Between us, we have led teams to achieve big things inside and outside the civil service for over 30 years. But what prompts us to write on leadership is having been led by 50+ senior leaders in our careers.
At times, we have felt very well led and at others, less so; and having reflected deeply and discussed extensively, we wanted to share our thoughts with a wider audience.
Despite never previously crossing paths and working almost exclusively in different departments, we found we have shared views on what makes government departments productive and effective. In this piece, we explore the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, and offer some ideas on how to embed this essential skill.
Kate Sturdy: Creating resonant organisations requires leading from calm
Productivity and the public sector
Government departments look at productivity through quantitative measures, usually financial expenditure against activity completed. The annual Civil Service People Survey provides additional qualitative insight into how engaged civil servants feel. But even together, these measures miss the critical element of relationship effectiveness.
All organisations are rich in opportunities for wasting human effort – whether it be through suboptimal leadership, bureaucratic frustrations or unsupportive culture. There are good reasons why such pressure is particularly intense in the political crucible of the civil service. Scrutiny is high, failure is acutely exposing, money is scarce.
"When leaders are dissonant, they have lower empathy for self and others, and make poorer decisions"
Our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world burns up human energy in managing emotional responses to stress – both one’s own and others’. I know from experience that there are ways to improve leadership to support a more productive and motivated workforce.
Leadership in the civil service
The nature of public sector leadership matters. Politicians and taxpayers rely on civil servants to bring both ethics and efficacy. As well as signing up to core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality, many civil servants are motivated by altruism. The chances are high, therefore, of civil service leadership creating “resonant” organisations. According to neuroscientists, these are characterised by leaders who are emotionally intelligent, empathetic and able to build positive emotional climates. The resonant leader will take seriously the interpersonal aspects of leadership – not just the delivery aspects.
The opposite of this is “dissonant” organisations, which feature leaders who are out of sync with those they lead. They are often directive, critical or emotionally disengaged, producing stress and disengagement in followers. This can happen when leaders naturally prioritise getting things done over engaging their teams. It can also happen when organisations are under phenomenal pressure to deliver. This is often the case in government departments – and it drives all leaders towards deprioritising energy spent on relationships. Departments also tend to be heavily hierarchical in nature. Research into bureaucracies shows that rigid hierarchy can create emotional distance between leaders and teams because the culture rates compliance over connection.
Ironically, this “delivery at all costs” mentality has negative consequences for productivity. The leaders in the organisation fall into greater hierarchical “command and control” styles, and everyone becomes less capable of regulating their response to stress – and to each other.
Encouraging resonance in leaders
When leaders are dissonant, and their ability to self-regulate is burnt out, they have lower empathy for self and others, and make poorer decisions. This gets to the heart of leading teams productively.
Resonant leadership requires leading from calm. Being better able to empathise, regulate one’s own responses and make good decisions helps get the most from teams for successful and sustained delivery. It also happens to tick the ethical boxes by being the right thing to do by others. Leading from calm protects leader and team alike against burnout, and promotes inclusion. This is not only more effective; it also chimes with those core and wider values held dear by civil servants and public alike.
The civil service often delivers remarkable things: think of the Vaccines Taskforce and leaving the world’s largest trading bloc, but also less headline-grabbing work like enabling communities to take ownership of their prized village pub. It is an institution that gets things done and helps people to live lives of value.
Where it is well led, it carries out this work in a way that benefits and develops those that work within it; where it isn’t, it delivers at their cost. In my experience, the best civil service leaders are those who secure freely-given discretionary effort of those that they lead, enabling delivery for citizens while developing and caring for their people.
Alex Ormerod-Cloke: Discretionary effort is the lifeblood of high-performing teams
Discretionary effort
Discretionary effort is all those things that relate to a person’s performance for which civil service employers cannot contract. Those exhibiting discretionary effort are the people who fire their hand up first for any new initiative, who prioritise ruthlessly so that they get the big, difficult things done early in the day and spend the rest of the day supporting others. They share learning far and wide, actively drive their own development, and find opportunities to overlap outside reading with inside work interests (for which Anthony King and Ivor Crewe’s Blunders of our Governments must still be the prime book recommendation: a lesson in how not to do things).
Discretionary effort is visible – it exudes from someone through their demonstrable focus on the outcomes they are aiming at, ignoring all the distraction and demands for delay the bureaucracy inevitably throws up. It is the lifeblood of high-performing teams. When you are surrounded by it and it is given freely, you sense that almost anything can happen.
Contractual effort
Contractual effort, on the other hand, is the Parisian approach to street cleaning: things get done but they do not sparkle. Contractual effort says: “This is a job and I will treat it like that.” The human dynamism required to overcome the stultifying effects of bureaucracy does not present itself where obstacles arise; they are accepted. For many, this is just the space and energy they have to commit and their discretionary effort goes on other areas of their life. But in reality, human energy is, at the marginal level, a zero-sum game and to get ambitious things delivered, leaders need to persuade people that they should give their discretionary efforts within work.
Freely given vs not freely given
A leader’s role, then, is to inspire people to expend their discretionary efforts inside work and in pursuit of ministers’ objectives – and not merely demand it. But it is essential that these efforts are freely given and not extracted. There is something intrinsic in us as agentic beings that means a sand timer is turned as soon as we are forced to act against our will in some way, leading inexorably to our departure in mind or spirit, or – where we hold our work too tightly – burnout.
Leadership that demands discretionary effort and doesn’t inspire it is the self-interested kind, focused only on reputation and career. When this kind of leader faces a tradeoff between their own image and their team’s wellbeing, they pursue their own interests; their team is merely the port in which the ship of their ambition is temporarily docked.
"Leaders with self-accountability ask: 'Am I giving the people I lead what they need to feel valued and motivated?'"
How it is that leaders secure freely-given discretionary effort
The question, then, is how leaders secure freely-given discretionary effort from those they lead for the benefit of their teams and for the citizens they serve. The answer, from my experience, is a combination of connection and direction.
Nature offers us a wonderful metaphor here. Researchers have discovered that trees are connected with each other through a web of roots and fungi, something wonderfully termed “the wood-wide web”. When a tree is damaged, other trees in the network feel this through this web of connections. This kind of connection has to exist for discretionary efforts to be given freely; teams must know that they are connected to their leader and that if they feel pain, they won’t feel it alone. Bonus points are no doubt available if the team environment is as calm as a forest.
The direction required for discretionary given effort is not just an echoing of ministerial objectives but an articulation of the change in the world that everyone’s collective efforts will achieve, and how citizens will feel the benefit of this change in their lives. It is the capacity of the leader to tell a story that translates the political into an opportunity for each person to serve the public good. When led effectively, people feel as though their leader is both alongside them and showing them the way to this end state. The great leaders also make it fun.
There is of course only so much a leader can do. The Overton window of employee engagement is wider or more narrow depending upon the person’s past experiences or interest in the subject matter, neither of which any leader has any control over.
Now that I have left the civil service I have some space to see also how arid the land of bureaucracy can be for developing and supporting emotionally connected leaders. So for me it’s all the more impressive how many there are who manage it.
Drawing out what is common between our sense of resonant leadership and freely given discretionary efforts, we arrive at the following components for effective leadership in the civil service.
Self-accountability
As leaders in the civil service rise, their power rises with them. This creates a leadership choice: does the leader connect with those they lead and hold themselves accountable for the impact they have on others, or do they instead expect their teams to shape themselves around what the leader wants and needs? Leaders with self-accountability ask: “Am I giving the people I lead what they need to feel valued and motivated?” For those that don’t, they are the centre of their world, and their teams are not.
Emotional intensity
The most effective leaders unbottle their emotional intensity, care deeply about achieving ministers’ goals and connect wholeheartedly with the citizens they are serving.
Emotional self-regulation
This is the underpinning for self-accountability – and the vital partner to emotional intensity. Whether this be through reflection, coaching, meditation or any other practice, a leader has to understand what is going on in their house to minimise the shadows they cast and not serve their own needs unknowingly.
Empathy
This is the connective tissue that, for example, ensures that when a leader is advising on what can be delivered, they think about what the demands on the team will be before providing assent. They show up in human form and all the humans they lead feel the sunshine that emanates as a result.
Now the question is: How do we develop these traits in our leaders? – on which we plan to write a follow up. How about a new Maslow’s hierarchy for civil servants: one in which emotional intelligence is the foundation for all other leadership skills and hence organisational productivity and effectiveness?
Kate Sturdy is an executive coach, trainer and leadership consultant. Andy Ormerod-Cloke is a policy entrepreneur and founder of Citizenry