Why you need to adopt meta-skills to improve public sector leadership

This article is written by Marika Tammeaid, a solutions-focused coach, learning designer and leadership trainer with long government experience.

• The problem: Systems leadership requires leadership linking to a broader picture than the duties of a line ministry or one agency.
• Why it matters: Leadership practices are far too often neglected — yet are a key factor for successful contributions to society.
• The solution: Focusing on metaskills development is essential and only grows in importance as societal complexity deepens.

The public sector of the 2020s faces a huge call for transformation. Society is more interconnected than ever before, and the intertwined needs of the citizen do not fit to the ready-made sectoral boxes of administration.

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In public policymaking, cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. Instead of taking care of one’s own plot inside the legislative and going for the familiar solutions which are easy to implement, the future calls to reach out to other contexts and strive to understand how things look from the perspective of others.

UK Policy Lab has well described the broad range of possible styles of government intervention in policy design. The government can effectively act in a role of a collaborator or steward in order to generate new kinds of co-operation and it can take an impactful role, both as a big customer and a service designer of own and bought services. In more traditional roles as funder, regulator and legislator, the government can take an active position of a stimulator and enabler. All these roles shift government styles of interaction from regulatory and resource management towards systems navigation, and broadens the scope of interface co-operation with the society.

Practising meta-skills helps public sector leaders to ask better questions than before.

It is easy to see the need for these kinds of changes, but it is important to ask: How do the civil servants adopt these new active roles and the capabilities required? Public sector leaders are in key positions in the development of both government organisations and our societies, so do they actively support and enable this kind of transition?

These questions have led me to research public sector leadership meta-skills. Systems leadership requires future-oriented, catalytic, and socially responsible leadership linking to a broader picture than the duties of a line ministry or one agency. The capability and will to build and steer this type of cross-sectoral collaboration and co-creation of new solutions, manifests itself in meta-skills in everyday life. Leadership meta-skills refer to generic and transferable leadership competencies and skills, which portray themselves in interactional choices of those in public administration leadership positions.

Deeds decide progress

In contrast to the long-prevailing tendency of leadership development to focus on developing leaders and listing what kind of personality features predict success in a leadership role, it might be now time to focus on what leaders do and what kind of interaction they provoke in their surroundings. Both real life experience and viewpoints of Solution-Focused practice and Positive Psychology tell us that people’s diversity is genuinely a useful thing and very different individuals can succeed in a leadership role. What is essential is the desire to create fruitful interactions between various people, to explore things from different perspectives and to build solutions that open up new thinking and integrate resources to move in the desired direction. Leadership is manifested more in deeds than as personal qualities.

Meta-skills that seem to be particularly important for public sector leaders in a fluctuating and complex world are learning to learn, systems approach, dialogical positioning, practicing thinking skills, reaching out to practice and upholding an enabling mindset. All of these six meta-skills facilitate good trans-contextual interaction and promote integrative change and renewal. Meta-skills are important in building the readiness to tackle varying issues regardless of the public sector branch.

Without these six meta-skills, the efforts of enabling public sector renewal and broadening the scope of government intervention and policy implementation often stop halfway.

Learning to learn is essential to interact with the changing world and keep a learning attitude, both in everyday tasks and huge policy implementation processes. Leadership is constant learning as well as showing examples and fostering learning in others. An important component of learning to learn is the ability to view one’s own activities as part of a larger context and finding new and constructive ways to be and act as part of the emerging entity.

Systems approach brings the leaders and public organisations to the web of interaction of different societal actors. Achieving change is always a process and requires a new kind of joint sensemaking, interaction, and feedback loops. In the systems approach, the illusions to control human systems and the public administration to work as a machine guiding great results predictably is replaced by understanding that every part of a systemic entity affects and works as part of the whole. Actions made as part of the system can be enabling or opportunity-reducing. Instead of describing and mapping the properties of the system, it is more important to see each other as part of the system and ask what we want to create together.

Dialogical stance of a public sector leader is portrayed in taking a reciprocal human-to-human relationship with all people despite status, but also in practical skills to build dialogical interaction. Good leadership is not something that is apart or above the organisation but fills its overarching role in relationships. Dialogue as an actionable skill means building adaptive spaces for widened understanding of different experiences and contexts to arise. Facilitating joint sensemaking and bridge-building improves the conditions for change.

Thinking skills refers to the ability to detach oneself from familiar thought patterns and consider things from diverse, new, and even surprising perspectives. Harnessing thinking skills increases ability to critically examine one’s own and shared beliefs and established ways of perception and building solutions. To strain off what is essential and meaningful in different situations helps to make choices in real situations. But it requires mental flexibility in its broad sense, i.e. perception, knowledge-building, creativity and emotions.

Reaching out to practice points to the desire to try new ways of working quickly, without prejudice, constantly learning and thereby shaping the future through active involvement. It is also the ability to act as part of networks and ecosystems, build partnerships and provide good conditions for the implementation of decisions. Far too often there is a gap between strategic decision-making and the operational level in public sector organisations. That is a special gap to be minded in the complex world where choosing novel and collaborative ways of policy implementation are highly strategic decisions and the essential systems change can start from top, down, middle or rear.

Enabling mindset is the breeding ground for seeing and taking new opportunities, creating new ways of working and interaction, and, even more importantly, appreciating the natural transformative capacity human beings and communities have. Change begins with the assumptions people bring with them. Paying attention to possibilities even in a gloomy situation as well as strengths and capabilities of the people involved increases the functionality and developmental capacity in any change. The enabling mindset makes space for succeeding and proceeding towards the common goal in various ways instead of striving for one uniform solution or deciding on behalf of others.

Cracking the hard code

The list of six meta-skills has crystallised into its current form the experience gained in the Senior Official Training trainings in 2018-2019. I have also tested its relevance through leadership interviews during this spring. Naturally, the creation of the list has also been influenced by my own background of decades as a solution-focused coach, leadership trainer and civil servant.

The interviews conducted have reinforced the notion that these six meta-skills form a whole from which one meta-skill is difficult to detach or lift above the other. It is, for example, essential that policy implementation is practiced in such a way that the interaction between strategic decision-making and operational activities remains alive and two-way, i.e., dialogical. And that the promotion of learning and thinking skills in the day-to-day running of an organisation takes place in an enabling — not in a criticising and discouraging — spirit.

For some, these six meta-skills may sound like soft skills, but via these the leaders can transform the hard codes of organisations: social norms, budgeting, role and extent of the data and information used. Meta-skills shift the focus of the common work to the future and what is wanted, instead of how things have been done so far. Legitimacy is built socially, and change happens by changing the interaction. Practising meta-skills helps public sector leaders to ask better questions than before. — Marika Tammeaid

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