A few months ago, Matt Andrews, Harvard Lecturer and Director of the Building State Capability Program, started a blog series about Public Leadership Through Crisis. I went through all the blogs and found it really valuable, full of resources and questions for reflection. It made me think about my time in government and the responsibility and potential that being a public servant implies. People often think of Cabinet Members -like I was-, as politicians. While this is true, we are also public servants, our mandate is to do everything in our power to improve the life of the citizens we serve. I liked Matt’s blog series because his posts were not about what to do, but about how one could organize a response in times of crisis. The blogs are about navigating what could feel like big waves and high winds in a small boat. I’ve written two blogs that summarize my takeaways, as well as some of my own thoughts and ideas. The first is about the leaders in charge of a crisis and the second is about the organization’s capability to deal with a crisis. This blog (the second) is about the organization’s capability to deal with a crisis.
Organization’s Capability
Since my time at the Harvard Kennedy School I have always resonated with Matt´s view of multi-agent leadership. My time in government showed me that you are only as good as your team is. Blogs 8 to 17 are focused on the organization´s capability and includes examples of Liberia with the Ebola Response and Bahrain with COVID-19. These are my main takeaways:
- Every system has significant potential to build its capabilities, rapidly, in the face of crisis. Matt defines capability as ‘the empowered ability to get something done, to solve problems’. Your system’s capability is influenced by: i) The abilities it is endowed with, in other words the skills (knowledge formally or informally acquired) and resources; and the three mechanisms that empower these abilities: ii) the authority mechanisms, structures and relationships that empower use of skills and resources; iii) what people accept to do, their intrinsic motivation; and iv) the organizational mobilizing processes you have to connect the previous three dimensions. Matt argues the challenge of leadership is to build organizations with the capability required to solve problems, starting where you are, building trust in the organization and growing these capabilities as you move through this crisis. Results will give credit, legitimacy and credibility to the leader and the team.
- Crises require flat, fast and flexible organizing structures. By nature, public organizations are hierarchical. These organizations often lack the ability to adapt quickly to find solutions to new problems, which are different to the ones they were created for. One alternative is the Snowflake Model, which is based in trust, mutual accountability and commitment. Leadership is distributed among many teams, coordinated around a central team. As Matt says, “There is a sustainable number of relationships, clearly defined roles and capacity for exponential growth”. Different people will play different roles. According to Shruti Mehrotra, Director of Policy at the Institute for Integrated Transitions, there are at least three roles required in a crisis: i) Technical expert: someone who can master the technical knowledge specific to the crisis in question; ii) Mobilization guru: someone who can bring different parts of government together where and when needed; and iii) Communication guru: someone who helps the team think about public communication. Your team will also benefit from technical and non-technical members, as well as insiders and outsiders with fresh perspectives. The structure in place should help you, as the leader, to identify where decisions need to be made, access information and ideas to make those decisions, mobilize agents to act on and implement those decisions, and constantly monitor those actions to adapt the decisions as necessary.
- The role of the leadership in times of crisis is to leverage the urgency to act and promote constant learning. In this podcast Mark Moore, Professor of Public Management at the Kennedy School, and Matt Andrews discuss about the energy generated in the midst of chaos. Moore argues that during a crisis people feel this urgency to do something, there is a constant reminder of the task that needs to be done. He suggests the role of leadership is not to command the system, but to coordinate and enable it, link a sort of traffic light. Moore says, trust that your people act and report on what they do. The information that is recorded will allow us to fill the gaps, identify resource misplacements and inform the leader and the rest of the team about the current situation. Moore insists that a leader should “not get in the way of urgency-inspired people doing things”. Leaders need to keep monitoring the ´state of the problem´, maintain motivation and hold the sense of urgency. They need to mobilize people, rather than simply directing and controlling them. The ‘artistic use of authority’ as Moore mentioned.
Final Thoughts
COVID-19 is the best portrait of evolving uncertainty, anxiety of the unknown, but also hope for a better future. The pandemic has shown us the need for collective action. Public servants around the world – doctors, nurses, postal service workers, teachers, among others – are giving us lessons of service beyond duty, resilience in the face of adversity and creativity to fulfil their own ‘worthy missions’. Unfortunately, we have also seen the terrible consequences of malfunctioning governments and incompetent leaders. For some, this has been probably the first time they have felt abandoned by their government. As Michelle Goldberg wrote recently in the New York Times ‘There are only two ways out of pandemic-driven insecurity: great personal wealth or a functioning government. Right now, many of us who’d thought we were insulated from American precarity are finding out just how frightening the world can be when you don’t have either.’ In my view, this crisis has reinforced the need for competent, effective and efficient governments to fulfil their role and to create equal opportunities for all. We can, and should, do better than ‘normal’.
Read the first part of this blog regarding Organization’s Capability here.
Photo credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash
