To lead you need ego. But to be a top manager in a public body you need ego that’s pliable, accommodating and unjealous.
Whitehall permanent secretaries and local authority chief officers, including finance directors, share leadership with a class of person who often has ego dripping out of every pore – the elected politician. Officials do not have to be selfless and pallid as a result, but they do need to take care, and identify where politics ends and administration begins.
If not, they run the risk of being identified as politicians, which may mean scathing public criticism and unwanted media attention.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has been talking about merging the roles of chief executive and council leader, apparently on financial grounds. But big differences in function and perception are not going to be easily bridged.
What has been in happening in Suffolk illustrates the problem. The Conservative-controlled county council is now putting on hold its dramatic outsourcing plans, but not before its outspoken chief executive, Andrea Hill, has been mired in controversy.
Suffolk’s plans seemed to be Hill’s own plans. Advocacy of elected members’ policies probably does fall within a chief executive’s job description. But usually chief executives secure cover and preface public remarks with distancing formula such as: ‘the councillors wish’, ‘elected members have asked me to’. The Whitehall formula is ‘ministers wish’, and it is more than empty rhetoric.
Instead, Hill seemed to make it personal. She made a striking speech at the Guardian Public Services Summit in February in which she invested herself in the (then) Suffolk plan; she made great use of the first-person pronoun, talking in crusading terms.
But now the plan has fallen apart amid political manoeuvring among the Suffolk Tories, Hill has become the subject of sharp attention – her demeanour, pay and expenses included.
Council chief executives walk a thin line between professional public management and enthusiastic implementation of political will. Take for example Geoff Alltimes at Hammersmith & Fulham. He has been managing a complex organisation through changes dictated by the Conservative majority on the council – without any suggestion that he himself was anything other than a professional adviser and administrator.
That is not to say Alltimes lacks personality or, inside the organisation, does not have ego; but his identity is quite separate from the Tory majority now in power led by Stephen Greenhalgh. He would be perfectly capable of working for Labour councillors were they, once again, to come to power in that borough.
At times recently, Hill seemed to overshadow the county councillors of Suffolk. She failed to follow the PR adage, not to let the press secretary become the story. By putting her stamp on contestable plans, she left herself with no wiggle room when the plans went pear shaped.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission
