This article is written by Israel Pastor, Chief of Staff to the Permanent Secretary of Justice in Spain, and an expert in public sector leadership. He is also the former Director of the Centro de Estudios Jurídicos, or the Centre for Legal Studies.

Any organisation will have its own culture: even if you can’t actually see it. It’s in the way its members work, in how they act, and in their reactions to tasks and issues. In public administration, organisational culture is reinforced by strict written rules.

Across the European continent administrative law acts as a very effective sort of operating system for government. In this ideal world, public servants acting according to the law concern themselves with efficiently performing the tasks of governing for the general good. We have to admit the reality is not quite like that.

Administrative law is usually quite inflexible. But it is visible. You can adapt to it and, sometimes, even change and improve it. In this way, we can avoid creating bad bureaucracy. But the times are urgently demanding more.

The public sector now has to lead on recovery plans after the pandemic. In some countries, administrative law has been amended in order to lighten its workload and facilitate the right use of funds. Will it be up to the task?

The Covid-19 pandemic has led many public organisations to embrace real digital transformation. Alongside this comes a demand for better and smarter rules and, most of all, better and smarter organisational decisions. People want to see agile and accessible public services, with a streamlined and efficient back office.

You will not achieve change if left to your own devices.

Culture makes it even harder for organisations to adapt than administrative law. Certainly, it provides confidence and comfort to members of an organisation. They know what to do and what to expect from each other.

I have seen this many times: new recruits join a ministry and quickly adapt to what they see. No matter how motivated they are, no matter how desperately we need them to breathe some fresh air into the organisation. They soon fit into the environment and lose momentum for change. For public managers, the job is to try and prevent new talent from forming a habit of low engagement and losing their enthusiasm for innovation.

Changing culture demands patience

It takes time to change organisational culture. It is not something you can simply plan like a project or a policy. If you want to see long-term changes, in my experience, you should not expect complete transformation. Rather, you may consider yourself lucky if you manage to achieve partial change.

Changing culture requires determination

You have to consider people’s resistance to change. Often bringing a new rule into force will not be enough. You will need to do a lot of communication — from meetings, to memos, to posts on the intranet, to individual conversations. Anything, really, to convey the importance of the new methods or procedures.

It is usually better to anticipate resistance by communicating and explaining the proposed change. But it’s more important to think of the incentives you can provide to encourage people to support the change. People are more likely to show a positive attitude towards an uncomfortable new task when it is explained to them in clear terms and they are also offered some kind of enticement. In Spain, we all know by now about the strategic importance of the EU Recovery Facility. But what personal incentives do we have to work longer hours for it? Let’s not forget that these incentives are not always about more money.

Changing culture requires support

You will not achieve change if left to your own devices. Whenever I want to implement some long-term changes in order to improve performance, I make sure I have support from my superiors. Your boss needs to agree completely, because you must expect some degree of turmoil and upset within the team. That’s a very powerful thing, not just because it can derail your well-thought-out plans. In public office, the whole situation can overflow into the media and undermine your leadership.

I’ve seen glimpses of actual cultural change in all the things I do, great and small, in public service. Some of these are changes in myself. I don’t call for a meeting when I can substitute it with an email. I stick to deadlines, to signal the importance of performance. I am a part of the same organisation as those less inclined to change. As a senior official, I can send positive messages about change, and in some cases, I can start removing the obstacles to it.

Leaders in the public service need to be convinced that the benefits of change outweigh the costs that come from resistance to it. With patience, determination, support — and some luck — you can change your organisation’s culture.

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