Public servants need an entrepreneurial mindset and culture

This article is written by David Kirby, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Durham. He holds The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion, and is a Council Member of the Accreditation Council for Entrepreneurial and Engaged Universities.

I believe we are all enterprising at birth, but that enterprise is gradually driven out of most of us: by our families, society, our religion, the education system, and eventually our employers. We learn that to succeed and be rewarded we need to conform, to be dependent, to be obedient. We learn not to question and challenge things, and not to make mistakes.

As an entrepreneurship educator, I help people to rediscover enterprise. It is my job to create an environment where they feel comfortable questioning, challenging, trying new things, making mistakes, and, importantly, learning from them.

As an employer I have to do the same thing. On September 9, 1996 I stood before my new staff of 200 and told them I wanted them to make mistakes. I then asked them why I’d said that. Nobody replied, possibly because of a fear culture I later identified in the organisation.

• Want to write for us? Take a look at Apolitical’s guide for contributors

So I explained why. Most organisations make mistakes and if we were not making any, two things could be happening. We might not be recognising them (and putting them right). Or we might be staying within our comfort zone and not innovating, doing only what we knew we could do successfully. Neither situation was acceptable. I wanted my staff to be entrepreneurial — to innovate, to find new ways to create value for others.

Margherita Bacigalupo, a Scientific Officer at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, writes in an Apolitical article that civil servants should also “seek new ways to create value for others”. I totally agree. In fact that is the whole purpose of entrepreneurial education — to develop young people who look for new, creative ways to solve problems and identify new opportunities. This way they innovate and help bring about change, something we need in an era of unprecedented uncertainty. American public speaker and author Tom Peters describes it as a world “turned upside down” where “predictability is a thing of the past”.

Bacigalupo also observes that “as civil servants, we do as we are told to do and we do it in exactly the way we are told to do it”. If civil servants are to operate effectively, this has to change. But for that to happen the work environment has to change, also, as does the way people are managed.

In a report for the European Commission, Martin Lackéus, Mats Lundqvist, Karen Williams Middleton acknowledge that "employees are more entrepreneurial when it is a culturally grounded imperative in an organisation".

They then draw on the idea of intrapreneurship — behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organisation — to consider how this may be done. In practice, this could include developing cross-functional teams, rewarding innovation, and recognising that not all innovations will work, among other things.

In an era of considerable turbulence and uncertainty, we need public servants and a public service that can facilitate and enable.

So what are the implications for management? The European Commission report points to three steps. To raise awareness: debunking myths about entrepreneurial ways of working, clarifying what the organisation is aiming to do and providing training. To offer support, appreciating and empowering entrepreneurial employees. And finally, to ask explicitly for entrepreneurial behaviour. This might include making employees feel responsible for enterprise, organising them, measuring results and offering rewards.

These are all very necessary but there is, I believe, a further important step. As I’ve argued in my book, managers must model the behaviour they want their employees to display. They must lead by example.

While they should display creativity they should not monopolise idea generation. They should welcome ideas from everyone in the organisation irrespective of status, grade or role. There should be no territorial behaviour — the phrases “this is not your job” or “you are not here to have ideas” have no place in an entrepreneurial organisation. And all ideas should be taken seriously and investigated, not dismissed cursorily.

Finally, don’t take ideas away from the person who’s come up with them and implement them separately, at least not without their voluntary agreement. You need to make the most of an entrepreneurial colleague’s commitment to the project. Nobody will want to see the idea work more. So "the doer decides".

A top-down, strategic approach to organisational change tends to be quicker and easier: but a bottom-up approach is definitely possible. Without the support of senior management, however, this can be difficult. As Italian advisor to princes, Niccolò Machiavelli, acknowledged hundreds of years ago, initiating change is difficult, unpredictable and even “dangerous”. So what happens when you give the initiative to your staff? It’s true that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are extremely difficult to manage and control. That’s because, as US management professor W. Jack Duncan writes, “they disrupt the established order by asking questions and experimenting with new ways of doing things when well-established procedures are available to provide direction".

It’s worth the risk. In an era of considerable turbulence and uncertainty, we need public servants and a public service that can facilitate and enable. That’s how they can support governments and deliver the best possible services to the public. This requires an entrepreneurial mindset and culture, which all too often appears to be lacking in the public sector. — David Kirby

We want to hear what you think about this article. Pitch an article to us or send your comments to hello@apolitical.co

(Picture Credit: Pexels)