Book Review: Ministers as Leaders
I strongly recommend Leighton Andrews' latest book, Ministerial Leadership: Practice, Performance, and Power, which focusses on ministers as leaders rather than as politicians.
Leighton is well qualified in this area having been the BBC's Head of Public Affairs and a Minister in the Welsh Government. He now teaches, researches and writes in the fields of government, public leadership, regulation and innovation and makes the good point that the media seldom comments on ministers as leaders. Rarely does it discuss leadership itself, rather than the supposed attributes of party leaders, prime ministers or first ministers.
Ministerial leadership takes a number of forms –
· collective, as members of a ministerial or Cabinet team;
· departmental, in a dual leadership role with their Permanent Secretary, Director General of divisional director, which requires some commitment to stewardship; or
· as leaders of sectoral systems (for example in Education or Health).
Leighton draws heavily and effectively on the Institute for Government's Ministers Reflect series of interviews. His various chapters include
· The Ministerial Role – activism and agency
· Becoming a Minister
· Time Control.
· Performing Ministerial Leadership
· Leading the Department.
· The orchestrated collective leadership of government
· Ministers Decide?
· Gender and Ministering?
· Ministerial Performance
· The emergence of the delivery focused minister
Different readers will focus on different parts of the book but civil servants will particularly enjoy his analysis of the relationship between ministers, policy officials, and Private Offices. The following quotes may give you a feel for the width and depth of his interest in that area:
It’s very easy for ministers to think they are the gods and “of course you should drive around in cars with flags on the front” and all this kind of stuff. Actually, all you are is a visible face of quite a big team of civil servants. Just getting over yourself is quite an important point, making sure that you don’t let all this go to your head.
When I asked the private office what they were there for....the memorable phrase was “we’re the roadies, you’re the talent”.
Sorting out the quality and timeliness of correspondence is generally overlooked in the political science literature on ministerial performance, but it is a leadership behaviour.
Michael Fallon recalled ‘I changed all my meetings from hour meetings, which is the great Whitehall fashion, to 30 minutes, which absolutely worked. People think “we’re only going to have time to get two or three points over” so they choose the best two or three points and get on with it’
Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she had learned early on ‘the distinction between the organisational, operational, internal operational issues, (which were the job of the civil servants) and the policy development, decision making, communication stuff, which was the responsibility of the minister’.
Alan Johnson said ‘it’s like driving a dual control car. If the minister sits there and doesn’t do anything, they’ll put it in gear and drive it away, because government has to work’
It may be a question of selection bias, but the former ministers interviewed were generally complimentary about officials and their responsiveness to ministerial needs. The IfG identified no real examples of ministers seeing the civil service as operating conspiratorially, though there were clear examples given of the need to have officials moved for non-delivery in some cases.
Philip Hammond said ‘I was a civil servant’s politician in that I didn’t go into government with the mindset that civil servants are bound to be wrong …. Which is a mindset that some of my colleagues, particularly in my party, have had. I’ve always found civil servants to be admirably neutral, well informed, and willing to do whatever work you direct them to’
For Richard Harrington, the fast-stream civil servants ‘are as good as anyone that goes to Freshfields or Deloitte or Goldman Sachs or whatever’.
Jeremy Hunt's main concern was ‘civil servants not having the confidence to speak out when they thought that one of my ideas was barmy’.
Iain Duncan Smith also expressed the view that officials early on could be too ‘nice’. He tried to identify those who had ‘an analytical and questioning approach’ and were ‘honest about what the difficulties were’ But ‘the good civil servants you will find are the ones that actually want to drive your agenda, they are like gold dust and they want to take ownership and they’re there with the answers’.
There's lots more in this wide ranging book. Indeed, its only obvious flaws, for the non-academic reader, are its length (440 pages) and price (£99.99 hardback, £79.50 eBook or PDF). But, if you have easy access to a library, or can persuade your institution to buy it, I doubt you will regret reading it.
Martin Stanley
Author - Speaking Truth to Power (63 pages, £3.99)