Focused renewal: Vital public-private connections

by Paul Crookall

Kevin Lynch is Clerk of the Privy Council and head of the federal public service. An economist and career public servant, he is a former deputy minister of Industry who was pivotal in developing the Government of Canada’s innovation agenda. He later was deputy minister of Finance when the government expanded its support of research and development, as well as launched its agenda of tax cuts and debt reduction. Immediately prior to becoming Clerk a year ago, he was Canada’s representative at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. The Clerk spoke about his views of public service renewal, including the challenges and opportunities they present, with editor-in-chief Paul Crookall.



You have made public service renewal a major focus.

Public service renewal is not about a specific initiative or effort at a point in time. It is a continual and dynamic process that seeks to ensure the public service reflects both the aspirations and needs of Canadians. It’s about being an ongoing institution that is continually improving. It’s not at all about something that is broken, or needs fixing to reach a certain point and stay there.

As a starting point, we must realize that the public service is an important institution. Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, observes that “one of the most important and enduring competitive advantages that a country can have is a lean, effective, honest civil service.” The World Bank and the IMF have confirmed this. I am struck by the correlation between a strong, non-partisan public service and private sector competitive advantage. I think we under-appreciate this contribution.

Therefore, clearly the private sector has a vital interest in our renewal, so that a professional public service committed to excellence can continue to provide the basis for sustained success. The first step in renewal is to emphasize that the public service plays a key role. We are reaching out, from central organizations, to the private sector. I have spent a lot of time going out and talking with citizens and the private sector, telling them we would like them to be more involved in both the public policy dialogue and in understanding the importance of public service renewal. That is also why the Prime Minister set up the advisory committee on the public service. It was not established, as so many commissions are, to deal with a specific problem, report, and disband. It is ongoing. We have nine eminent Canadians who are to provide advice to the PM and the Clerk on how to keep the public service on the leading edge. I have been struck by their understanding of the importance of the advice they are providing.

Internally, we have set up a Deputy Ministers’ committee on renewal, headed by Margaret Bloodworth. Its focus is internal: How do we make sure that this institution, which is so important to the country, continues to contribute, to use best practices, to fulfill its role?

Overall, we are emphasizing that renewal is an ongoing, collective challenge and opportunity for all of us to refresh and renew the institution we work in.

Challenges
Public and private sectors face similar challenges in renewal. It’s important to identify these challenges to understand what renewal means and how to achieve it.

First is demographics. Canada’s population is aging, and the federal public service more so than other segments of society. Canadians are becoming more diverse. As a public service, we are reflecting that diversity, but probably not at the pace that we should. Diversity of backgrounds, experiences and cultures allows us to give advice in many ways that reflects the views of Canadians and in so doing be a more effective public service.

Technology is very much changing the way folks do business. I’m not sure we’re maximizing the use of technology, internally and in service delivery to clients. We are sometimes at the leading edge, but that’s an area where we can learn, develop and improve.

We recruit and retain, not in isolation, but in the broad social and economic context of Canada and the world. We have many competitors for the best and the brightest coming out of university, and whatever stage of their career they’re in. We have to be conscious that we’ve got to work hard to recruit and retain them.

The next two challenges are more unique to public service. The public is changing its demands. One demand is for greater accountability and transparency. Another is for really efficient, effective delivery of core services. We have to understand and respond to these challenges to be successful in the ongoing renewal process.


Focus of renewal
It’s important to be practical. So rather than search for one specific thing that is going to change everything, we have focused on a series of pragmatic areas where we face the largest challenges with the biggest potential payoffs, and where we need to develop the greatest capacity to respond.

Recruitment
First and foremost is recruitment. We need to continuously bring the best and the brightest into government. There are more competitors and more opportunities for young people than 20-30 years ago when many of us joined the public service.

For too long, we have been a relatively passive recruiter. We’ve relied on being Canada’s largest employer, the national government, and folks would come to us. In today’s market, we have to be much more proactive. We can’t delegate it to the HR department. It’s got to be a primary focus and activity of senior management. So, part of our change of view is that recruitment will become the job of the DM, ADMs and senior management.

The reason for that comes from our value proposition, which is that a career in the public service is unique. It’s the nature of the job, the professional experience, the opportunity that by coming with us you can grow personally and professionally, and you can make a difference to your country. That’s the unique value-added proposition we have to market. But we must have people doing it who have experienced it, are living it and can represent it, who can actually interact with graduates on that basis.

We need to focus on our “brand.” As strong as it has been in the past, we need to define and make it more recognizable and compelling.

Development
Second is development: How do you provide development opportunities commensurate with them being able to continually grow personally and professionally? That, I think, is going to take a much more personalized approach than in the past.

Retention
Third is retention. How do we make sure that we hold people in their careers? Our great advantage is that you can change your career many times without ever leaving the Public Service of Canada – across the country and around the world, in different roles. We have to ensure those opportunities to do different things in different departments in different areas are open and that mobility is available.

Management tool kit
The fourth area is the management tool kit – to make sure we have the flexibility and the ability to do those various things mentioned above. We need a constellation of rules and other things that encourage risk management, not risk aversion. We want to encourage innovation in policy development and service delivery. Not to avoid risk at all cost but to risk manage in a very clever way – that’s best practice in parts of the private sector, and we need to make it best practice, and common practice, through a series of incentives and disincentives.

Leadership
I think the key to organizations is to encourage leadership at all levels. What you have to do is to make sure that the folks have a good understanding of the values and the priorities. For that you have to rely on many, many levels to actually implement and innovate. And to do that, you really have to make sure that you develop, promote and reward leadership, because I think that’s what people are ultimately working for.

Those are our areas of focus and what we are going to continue to do. Some of it is going to be at the corporate level, some will come from input from advisory groups, some will be at the departmental level because one size doesn’t fit all. The overall objectives and priorities should fit all, but how you implement it is not necessarily the same.


A difficult job
You are head of the largest, most complex and geographically diverse organization, public or private sector, in this country. It seems an impossible job. How do you do it?

It is, I think, similar to other jobs in the public service. I thrive on the complexity, the opportunity to move things forward. The flip side of the challenge of the job is the opportunity.

The Clerk of the Privy Council plays a three-dimensional role. One is as the primary policy advisor to the Prime Minister. As the Secretary of the Cabinet, the position involves the management of the cabinet system. And finally, I am head of the public service. The three are interrelated, because part of helping to manage this large complex organization is the need for clarity of priority, clear signals and orderly corporate focus. What we’re about is policy, service delivery, accountability and effective management. I think the three functions really interact well with each other, and, as a whole, that’s the nature of the institution.

Accountability
It has been my experience that the media, the public, and public servants prefer that when things are going wrong, that it be acknowledged early in the process, rather than after the inquiry is completed. Is this earlier acceptance of responsibility something you and the prime minister are trying to achieve?

I think it’s worth stepping back a bit on accountability. The public is looking for greater openness, transparency, and accountability in what government does. You can see the response in the increased role of the Auditor General, the increased role for the audit and evaluation functions in each department, the change in the nature of parliamentary oversight, and greater reporting to Parliament. Accountability is not one specific thing. It’s how you’ve involved Parliament and the public in the activities of government. It’s the reporting to Parliament through the Departmental Progress Reports and Results-Based Planning. It’s not one specific element, but many factors.

Government can’t be risk-free and error-free because the flip side in accepting some risk is the opportunity for innovation and improvement. You’ve got to find the balance. We want to have good risk-management systems in place and make sure that folks understand the values, the principals, the approaches and priorities and then take decisions in that context. They’re not always going to be right, but they’re not always right in the private sector. The key has got to be that the decisions are taken for the right reasons, with the right degree of openness and with the right focus on excellence. That’s the approach government is moving towards. Making mistakes is part of doing things. What we need to do is focus on excellence.

The flip side, getting the good news out, also needs attention. In the last AG’s report, she noted that one of government’s biggest programs – pensions and old age security, accounting for 15% of the total budget – was well managed. That got no press. On the other hand, the Canadian Forces seem to be doing a good job of getting their story, good and bad, out. What is the public service doing to get better media coverage of success stories?

That’s an important question. Part of being open and transparent is to talk about what runs well. It is a joint responsibility, of public servants, Parliament, the officers of Parliament, and yes, the media, to get these stories out. The public needs both good and bad news to make informed judgments, to build an ongoing dialogue. Once policy choices have been made, we need to discuss publicly how we implement that policy, and how we are doing at implementation. We need to increase understanding.

We need broad engagement and dialogue between the public and the public service.

Greater openness and accountability and transparency is understanding everything the government does and that’s understanding the things that run well, not just the things that run into challenges. And you’re quite right, it’s got to be symmetric. In that general context, I’m strongly supportive of greater outreach by public servants to their clients for an ongoing dialogue in both ways – explaining what we’re trying to do, not in a policy-making sense but in an operational way, what we are doing, how we can do it better. I think that kind of dialogue is appreciated by both sides – it gives public servants a chance to get feedback and allows us to explain what we’re doing.

If you think the public service is a really important institution, then you need engagement with both sides, the public and private sectors, and part of that engagement has to be by public servants.


Stress
Something we hear often from our readers, and from Linda Duxbury’s research, is that mid-managers are increasingly feeling stressed, overloaded, and not able to achieve work/life balance. Is this a concern that renewal is dealing with?

I think we always have to be realistic about what we can and can’t do. Modern work life comes with complexity and demands that we should always try to manage so that we don’t create needless demands, don’t in effect set activity going that doesn’t lead to productive results. Being clear about priorities, being clear about timelines, being clear about what we’re doing – that in and of itself can reduce stress. Paying attention to the five areas of focus will help. But there are demands that are in fact there, as they are in the private sector, and the key is that we, as managers, have to make sure that what we do is actually important and timely and we use good management processes.

The sense of achieving something worthwhile needs to be there.


Afghanistan
You were recently in Afghanistan. That must have been a moving experience. What was your objective in going, and what was your experience like?

The objective was twofold. First, to see first hand the scope of the challenges faced by the Afghan people and their capacity to address those challenges. And second, to observe what impact on the ground Canada is having in terms of achieving the goals of security and development set out by the United Nations and NATO.

What I can say is that when you visit Afghanistan, it is impossible to be indifferent to the plight of the Afghan people. I was deeply struck by the will of the people to break out from the situation they are in, and their pride of who they are and their country.

There are four challenges as I see it that Afghanistan faces. They are the challenges of security, governance, development and the relationship with Pakistan. I must say that when you see the will of the Afghan people to rebuild their country, even though they lack so much, you can’t help but see how important the work is we’re doing as part of the multinational effort. I was tremendously impressed by the profound dedication and courage of the women and men of the Canadian Forces, Foreign Affairs, CIDA and the RCMP who are serving their country so well and are so committed to making a real difference in the lives of the Afghan people.