Will Labour's leadership revolutionise government culture?

Mission-led government: impacts on Public Sector – part 3: leadership and culture

This article is Part 3 of a three-part series exploring mission-led government and the implications for public sector organisations. Parts 1 and 2 can be found below:

Reading time: 5 minutes

We’ve previously discussed some of the challenges that may arise from a change in government and how best to respond to them, including through the creation of a Strategy Management Office and undertaking a detailed organisation design review. These solutions, however, can’t work in isolation. Rising to the future challenges in a change in administration will require leaders to work in very different ways.

In this final part of our series exploring a change in government, we look at the role of leadership, culture, and capability in supporting effective mission delivery.

What changes are needed?

Fostering a culture that enables mission-led government requires a change in approach across the Civil Service: from top-down decision-making to agile experimentation; from departmental objectives to collaborative service delivery.

Here are some of our top tips for how you can adjust the culture within government to support mission delivery:  

How can leaders support changes in government culture to drive mission delivery?

• Appreciate the degree of change: It is vital that leaders recognise the scale of change required to deliver mission-led government and the need for trade-offs; identifying and communicating what needs to stop, start and be done differently to make this happen. Supporting their people to deliver work across departments will not only require a shift in how they think and act but may require more complex lines of accountability. Culture change starts at the top: leaders should set this vision, communicating the importance of change, and lead by example.
• Encourage collaboration: Delivering cross-departmental missions will require a culture of cooperation and collaboration, of give-and-take and shared appreciation. People should be actively encouraged to embrace the opportunities that flow from working collaboratively with colleagues and stakeholders both within and outside the Civil Service. Through building new, multidisciplinary teams and relationships, there is real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence that’s held across the system, to galvanise action and mobilise different groups from across society.

• Build an experimentation culture: Mission-led government will require trying new approaches and ways of working. Leaders should encourage experimentation within departments as a low-cost, low-risk way to test out new ideas and innovative changes, with successful experiments ruthlessly pursued to adoption rather than assumed to happen organically.

• Embrace social partnership: A new, more humble form of statecraft that builds social partnership with central, devolved and local government, academia, citizens, and the voluntary and private sectors all working together, will help create a sense of shared purpose in pursuit of successful mission delivery.

• Build new capabilities: Achieving the new Government’s five missions will be a serious challenge, requiring the Civil Service to draw heavily on its vast reserves of existing talent and capability. However, with the incredible pace of technological change, leaders will need to demonstrate their willingness to test and build out new organisational capabilities (such AI) at pace, working across boundaries to have maximum impact.
• Preserving the best: It’s important to make sure the best of your current culture, capabilities and ways of working are preserved to build on in the future. For example, civil servants moving between roles and departments in Whitehall helps develop highly skilled people with a broad range of experience that will be incredibly useful when focusing on cross-cutting missions.

Where have we done this before?

At Q5, we have a strong track record of supporting leaders within public sector organisations as well as across a range of other industries, to deliver organisational transformation at scale in challenging environments through embracing culture change:

• We’ve worked with the Culture & Engagement team at HM Revenue & Customs to design, test and refine new values and behaviours, develop a change toolkit, and facilitate leadership events to launch them to the organisation.
• We co-designed new ways of working and target behaviours for High Speed 2, supported by measures to track culture shift and the organisation’s success in holding people to account.
• In the NHS New Hospitals Programme, staff from across government, the NHS and the private sector have come together to form a temporary organisation. We helped the NHP team to define a distinct culture, including ways of working, values and behaviours that enabled them to work effectively together as a new and remote team, coaching their leadership team to embed the new culture through their own behaviours.

How can we support?

We believe that everyone deserves to be led well within a healthy culture and we want to help people and teams develop their leadership mindset and behaviours so that they and their organisations can work healthily and achieve more.

We know that for leaders in the Civil Service to achieve a mission-driven culture in their departments it will take much more than an off-the-shelf toolkit or programme.

To achieve the change required within departments, we can offer a three-part approach:

1. Detailed cultural diagnostics that give leaders a clear measure of the health of the culture within departments, helping to understand what should be retained and what really needs to change.
2. Customised leadership development that appreciates your particular context and challenges. Each of our programmes is designed to meet the specific demands and goals of your organisation and encourages learning through self-discovery, exposure, and practice – so that lessons are felt deeply, and last longer.
3. Finally, to support leaders to lead change from the front within their departments, we offer a tailored approach to coaching that meets individual needs in the context of the new mission-led context.

Our team of organisation development consultants and coaches are experts at avoiding the common traps in leadership development and culture change and are dedicated to the pursuit of our clients’ goals. If you’d like to know more about how we could support you achieve a mission-driven culture in your organisation please get in touch by emailing [email protected].