Dealing with professionals
Stefan Stern at the FT covers the problems brought on by the drive to apply private sector methods to the public sector.
……public sector workers and managers are far gloomier than their private sector (or voluntary sector) colleagues.
What explains this morose outlook? Some will feel it is the predictable whingeing of once feather-bedded workers struggling to cope with the realities of the modern world. But that is too crude. Talk to managers who have experience of both the public and private sectors and they will tell you about the remarkable levels of competence and commitment shown by employees who provide essential public services.
All over the developed world we are witnessing the same difficult, and at times painful, transition from the old centralised model of public service provision to a more up-to-date, personalised one. This change makes huge demands on managers and staff alike. And, in the UK, some of the sharpest minds in business have struggled to deploy their allegedly superior management skills to any great effect.
……. Today’s public versus private debate involves a classic category error. Put simply, the private sector is good at providing us with things that we want. But the public sector is there to give us the things that we need. It is a fundamentally different role. To suggest that what the public sector requires is more competition and “market mechanisms†is to confuse two separate types of activity.
……. The success or failure of public services is ultimately down to the quality of their management. A few observations: it would be better if leaders used the word “reform†as an incentive and not a threat. It is unwise to declare, as John Reid, the UK’s home secretary, did a few months ago, that your colleagues are “not fit for purposeâ€. The expertise of practitioners should be respected and heeded. Private sector “best practice†may not always be applicable in a new and alien context.
People who choose careers in the public sector have usually done so because they want to provide a good service, not because they want to compete commercially with rival companies. The language of markets and “contestability†is lost on them. The management challenge is to raise performance without jeopardising that service ethos.
I would hope that there is not a great deal of disagreement with any of the points mentioned above. I have read Stefan’s columns with interest over the years and found myself nodding my head at his comments on managing professionals.
What does it mean to be a professional today? Where in the past the term covered the established disciplines of law, medicine or accountancy, today it is used to cover even the work done by security guards or contract cleaners. Has the term “professional” been devalued through its ever wider application to ever more lines of work? And what implications does the changing nature of professionalism have both for employees and their organisations?
In both the public and private sectors, managers are agonising over similar things. In this age of targets, monitoring and performance management, professional people wonder how much autonomy they retain over how they go about their work. They had originally entered a profession because of a vocation, a calling. Now they found themselves pursuing a managerial agenda set remotely by bosses who often did not share the same personal commitment to the work in hand that they do.
Richard Sennett, a professor at the London School of Economics, argues that many professional people have lost “a sense of craft” in their day-to-day work. They are being judged according to their position in an occupational hierarchy, not by what it is about their work that makes them feel professional: their dedication to their craft.
“We have misunderstood the idea of quality, and how people go about doing quality work,” he says. “A most important motivator for professionals is being able to do a good job for its own sake, rather than just to meet a target. If you take that ability away from professionals they get very unhappy.”
They do not want their true professionalism to be performance-managed out of them.
For another perspective on professionalism, we go to the HSJ where Dr. Andrew Jones comments.
With that in mind, maybe the drive for clinical staff to undertake management training is not so farfetched after all. In most industries, it is change from within that has the greatest chance of successful transforming the enterprise, not an external imposition by people without experience of the sector. And healthcare professionals with formal management training offer a good chance of making that happen.
Or you end up with stories like this, which have not much at all to do with the lack of occupational health services & a lot to do with confidence in the system.