Responsible Leadership in an age of change

Thank you.

My name is Meg Hillier, and since 2005 I have been the Member of Parliament for Hackney South & Shoreditch.

I have also been a member of the Public Accounts Committee since 2011 and in June this year was elected its chair for the next five years.

For three years I was a Minister at the Home Office. I've also served as a local councillor and on the Greater London Assembly.

I give this brief biographical background because I hope it highlights that my experience and interest in the exercise of leadership is deeply anchored in its practical application in the public realm.

The leadership I've observed over the past 25 years has been the kind exercised by:

Head teachers

Senior police officers

NHS managers

Senior civil servants

Cabinet ministers

And Prime Ministers

I am a practical politician, serving a diverse and, in parts very disadvantaged, community, amidst the swirling eddies of global change.

But what I have noticed is how the nature of the political challenge has changed. I want to highlight four particular aspects of that change.

And then set out four implications for leadership.

First, the collapse of deference and tradition.

Whilst there never was a “golden age” when politicians were always held in high regard the challenge today is even greater.

Even at the height of the Second World War over 40% of the electorate thought politicians were putting self and party interest above that of the country.

We may think there was a golden age of deference, but there wasn't.

But now that disconnect between politicians and the public is even greater.

Professor Lord Anthony Giddens suggests that our society is 'post-traditional', by which he means it no longer is bound by the traditions of the past.

Our options are at least as open as the law and, especially in politics, public opinion, will allow.

What this means is that leaders and institutions cannot rely on tradition and deference to justify their existences.

Take any of the great public institutions, and you can see this is the case.

The NHS, the BBC, the Universities, the Police, Parliament.

Each institution and its leadership must justify its very existence to a sceptical population.

There are various factors at play here:

For example, the information revolution. A patient with a rare condition is as likely to know as much or more about their condition than the local GP.

Citizens are more aware of the law, their rights, and means for redress than ever before. Freedom of Information legislation has opened the books like never before in our history.

It puts power in the hands of the people, and this has huge implications for leaders, the risks they take, their internal deliberations and how they are held to account.

To add to our challenges we have had institutional crises and scandals, which buffet once-mighty edifices, such as the impact of the expenses scandal on parliament, or the scandals affecting the BBC and Church of England.

Second, the impact of the crash.

The global financial crash, undermined trust and faith in mighty financial institutions, national governments and individual leaders, as they stood powerless in the face of vast global forces.

Leaders ever since know that no institution is 'too big to fail', and that no matter how established, how interconnected to the rest of the system, and how famous the leader, institutions can and will disappear overnight.

But the financial crash did not just test our faith in institutions it has created the global financial squeeze which has limited the capacity of governments across the world. Put another way we cannot simply buy our way out of problems.

Third, the emergence of 'wicked issues'.

Few of the challenges we face today are technical ones.

Joe Chamberlain is often regarded as the founder of modern local government. As Mayor of Birmingham he brought clean water and gas to the masses. But the big challenges we face today are more likely to be “wicked issues”. Clean water was probably the biggest single breakthrough in extending life and the quality of life.

But now we face issues with more complex origins , where there is less agreement about what should happen, and where no one issue can be tackled in isolation.

So, just as the financial crisis robbed us of the financial resources to do many things we now find that like the magician in the Wizard of Oz the so-called “levers” he controlled are just not connected to anything.

Fourth and finally, the crisis of identity.

In this post-traditionalist world we see real challenges in terms of our sense of “us’.

Robert Putnam is a famed American political sociologist. He is perhaps most famous for his book “Bowling Alone”. In it he analysed the decline in ten pin bowling leagues in America. People still went bowling but now only with their close friends and family. Putnam talked about social capital and contrasted “bonding” capital with “bridging” capital. If the family goes out once a week to play bowling as a family that is bonding, but if each week they play against some other family that is bridging capital.

Now I do not know how many of you go bowling, so let me give another example. I am sure if I asked how many of you are on Facebook or Twitter the majority of you will own up. But what is interesting about these social media phenomena is how it operates. What we often find is an “echo chamber” effect. Instead of connecting with diverse groups we connect with fellow minded citizens.

That connection reinforces our shared views, it does not help us understand the views of others.

Let me give a specific example

Immediately post the close of polls in the Scottish Independence referendum Alex Salmond was convinced he had won. The social media analysis showed that the vast majority of users of social media in Scotland were pro Independence. But what transpired is that those social media users were talking to themselves. To this day there are still some who suspect a fix in the result because all their “evidence”, all their tweets and face book interactions showed a clear win.

So if these are four big challenges for modern political leadership, how do we respond, and more particularly how will I as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee aim to rise to those challenges.

Let me now turn to four ways in which these changes are impacting on leadership.

First

we aim for transparency. Most decisions in any public system are made for the best reasons, and with the best intent. But in an age beyond deference that is not enough. So our job is to bring that ray of sunlight so that the public can see what the process of the policy was. Critically I aim to develop a lot more pre-implementation scrutiny. That way we can make visible what the intent and expectation of the policy was.

No leader should be able to blame others, hide behind the collective, or obscure the decision-making process to avoid culpability.

In an age of Freedom of Information, and organisational transparency, the position of leader is exposed. This is a good thing.

So we need to develop new ways to allow leaders to admit error, learn in public, seek guidance and help, and develop their skills, all in the public glare. My committee and I are very positive about the advent of the Major Projects Authority which trains civil servants to manage projects proactively and give them space to talk about mistakes and methods.

Secondly

Leadership must be exercised in times of austerity.

Reductions in public expenditure will place new pressures on public leaders to deliver their services with less. The last rounds of public expenditure reductions have pared budgets to the bone.

So the question for leaders becomes one of strategic focus and necessity. In other words, leaders must ask: what must we do, what should we do and what could we do? This is year-zero leadership, looking at the fundamentals, and asking whether services must be delivered in the same way.

Leaders must be financially literate like never before. I expect the leaders who appear before me at the Public Accounts Committee to know their numbers.

They must also be imaginative and innovative.

I have asked the Public Accounts Committee to consider every penny we review as belonging to the taxpayer, not the government or Parliament. It's not our money, it's yours.

And every penny wasted is a form of theft.

That includes profligate management lifestyles as much as inefficient procurement.

So the responsible leader must be focussed on every penny in and out of the organisation like never before.

But it is not just about ensuring the money is well spent. The question we have to ask is not just about the use of resources. It is 'what was the outcome'. It has taken a long time for the public sector to move from counting inputs to counting outputs. In my term as Chair I intend to see the switch to focusing on outcomes.

Thirdly

If our challenges are now rarely technical (or to be precise rarely purely technical) we need to jettison mantras which depend on an old presumption.

It's the power of influence that we need.

I would argue that in today's climate, it is the leader who can display great emotional intelligence who will succeed.

This means technical know-how and intelligence as measured by IQ will become less important and a repertoire of emotional intelligence techniques, including being able to understand emotions in yourself and others, will become more important.

A conclusion of that argument is that women leaders will come increasingly to the fore, as the bulk of studies into emotional intelligence suggest that women have higher degrees of emotional intelligence than men.

I predict that this century is the century of great women leaders.

But beyond more emotional intelligence we also need to recognise complexity.

In an age of technical solutions the answer was get the best team together to build the bridge, build the plane, indeed build the bomb. But with challenges that straddle many responsibilities we now need to think “whole place” or “whole system”.

So here are some clear messages to government departments – no cost shunting. It only serves the short term interests of ministers and senior civil servants, it does not serve the public.

“Fail fast” – adopt the mantra of the Government Digital Service, better to recognise that we need to experiment and learn from that experiment than bluff and deny what is the obvious. I will not name any one department as particularly prone to that, but if I were DWP would certainly come to mind.

“Think like a user/patient/parent, act like a taxpayer” – to solve the big problems of today we need to see citizens as a resource not a problem.

Finally

Let's us recognise that one of the clearest examples of a group talking to themselves are those trapped inside the Westminster/Whitehall bubble.

I am a neighbouring MP to Jeremy Corbyn. Prior to becoming an MP I had been a councillor in Jeremy’s constituency, and I subsequently represented that constituency on the Greater London Assembly. So I have known and worked with Jeremy for a long time. No one has ever accused us of being on the same wing of the Labour Party but I like Jeremy and I know how hard-working he has been.

But if we want to understand why Jeremy won then one reason was that more than any other candidate he connected beyond the bubble.

The Public Accounts Committee is the oldest and most prestigious select committee. In my office the walls are covered with portraits of past chairmen- some very famous such as Gladstone, but all men (Margaret Hodge’s portrait is yet to come).

So with all that pomp and history it would be very easy to live within the bubble.

Instead I intend to be more public facing, taking the committee to different parts of the country, talking to people who actually depend on public services so that we engage with them and they believe we are listening to them.

This engagement with the 'real world' strikes me as a vital aspect of responsible leadership.

So those are the four ways leadership must adapt: transparency coupled with accountability; delivering in austerity; understanding emotional intelligence; and connecting to the real world.

Finally, then, a note of optimism.

My constituency includes the famous 'Silicon Roundabout', which boasts the third-largest number of tech start-ups after San Francisco and New York.

When I visit these companies, I meet leaders who amaze, inspire and delight. They are often young. Often from countries other than the UK, from the States to the Baltics. Their growing companies are filled with talent and energy. They may seem wacky yet the leadership is superb - entrepreneurial, visionary, collaborative, flexible, tearing up the rule book.

I wonder how many of them would have survived in a British boardroom thirty years ago, stuffed with old school ties and time-serving 'yes men'.

My point is that new forms of responsible leadership are being born all around us. We don't need to read a book when we can walk into a tech start-up or an academy school.

The only constant in our lives is constant change, it may seem daunting but modern leadership needs to cope with this.

ENDS