Mission Driven Government: Ordinary Hope and Public Services

This essay was first published in Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild (Download PDF).

This essay is adapted from Dan Honig and Sam Freedman’s post ‘How Labour can fix the public sector’ in Comment is Freed

As I chat with strangers I meet in and around London, they often comment on how things are not going so well in this country (e.g. riots, transit strikes/ delays, weather, football). As an American, I feel an irresistible urge to reply by pointing out some of the great things about this green and pleasant land.

There are plenty of things I can mention to get a smile and a cheerful nod. The most effective seem to be National Trust scones, British humour, Richard Osman, and millionaire shortbread. But when I’m searching for an argument, I mention what I think truly is one of this country’s superpowers: its public servants. I include here the Whitehall civil service and the broader universe of public sector employees and service providers. The average Brit often thinks I am having a laugh when I say this. But I’m not. A new government, one searching to restore hope to the country, has the opportunity to unleash an incredibly powerful engine to assist that progress: what I call mission-driven bureaucrats.

A genuine strength, worth celebrating – but under threat

I study bureaucrats around the world, and work with governments to help improve their performance. The British civil service is rightly the envy of many. An impartial, meritocratic institution with an ethos of public service didn’t come easy. It is the product of long investment. Gordon Brown once said that in establishing the rule of law, “the first 500 years are the hardest.” The same can be said of the civil service. With investment, patience, and time, the UK built a civil service second to none.

There has been an effort in recent decades to diminish this asset. If this had been the intention of the prior administration, I would celebrate their effectiveness. Job satisfaction in the civil service is historically low. The Institute for Government’s most recent Whitehall Monitor paints a picture of declining morale, with increasing numbers of civil servants heading for the exits.

The tools the UK government employed to achieve this behaviour change are what I call ‘managing for compliance’. The system is (over)burdened with rules, procedures, sanctions, and incentives. All are attempts to get bureaucrats to do what they otherwise would not. Compliance puts control and authority, those who set the targets and monitor the behaviours, at the top of the pyramid. Those lower down are meant to follow orders and respond to the reporting frameworks, carrots, and sticks dangled from above.

Tools of compliance succeed only by generating behaviours and actions that can be monitored, measured, rewarded or sanctioned. Using compliance to change behaviours generates good performance where what is to be done is observable and verifiable. This is why fast food restaurants and package delivery companies heavily use the tools of compliance: what can be monitored about a burger or a package on a doorstep is pretty close to all the firm cares about.

Unfortunately, most things that government strives to do are not easily monitored and measured. A teacher with a student, doctor with a patient, social worker with a vulnerable child can be monitored. So too can health or education outcomes far down the line. But long-term outcomes are very hard to attribute to the individual teacher, doctor, or social worker. Too many other factors contribute to their individual performances. It is impossible to get those workers to do the right thing through pure compliance.

Too often – in Whitehall, in local council offices, in the NHS, in schools, and far beyond – there are systems that keep the humans in them from doing the reasonable, positive things those humans want to do. Luckily, there is another way – managing for empowerment. As it happens, this is also the best, and likely only, way for Labour to deliver on its promise of missiondriven government.

For Government to change direction or perform better, individuals need to alter their behaviour. What can lead those people to change?

One option is changing the people themselves - chucking out the current lot and starting anew. But it’s a prescription that doesn’t fit the British public sector very well. The fact that the public servants of the NHS are good humans who want to do good things is generally (though by no means universally) true according to all available evidence. If it’s the system that’s the problem, there’s no reason to believe that new personnel won’t in turn be demotivated and constrained by that system.

Far more promising than changing staff themselves is changing the system to alter the behaviour of existing staff. The good news is individuals can and do alter their behaviour all the time. Getting public servants motivated by, and acting in ways aligned to, the mission requires a management system that supports and empowers those actions. My research shows these are practices that allow autonomy, cultivate competence, and help public servants fulfil their purpose.

When more empowering management is present, so too is greater motivation to fulfil the organisation’s mission. More empowering management practices also decrease employees’ desire to leave the civil service. Give someone who cares about their work the ability to feel they can meaningfully contribute to that work, and they will stay and work hard. Take away the ability of someone who cares deeply to feel they can contribute, and they will be demotivated – or leave entirely, taking their talents and experience with them.

The front line should (often) be in charge – including in delivering on Labour’s grand missions

The essays in this publication explore ideas for meaningful delivery against themes broadly mirroring each of Labour’s five grand missions. I say “grand” because mission driven bureaucrats can be aligned to a lofty mission like those articulated in Labour’s manifesto. Mission driven bureaucrats can also be focused on the ‘everyday’ mission of the work they do: educating children, ensuring tax is collected, fighting fires.

Taking the mission of ‘building an NHS fit for the future’ for example, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has already put this centre stage. He wrote that in the NHS “more trust must be placed in staff to try new ways of working… Frontline staff will be in the driving seat of the reform agenda — this can’t be done from Whitehall alone”. So how to do this? In the ‘everyday’ sense, managers at every level of government – from minister to team leader - have the ability to make progress. But of course most of the attention is rightly on the new government’s overarching aspirational goals – and these come with an additional focus on the mechanics of delivery, beginning with the establishment of HMG’s mission boards.

The boards – and indeed, the infrastructure for delivering missions more broadly – offers a great opportunity, but also a risk. The risk, as my colleagues at UCL Policy Lab and the Future Governance Forum put it, is that mission boards will constitute a “re-heated Delivery Unit-style approach.” The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit is reputed to have changed its name to the Prime Minister’s Mission Delivery Unit, underscoring the danger that missions will simply be the old delivery ‘wine’ in new bottles.

Evidence on delivery units suggests they tend to focus on pulling control ‘up’ to the centre and managing for compliance. As a result, delivery units are often very good at accomplishing the narrow set of measurable things they focus on, for as long as the attention from the top persists.

I think many readers will agree that the UK needs right now something broader, deeper, and more fundamental than that. If mission boards operate by pulling power ‘up’ to the centre in an effort to use data dashboards, targets, and performance metrics in a management for compliance approach, they will be able to show some successful delivery against targets – but they will ultimately fail in their transformational missions.

This need not be the fate of missions. Mission boards and the Mission Unit can be powerful tools for transformation, broadening the tools available to achieve the missions by coupling careful attention to how delivery structures need to change with the high-level authority to make necessary changes and study results. Where is more citizen voice and ownership (i.e. the ability to contribute meaningfully to decisions) needed? Where do bureaucrats need more autonomy? Where do accountability structures need to change so that bureaucrats who want to centre citizens’ needs can do so, rather than focusing on delivering to targets unmoored from citizens’ welfare?

Put simply, tools of empowerment, not compliance, are needed to achieve Labour’s missions. The effects of changes in management practice can then be rigorously studied. Moving towards empowerment need not and ought not mean abandoning a focus on outcomes.

There are many ways to move towards greater empowerment

Few readers will find themselves sitting on these boards with the power to drive change, of course. But there is a great deal that people at all levels of the system, and even those of us not employed by the British state, can do to make it better. This is true even for parts of the administrative state not directly affected by Labour’s grand missions, for the millions of public sector employees who will continue to work towards the everyday missions of their agencies and teams in educating children, fighting fires, providing social care, etc.

There are a few very simple questions we can ask systematically:

Are there people, usually public servants but sometimes community groups, citizens, and nonprofits, who want to do good things in support of the mission, but are unable to act?

If yes, what is getting in the way?

Whether yes or no, how can we increase motivation in the workforce and restructure management to generate more value for citizens?

In the book Mission Driven Bureaucrats, I discuss various solutions tried in practice. These include (i) clarifying the mission, (ii) connecting employees to the impact of their actions, (iii) activating the power of peers and (iv) putting citizens at the centre of accountability. These strategies are but the tip of the iceberg; increasing engagement with missions can and does take many forms. Some forms require intervention from the very top of the organisation; others can be initiated by people at many different places in the system. Some forms require changing formal rules and structures; many do not.

I would forgive readers for thinking that at least some of this is blindingly obvious. It’s hardly surprising that when people who care about a job do not have to focus on targets set from above they do better. I agree entirely. It is pretty obvious. But then why aren’t we doing the things that will make the public sector work better and cost virtually no money, exactly? Why do we manage in ways that demotivate and undermine performance so often?

Accepting a different kind of risk

I often hear concern that empowering people is risky, as it means some may misuse their greater agency. This is inevitable; people are fallible, sometimes with malice, but more often unintentionally. Public servants are people, and some will do bad things—just as the politicians who write the rules sometimes do. However, the inevitability of misuse must be weighed against the risk of strict compliance, where public servants follow the rules to the letter but fail to add value to the citizens they serve.

Acts of fraud and malfeasance happen in every system, but increasing compliance in response to bad actions often undermines the performance of many to prevent the mistakes of a few. Just as we don’t stop driving cars due to traffic accidents, we shouldn’t respond to failures by reducing autonomy.

‘No compliance’ is surely usually the wrong answer; but ‘less compliance’ is very frequently worth considering in a public sector too often obsessed with control from above. Public servants too often face a system that does not treat them like the dedicated professionals they very frequently are. This is bad for public employees; but it is also very bad for the broader public.

So let’s build a government as good as the public servants who constitute it

Concentrating power at the very top of the hierarchy has not yielded the state most Britons want; the recent election makes that abundantly clear. The grand missions can, implemented correctly, chart a path forward for the entirety of government. More can be accomplished by taking advantage of what I believe to be the government’s most valuable asset: the talents, dedication, and mission motivation of the public sector.

The motivation and dedication of Britain’s many dedicated public servants is part of what has led to this nation’s greatest successes. It can do so again – if leadership is bold enough to let it. I hope for all of our sakes that the new government is up for the challenge.

This essay is adapted from Dan Honig and Sam Freedman’s post ‘How Labour can fix the public sector’ in Comment is Freed Dan’s book Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People To Help Government Do Better is available for purchase here.