ers in the f e d d public service include t!i ow at the most senior levels

librarians, architects, and virtually every other proession, P technical specialty and


WALTER BAKER

sionals into mediocre managers is a too frequent occurrence in many organizations. Good architects and engineers, for example, can and on occasion do make very good managers; that they do SO is not a necessary function of their skills as architects or engineers, but of the managerial strengths that have been latent or only partially developed in their professional roles. Conversely, save in the exceptional circumstance, the manager who projects himselfe into the actual design of a building; who wants to deal directly and personally with an Indian family requiring assistance; who, in other words, wants to 'do' rather than 'manage,' may well be a frustrated professional filling a managerial position without a commitment to the strictly managerial functions.

That managers have their own peculiar set of functions to perform, demanding in turn a special set of strengths, is not as widely known or understood as it needs to be if we are to place due stress on finding and developing first-rate managers. Below the political Ievel'O it is to our managers we must look in the fist instance, for example, for leadership in ensuring that the reasons our organizations and their many sub-units exist are clear, consistent with changing public wants, and clearly communicated to and understood by all who need this knowledge; that organizational resources are mobilized only against the clarity of direction that comes from the careful translation of such a sense of purpose into the set of objectives, policies, more concrete long- and short-term goals, and the detailed guidelines and procedures into which purpose logically flows. It is to our managers, too, that we look to accept responsibility for and lead the process of identifying the work that must be carried out if objectives are to be successfully pursued, and of organizing this work into discrete tasks, capable in turn of being assigned as the workload of a single individual - and then through sound structuring to bring the over-all set of tasks together in an appropriately co-ordinated and integrated whole.

The managerial role goes far beyond these vitally important functions, however. It is the manager's responsibility to ensure that the personnel, financial, materiel and other resources required to carry out planned adivity, within the organizational structure developed, are properly esti- mated, appropriately mobilized and effectively used. Personnel management, financial management, and matCriel management are very much the direct concern of managers, however profitably the services of support

9 Throughout the paper I have used the conventional masculine terms. Even though I subscribe fully to the current, overdue attempt to open managerial positions more freely to women, I found it impossible to reflect this without complicating the paper inordinately. 10 'Below the political level' is a key phrase. This paper focuses intentionally on the managerial role within the public service. Only occasionally, therefore, is the existence of the litical level even noted, and nowhere is its legitimate interest in administrative re& properly considered. That topic merits a paper in its own right.



personnel may be employed in carrying them out. And while the term ‘leadership’ has to be used carefully in considering the role of managers, it is to them we must look to lead the development of an over-all climate in which the individual employee can operate effectively while finding personal satisfaction in his work - and the skill of a manager in the demanding world of interpersonal relationships will have a critical bearing on the nature of this climate.

Then, too, it is the manager we rely upon to counter, through the development and administration of sound control systems, the marked tendency of organizations and units to diverge unintendedly from the courses on which they originally embark; systems that are built, in turn, upon a clear sense of original direction, the identification of appropriate performance standards and indicators, the actual measuring of performance against these, and the timely feedback of measurement information to personnel in a position to act upon it. Crossing these functions and central to each are the special demands we make on managers in decision- making, in establishing effective communications and in representing their units.

Finally, it needs stressing that because in the managing of public organizations there is no clear demarcation between ‘policy’ and ‘management,’ managers rightly become involved in the evolution of public policy as well as its translation into action. The most senior managers work in close if subordinate p h e r s h i p with the political level on policy matters that at any one time are politically significant; in addition, an extremely broad range of policy issues never become significant at the political level and are therefore settled within the public service itself. Because of the primacy of their positions in the decision-making of their units, managers therefore play a leading role in many policy issues.

In brief, then, lending themselves to a limitless variety of substantive areas are the distinctly managerial functions: planning, organizing, mo- bilizing and deploying resources, providing leadership in motivating, guiding and supporting those in their units, ensuring positive control of programs and activities, playing the central role in many key policy and management decisions, seeking to effect sound communications, and representing the unit in the external environment. Certain people are attracted to these functions p e ~ se, over and above whatever status and salary con- siderations apply; others perform them less willingly, drawn to them in major part by prestige and/or salary concerns, s a d c i n g as a result many of the deeper career satisfactions that only come from doing a job that is ‘natural’ to one’s caste of mind and career bent.

On this last point, I am convinced that there is a ‘managerial mind‘ identifiable against, say, a scholarly or scientific mind although having characteristics in common with both. This is dangerous ground, but in

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WALTER BAKER

seeking to establish a set of criteria for identifying the managerial mind I would look at such factors as the well-known penchant for ‘taking action through people,’ with stress on both the ‘people’ and the ‘action’ orientation; an ability to take risks and live with the results; evidence of being drawn towards ‘power’ and the responsibility that is its concomitant; a realism that enables recognition of those occasions when compromise is required, and a flexibility that permits such compromise; an orientation to ‘seeing things whole,’ and individual factors in their interrelationships; an ability to take decisions and act upon them even when available data is insufficient for ‘rational’ decisions, and therefore the ability to operate in the midst of ambiguity and imprecision; and a strong orientation to the future as well as the present. People of managerial bent are not especially distinguishable from other professionals, I believe, on such matters as the keenness of their intelIigence, analytical capability, integrity, ability to communicate, political insight, empathy, or social responsibility.

The point of identifymg the above as facets of the managerial mind is not by any means to suggest that they are to be taken as definitive.l’ What is important, if the existence of such a special type of mind and career bent is acknowledged, is to come to grips with the very M c u l t question of how we identify it, and preferably at an early stage in a public servant’s career. This is particularIy important in selecting candidates for the several programs that have emerged over the last few years, such as the Career Assignment Program, through which we hope to develop managers capable of assuming senior executive responsibilities. It is also important, of course, in selecting candidates for the full range of managerial positions, as the quality of management of the public service does not rest solely or even primarily on the calibre of those few who reach the most senior positions.

In sum, then, one essential prerequisite of a soundly-managed public service is finding and nurturing men and women of managerial mind to carry out the managerial functions at all levels of the public service hier- archy; each having a sense of managerial purpose and the requisite skills to plan, organize, mobilize resources, lead, control, decide, communicate, represent; open to, and to the extent feasible aware of, the latest managerial insights from research scholars and accomplished practitioners alike; politically and publicly sensitive and hence able to function in a system that demands responsiveness and responsibility from its public servants; rigorous, futures-oriented professionals, and exceptionally good ones, and hence able to cope with an increasingly complex, even volatile environment. I suppose I should add, ‘and able to walk across the water,’ to

11 For follow-up material that addresses the question of the managerial mind much more systematically, see: CHARLES E. SUMMER and J. J. O’CONNELL, The Managerial Mind, Irwin-Dorsey, 19Bg (es ially the Appendix, pp. 851-63) and DAVID EWINC, The Managerial Mind, New YorrFree Press, 1964.



acknowledge that whereas there is not a single element in this statement of desired qualities I would want to soften or withdrawx2 we will probably fall short in finding them, in appropriate combination, in anywhere near the number of candidates we need to stafE our managerial positions.

The problem of staffing managerial positions effectively is further com- plicated, and very considerably, by the need and duty to deal sensitively with those now occupying such positions but judged unsuited to managerial responsibilities. Managers need to be measured against more exacting standards and transferred out of managerial roles when they fail to perform, but to move to this position we need far more careful selection practices than now exist, better appraisal practices and, as stressed earlier, the service-wide recognition that managers have no monopoly of virtue, status or reward and that to be moved out of a managerial position, therefore, may be to find true career satisfaction in a different field. We also need greater skill and commitment than we have so far shown in developing the strengths of low performers to appropriate levels. As I discuss more fully, later, managing is a function of 'a person in a situation'; someone of managerial mind may be failing, therefore, because he lacks one or two attributes only out of the total required in relation to that particular situation. It is not only inhuman to subject him to a traumatic and poten- t i dy destructive experience when a suitable development program could add the additional strengths needed; it is also very bad economics.

2 Supporting the manager A second crucial aspect of managing well is to ensure that managers are appropriately supported.

Good managers can produce results in very difiEicult environmental situations, of course, but they manage incomparably better when the organizational environment in which they operate supports rather than hinders their efforts. In other words, managing well is a function of the manager and a supportive organizational environment, and it would be short-sighted indeed to invest heavily in finding good managers and then to deny them

The Glassco Commission addressed this point in recommending that appropriate financial and personnel support be provided managers, and since Glassco it has become commonplace to find financial and personnel specialists at or close to all levels of departmental management, including the most senior. We have also moved, but far less strongly, in providing professional support in several other areas. If we want to free our managers

12 provided it is accepted that a shading of de ee in terms of hierarchical level

as hey move through their careers, an% soundly conceived career development and mobility programs can hasten the process.

such support.

c ~ l l and will exist: undoubtedly, mana ers will a CT d or strengthen desired attributes


WALTER BAKER

to manage well, however, we must move much more vigorously in creating an appropriate range of support services and systems, and in a milieu conducive to sound management. What is happening, in essence, as the heavy demands modem organizations place on their managers begin to be understood, is that more and more the wisdom of two complementary steps is being recognized: increasing the number of managers, thus sharing more finely the managerial workload, and breaking down the managerial funo tions themselves into their discrete elements for purposes of providing

Concerning the number of managers, I am aware how often we are tempted to treat with numbers when we should more properly be sub- stituting managers for current incumbents unsuited to managerial tasks, and creating sound structural situations and improved systems. With such steps, we can on occasion reduce rather than increase the number of managerial positions required. Nevertheless, a major contributing factor to the remarkable organizational transformation accomplished at General Motors by Alfred Sloan was his recognition of the need to increase mark- edIy the number of managerial positions. Since Sloan, this recognition has continued at General Motors and has been reflected in the practices of a number of other large 0rgani~ations.l~

In most departments the managerial cadre is relatively very small, taken as a percentage of total staff complement (in Public Works, for example, 330 out of roughly 8OOO positions). A significant increase in managerial positions normally translates, therefore, into a small percentage increase in over-all manpower. Even this increase occurs only over the short term; in the longer term, it is not unreasonable to expect that good managers operating within a sound structure will pay for their services many times over, through their impact on operations and general organizational practices.

Then, too, key decisions to implement many of the Glassco Commission recommendations, to introduce collective bargaining, to bilingualize the Federal public service, to establish the Treasury Board Secretariat as ‘general manager’ and ‘employer’ and to provide service-wide managerid and policy support systems in the areas of planning, programming, budgeting and management information, have undoubtedly placed added burdens on managers. Many of these are givens in the new environment; however much we rail against them they will not go away. Neither should they, as in total they represent a decided pIus in managing the public service. Because the pace of administrative reform is very much a function not

13 See ALFRED SLOAN, My Yeurs with General Motors, New York, Doubleday, 1%. For other notable organizational transformations in which the same theme (among others) appears see mrmrr DALE, The creut orgunizers, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1960.

specialist support.

390 CANADJAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION


only of the quality but also the actual number of managers available to guide it, however, success in the new initiatives will depend strongly on a selective expansion in the number of managerial positions.

In this connection I have been impressed, and very deeply, by the burdens we place on our managers to the detriment of their physicat and emotional health, and especially when we add significant reorganization responsibilities to already demanding ongoing tasks. While to my knowledge there are no reliable figures to document this, signs abound of the adverse effects of overwork, and of the inner resources of many managers being stretched close to the breaking point. Perhaps the worst mse of the Federal public service is the gravely mistaken assumption that acceptance of a managerial position must carry with it a commitment to a 12-hour day, six days a week - and the sooner we kill this anachronistic bogey the better.

While increasing the number of managers, we also need to apply the insight that ‘management’ comprises a team; namely, the manager and his support specialists. There are now qualified specialists to support at least the areas of planning, organizing, resource mobilization and use, be- havioural concerns, control, communications, decision-making ( logical and creative), and where applicable, customer and public relations, and marketing. While it would be the height of folly to turn the managing of our organizations over to a plethora of such specialists, it would be equally foolish to deny our managers specialist support of a nature and quality often far in excess of their individual capacity in each of their several functions.

There are some who appear to see the new specialties and related techniques as a threat, or at the least to be accepted only with great caution. Yet to me, if I can borrow a term from our teenagers, this position is a ‘cop-out’; a refusal to face the realities and pressures of modem organizational society. It rests, moreover, on a lack of insight into the special relationship that can and should exist between the manager and the support specialist. The secret, I think, is to see these new specialties in proper perspective. The manager must continue to be heId personally and directly responsible for successful performance in his area; however, properly used as the support they are, the new specialists can be of enormous benefit to him. It is primarily when strong-minded or improperly-arrogant specialists are placed alongside weak and insecure managers, one or each incapable of seeing or performing his role appropriately, that the most serious problems develop.

In addition to stalling public organizations with the new managerial specialties, in appropriate support relationships to managers, there is the related concern of putting in place a variety of workable support systems. Such systems, when they are the product of managers and support


WALTER BAKER

specialists acting in concert, can give a procedural stability, a supporting framework, that reduces considerably the number of times a manager needs to take a ‘unique’ decision, freeing him to work on the more exceptional. Yet the evolution of appropriate support systems, and their inter- meshing one with another, is no mean skill- and a skill in which to this point performance has left much to be desired. Systems for financial planning, accounting, manpower planning, s t a n g , classification, infonnation- handling - these and many more, imperfectly conceived and developed, snarl our managers in miles of unproductive and counterproductive red tape.

Until an organization sets out to revise its managerial and operating systems to meet new goals and the consequent changes in substantive programs and activities, how firmly most of us are enmeshed in a network of systems can escape the notice of managers. So, too, can recognition of how often such systems are working against rather than for us.

I speak to public service managers occasionally on the topic, ‘The Compatibility of PPB and MBO,’ advocating a combined PPB/MB014 system as a major tool in managing complex organizations. Invariably, I find managers confused about the logic of the two systems, and even more about the potential of a combined one, and very often angry at those who developed and currently administer the systems, because of the paperwork demands that seem to be their inevitable concomitants. In consequence, as they freely confess, they learn to invest the very minimum of time in such ‘make-work’ activity, through employing various devious practices. The same is even more true in the field of information-handling systems. I can recall, wryly, one management information systems’ group exhorting the top management of its department to support a fundamental reorganization of an existing information system, at very considerable expense, only to acknowledge towards the end of their presentation that less than one manager in ten made any use at all of the reasonably satisfactory system in current operation.

The end result of an insuEciency of managerial positions, a failure to identify and make appropriate use of the numerous support specialties, and the development and perpetuation of counterproductive support systems can only be an environment designed to frustrate rather than support the manager, inevitably thwarting his best efforts and hence working over- all against sound public service management.

14 ‘Planning-Programming-Budgeting/ Management-by-Objectives.’ It may be super- fluous to translate these initials; however, a senior colleague who has been much more successful than many older managers in adjusting to the newer techniques, remarked recently that he had finally discovered that MBO was not the French translation of PPB!



3 Countering parochialism and insularity : the s u b-o ptim izat ion problem

A central feature of the Federal public service is our commitment, of6cidy and in many of our practices, to what the Glassw Commission termed ‘responsive and responsible bureaucracy.’ Everything we do only legitimately takes off from the wishes, the wants, of the Canadian people, and despite what appears occasionally in the media about the power and ‘intransigence’ of the bureaucracy, seen from the inside there can be no question that where the wishes of the Minister and the Cabinet are clear, officially linking the public service to Parliament and ‘the people,’ this becomes the dominant factor in the over-all direction public service programs and activities take.

From what is an involved set of public/political/public service inter- actions, a sense of direction for the public service hopefully emerges, receiving formal expression in a variety of official ways. I say ‘hopefdy,’ because there is reason to doubt that this process is working as well as it might. In total, the range and complexity of public service activities is staggering, and very considerable skills are required to translate the broad and sometimes ambiguous direction of the political process into a clear sense of direction for the public service, and the individual departments and agencies of which it is comprised. New legislation, orders-in-council, Treasury Board minutes, and other official statements of government policy, emerging annually in considerable quantity, have to be meshed with each other and with existing policy provisions that since Confedera- tion have accumulated in countless numbers.

Failure to give clear direction is particularly critical in light of the attraction of a manager’s own narrow area in directing his attention away from broader concerns and issues. Parochialism and insularity may well be endemic in the managerial condition; if they are, then they can be coun- tered only by deliberate and demanding effort. To compound the issue, the managerial mind is more ‘action’ than ‘planning‘ oriented; however much a manager may rail against the burden he carries, having to respond busily to frequent and active demands on his time throughout a long and hectic day can be the evidence of being ‘needed’ so many of us seek. To the drawing power of a manager’s own area, then, and in part giving rise to it, add the ‘seductiveness of detail,’ of being vigorously and actively busy.

Then, too, each manager sees the world around him in his own particular way; he seems to have a built-in ‘scanner’ or ‘filter>’ developed over his total life-span and reflecting, therefore, the uniqueness of his experiences. Managers who have been exposed to the excellent short film on perception, The Eye of the Beholder,’ have seen dramatic evidence of the personal


WALTER BAKER

nature of perceptions, and it is not hard to trace to this factor much of the apparent insularity managers display.

To manage the federal public service well, in light of the parochialism and insularity that exist, we need to develop in managers a clear recognition of the public service as the one complex if cumbersome system it actually is. Moreover, we need to take positive steps to ensure that over-all system concerns are added to the concerns of the individual department or unit. This requires, in turn, highly effective central management to complement the excellence of individual managers. I would place as high if not higher a priority, therefore, on putting a really first-rate central group of ‘corporate executive^'^^ and service-wide systems in place as I would on finding managers capable of occupying managerial roles in the individual departments and agencies.

In this connection the highest priority should be given to developing the Treasury Board Secretariat as a cohesive, well-managed unit with resources adequate to handling its very sensitive and vital powers; settling the am- biguities in roles that have arisen vis-d-uis the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Public Service Commission; appointing as the chief executive officers of our departments and agencies those who can serve their individual Ministers well and manage their units efficiently while at the same time being capable of acting as corporate executives in relation to the government as a whole16 and bringing such chief executive officers regularly to the consideration of service-wide concerns, therefore. It means reviewing thoroughIy the committees and units established to bring different facets of the public service into appropriate co-operative relationships. Finally, it means reviewing, over-all, the service-wide systems that have arisen over the years, pur- portedly designed to support and integrate the activities of managers but too often failing in both.

Bringing the system as a whole into reasonabIe coherence wouId be a major forward step, but one that would still leave the sub-optimization problem within the individual departments and agencies. Too few of our major units have developed and communicated over-all objectives that are consistent with service-wide objectives and with the nature and demands of the foreseeable environment, and fewer yet have established and am- municated a sound long- and short-term planning framework to guide the

15 The term is taken from the business world. To take the perspective of a ‘corporate executive’ is to seek to view the system as a whole, and accordingly to bring to those decisions crucial to over-all organizational health a breadth of view and an understanding of the objectives of the system, in counter-balance to the namower concerns pressed, quite legitimately, by those directly responsible for individual units. 16 Although admittedly difficult, it is possible, and highly desirable, to combine responsibility for one organization or one segment with wearing more-or-less com- fortably the hat of a corporate executive.



individual manager. Even where such a guiding and constraining framework exists, few managers are working within terms of reference that are consistent with those of their colleagues, and in light of acceptable performance indicators. Apart from the sometimes quite perfunctory use of management committees, very few organizations have made formal provision in their decision-making for a departmental ‘corporate’ presence to complement positions taken by individual units. Support units exist in uneasy companionship with each other and line managers, uncertain of their roles and interrelationships, while organizational structures on occasion exacerbate rather than simplify relationship problems by permitting confusing overlaps ia jurisdiction.

4 Adjusting to ‘the temporary society’ Bringing organizations to a satisfactory level of functioning is not a one- time activity; it involves facing continuously the paradox of producing and maintaining an efficient organization in some reasonably stable state, while dealing dynamically with an environment that is in a condition of rapid flux. To function well in light of this paradox we need managers who can combine the ability to give direction to the current programs and activities of government, while sharing responsibility for adjusting the public service and its individual parts to the change that is occurring on all sides: in wants, needs, milieu, methods, available tools and skills, colleagues, sub- ordinates - and each change producing yet other changes in endless permu- tations and combinations across the public service. To use the words of Warren Bennis, this is indeed an era when we need ‘the adaptive manager,’ who can function well in ‘the temporary society.’

Under the increased stresses of today and the turbulent future we see emerging, it is even more imperative that we have managerial positions in s&cient quantity, staffed by those of managerial mind and bent and equipped with the requisite skills; that managers be properly supported; and that we take steps to counter parochialism not only within departments and agencies but service-wide. If the time ever did exist when managing was a quite routine activity, that time is well past, and we need the special skills of the truly competent manager simply to avoid the break- down of existing structures and systems in the face of new and growing environmental challenges and threats. If we want to go further, as we must, to influence the rate and direction of change, to manage it rather than simpIy adapt, we will need to add to the skills of the manager a special ability to appreciate environmental turbulence and to move with and creatively lead beneficial change.

If this is acknowledged, even in the short term there is a great deal we can do to prepare ourselves. We can at the very least become more closely aware of the dimensions of the change that has already taken place and


WALTER BAKER

which is now accelerating; the ‘futures’ field over the past several years has developed an extensive literature of its own, documenting change pheno- mena, proposing ways and means of coping with change, and outlining various ways of identrfylng change trends. We can go further, and structure ourselves to monitor the change that is taking place of direct relevance to the Federal public service or which can with reasonable care and tolerance of error be forecast. Such ‘futures’ forecasting’ is no longer the idle pursuit of the crystal ball gazer; many hard-headed business organizations and indeed some public ones have seen the practical significance of monitoring the environment for real or potential changes which offer a challenge or threat to them, and have developed a range of techniques adaptable to our use.

Seeking to cope with new concerns can lead to unforeseen benefits, and this has happened in the case of concern over the accelerating rate of change. The need to adjust organizations to the new environmental turbulence led firms like Kaiser Aluminum and Imperial Tobacco to invest small fortunes in creative endeavours; these, and many similar initiatives, have come together in certain organizations in healthy symbiosis with growing concerns about the unnecessarily autocratic nature of much of our decision-making. This has led, in turn, to a recognition of the inefficiency of decision-making practices that deny decision-makers valuable insights from other organizational members, and constrain them within the logical, no-nonsense hard-headed approaches that until very recently have been the rule. We can and now do use brainstorming, synectics, and a host of other useful techniques to complement ‘logical’ thought - resulting not only in more exciting organizations in closer tune with the adaptive require- ments of the ‘temporary society,’ but greatly enriching traditional practices in many areas of organizational activity.

If anyone doubts the turbulence of the organizational environment - and from my experience many do - there is a simple test that can be carried out. Bring any group of managers together in a conference session and pose this question to them: What changes do you see on the horizon, that by 1985 will be facts of life with which we shall have to reckon as managers? Even managers who on occasion see their lives as ‘much of the same,’ week after week, have no trouble identifying marked change trends, together constituting in less than 15 years a virtual revolution in organiza- tiond society. Scale the forecasts down to 1980 and the results, while less dramatic, are still striking, and point convincingly to the need for managers who can live with and manage change.

Conclusion: living with the managerial paradoxes

What I have tried to say in previous pages is that when managerial practices in the Federal public service are reviewed against the higher level of


ADMIMSTRATIW REFORM

effectiveness that is feasible, it is dear that we have taken only the first steps in administrative reform. I state this, I trust, not as an academic out of touch or impatient with the manager’s world as it really is, but after three years as a member of a top management team committed to administrative reform and working actively to bring it about.

One strong conviction I have been left with as a result of the experiences of the past three years is that managing is a set of paradoxes, and that constructive administrative reform must take place against a recognition of this. To illustrate, it is possible to justify and retain a high level of missionary zeal while experiencing regularly ‘failures’ that would justify the deepest cynicism; to believe in the great impact of good managers while, again, recognizing at every turn the uncontrollable complexity of the departmental environment - and the mind boggles at projecting this complexity across the entire public service, let alone society as a whole; to attain and retain a hard-driving, business-like orientation to managerial work, while freely acknowledging at every step that without a complementary concern with the individual needs of the people who comprise our organizations we cannot hope to make lasting progress.

We can recognize environmental turbulence and even deliberately stimulate change by embarking upon quite ambitious programs of reform while, at the same time, recognizing the deep-seated need of people in organizations for stability. We can acknowledge the values stemming from involving personnel in decisions that concern their well-being, and as a consequence seek to move to a much more participative environment, while recognizing that the types of program on which we are launched require strong and forceful leadership. We can seek to work rationally and objec- tively, gathering ‘the facts’ and making use of modern methods of analysis, while coming up frequently against situations that can only be resolved through the intuitive judgments of seasoned managers, the newer techniques of divergent thinking, or ‘the creative leap’ that goes beyond rationality and objectivity. Above all, and the central paradox in administrative reform, neither the sentiments of the Rabbi of Zans nor those of Neil Armstrong reflect, alone, things as they really are; we must find a satisfactory position somewhere between setting our managerial goals at extremely high levels and adjusting them to the incredible complexity of the substantive functions we manage and the very much broader world in which these are performed.

Whatever the concessions we make to reality, there is simply no way we should settle for the current level of managing in the Federal public service or feel we can take our time in reaching an improved level - events in our society are moving too rapidly towards a point beyond our control for such a comforting view. To raise performance significantly, we need men and women of managerial mind, and of a professional competence, in as many of our managerial positions as the availability of this scarce resource per-

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WALTER M E R

mits. We need to invest in their development, and support them appropriately with relevant specialists and efficient support systems. We need, further, to strengthen the ties that bind individual departments together as cohesive units, and those s t i l l broader ties essential to an integrated public service, government-wide. We need to give major attention to the problems of charting a clear, or at least clearer, over-all direction, in supplement to the responsibilities of the political level for this task. Above all, we need to see each of these concerns as the dynamic, continuous, cyclicaI ones they have become, in light of the volatile environment in which they must now be performed. In total, this is a set of tasks to challenge the hardiest of administrative reformers.


Documents

Administrative reform in the federal public service: the first faltering steps