No more throwing good energy after bad leadership.

This pandemic has made me rethink where I want to direct my professional energy.

Do I still want to consult for the public sector, in the same way, and on the same topics that I have been? Do I want to focus on freelance work instead? Do I want a full-time position in-house somewhere? Do I go for a new venture altogether?

Whatever I decide to do, one thing is for sure: I won’t be considering anything that features the kind of urgency, pressure and complexity that I’ve immersed myself in for the last 20 years.

Why?

Because even though there are still a lot of organizations and leaders that do appreciate what I do, I’ve decided that on balance, I’ve given too much time to the pointless complexity, manufactured pressure and bogus urgency that comes from poor, unchecked leadership.

COVID-19 is a global social crisis as well as a health crisis, and it should remind us all that public services should pursue impact and add value. Skill and effort shouldn’t be wasted on enabling poorly performing, well-paid leadership when there are poorly paid, hard-working people, putting the very last of their energy into keeping the world going.

But looking at the current job market and consulting environment, cutting those things out of my future might be easier said than done.  

For almost two decades I’ve worked on high-level strategic projects at the core of local government and other complex public sector organizations. Some of these projects have been hugely political and organizationally sensitive, with legal, reputational and commercial implications if things went wrong. These are the kind of projects where (if problems arise) the press tears organizations and careers to shreds.

These were, by any measure, high pressure, high speed and high exposure professional activities.

I eventually moved on to reviewing and evaluating the same kind of work in a consulting capacity, dissecting programs, projects, partnerships and whole organizations, acting as a critical friend, highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly and investigating how they came about. I also stepped in and out of organizations over the years to work in-house on similar projects. 

One of the many things you pick up in these forensic environments is an ear for language that implies problems, particularly the code words that point to issues caused by leadership styles. The use of certain terms and phrases will quickly draw my attention, and I know that in some contexts they really should be seen as red flags.

However – and here’s my point – it seems that some of the terms which normally hint at these problems are now used to describe pretty standard roles, generic teams, and conventional organizations.

To me, as an experienced trouble-shooter and evaluator, this suggests that avoidable difficulties, stresses and challenges have become accepted as normal in the public service workplace, to the point that the language now appears in job postings, either as a warning, or worse - as bait. 

This isn’t just discouraging and negative; it’s also often unnecessary.

I’ll list a few specific terms and explain why they’re problematic. 

‘Fast-paced.’

Why on earth might a public service setting or role be described as ‘fast-paced’? Well, it could be that the team connects with emergency services in some way, or perhaps the job involves frequent, responsive, short-term tasks (such as urgent engineering works or dealing with high volumes of queries at a contact centre). OK, fine. That makes sense. 

But in reality, when these settings are pulled apart in an evaluation, you often find that this term is also code for situations where one part of the organization is constantly dealing with the effects of poor performance or blockages elsewhere. In other words, someone is routinely having to take up the slack, in a hurry, on top of their own workload, for someone who isn’t delivering.

A frequent example would be where the work of Team A relies on a key input from Team B. However, Team B’s manager doesn’t prioritize this task at all, frequently diverts staff to other work and always needs a reminder to get onto Team A’s requests. Eventually, both teams fall into a pointless routine of cramming vital tasks into a last-minute hustle to cope with one manager’s approach. The artificial urgency has become normalized as a ‘fast-paced’ environment for both teams.   

Also quite common is the set-up where ‘fast-paced’ refers to a manager taking a reactive approach to tasks rather than planning a team’s workload in any meaningful way. This unchecked lack of focus results in chaotic activity that's mistaken for vigorous, valuable work. These situations become an unstructured waste of resources, as well as a source of multiple risks.

Charismatic leaders like to be thought of as dynamic and original, but seriously, winging-it is not a strategy, and allowing it to happen is not leadership.

Both of these examples demonstrate a lack of appetite to lead and learn on the part of senior management, and unless they need a hand to slow things down (which can be done), I’ll be prioritizing other options.

‘Multiple Projects’ or ‘Diverse Workload’.

Project-focused workloads aren’t as common in public services as people might imagine. Roles are generally more functional; staff carry out specific activities as part of an overall process or service. There are legitimate roles that regularly connect with multiple projects across organizations and teams, but there are very few positions where the day-to-day duties are entirely project-focused. These are usually specialist roles.

If these terms are being used to describe a role that involves a specific skill-set that’s applied to a range of scenarios, that’s also legitimate. For example, a statistician might carry out a similar analytical task for three different projects in a week, or a housing support worker might complete several different (but related) assessments throughout the day, or a quality improvement specialist might review three processes in different programs in a month.  

In these examples, the diversity lies in the different contexts where similar pieces of work take place, not in the range of tasks. This is key.

Other project-oriented roles might evolve from initiatives where a department or team once undertook a review or some additional planning and added a project coordinator of some kind to the team. It’s not uncommon for these roles to then morph into ongoing positions that drift away from that original purpose.

It’s especially common to embed these roles where there’s a shortage of planning capacity, and the ‘project person’ becomes loaded with all sorts of thinking tasks that don’t neatly fit into the organization’s functions, or where management isn’t inclined or able to think for themselves.

Eventually, the role is piled up with un-coordinated tasks and pseudo-projects that become an accepted part of the job and the overall team. This role often features low job satisfaction and high staff turnover because it’s essentially a dumping ground for stuff that the manager won’t take hold of. 

The additional red flag here is the team’s eye-rolling reference to the standard line from the job description that reads,

‘…plus any other duties as required.’

That's a sure sign that the lack of focus and purpose is now firmly embedded in the role. And everyone knows it.

So, as much as I like a diverse workload, I’d want to know what the organization’s project management framework was like, where these multiple, diverse projects come from and how they fit together to add value to the overall organization.

Thankfully, this is a very repairable situation, and easy to develop win-win options.

‘Conflicting Deadlines’.

This is a super-red flag but it seems to be almost commonplace now. Competing deadlines should never be a thing. Who knowingly plans conflicting deadlines and competing priorities? Who openly and repeatedly tries to get a quart into a pint jug and square pegs into round holes, and expects you to help make it happen?

Leaders who can’t (or won’t) say no to projects or sensibly negotiate delivery details, that’s who. And they do it often, by failing to register existing commitments before making new ones, by presuming that all timeframes are re-negotiable, by dismissing the parameters and requirements set by others in favour of their own, by wandering away from any medium or long-term plans for a subjective short-term gain, and by dismissing the exasperated feedback of staff.  

These managers say ‘yes’ to every new project because they need to feel indispensable. They consider themselves to be edgy risk-takers and genuinely believe they have a loyal (i.e., complicit) team behind their expertise, and are always surprised to find that they’re not that edgy and that the team is burnt out.  

I wouldn’t seek to work with an organization that normalizes the idea of conflicting deadlines. It’s a tricky issue to manage away with process as it’s rooted in a personal characteristic. However, that makes it a very coachable phenomenon, and I’d be happy to take that on. But you have to acknowledge the problem first, right?

‘High-Pressure Environment’

This term could legitimately signify several things:

• there’s a greater than usual expectation of something specific from an individual or team;

• there may be more significant implications than usual if things go wrong;

• or a higher likelihood of major problems arising than might normally be expected.

There are genuine roles that we describe as operating within a high-pressure environment in the public sector. These are specific, specialist, usually regulated roles featuring professional qualifications and accreditation. These are the planning officers, social services professionals, environmental protection leads, accountants, legal officers, etc.  

The pressure they experience relates to maintaining high professional standards, and perhaps it would be better to describe the environment in those terms (which, indeed, often happens).  

However, if the phrase is used to describe any other kind of work it often means that some kind of artificial ‘pressure’ is being introduced into that environment.  

This can happen in several ways and for many reasons, but it almost always arises because senior management explicitly emphasizes delivery over planning, pushes completion metrics over quality standards, and values loyalty and optics over reality and wellbeing.

It creates a nightmarish setting of concocted stressors, cascading finger-pointing, bullying, chastisement, gossip, personality politics, and individual rather than shared commitments.

They feature high rates of sickness-absence among staff and managers, with self-preservation as the key motivator. High staff turnover means that the perpetrators remain and then advance within the organization, considering (and promoting) themselves as resilient rather than responsible.

This kind of ‘high-pressure environment’ is not uncommon, and they’re toxic, juvenile, wasteful in the extreme, and wholly unnecessary. But make no mistake: genuine leaders, evaluators, consultants and advisors like myself see right through the bullshit to exactly who is responsible, very easily and very quickly.  

I wouldn’t waste a minute of my time in any capacity on an organization that openly used this phrase. But then, these organizations recruit for organizational fit and never invite scrutiny or change anyway. This is why (thankfully) we have auditors, regulators and trade unions.

The use of these terms and phrases in public service job postings should be seen as red flags. Not just because of the avoidable complications they alert us to, but because they also warn us that the management level problems that create them have been ignored by both the organizational leadership and the HR department.

It isn’t rocket science and these aren’t new or unique issues. There are plenty of organizations that deal with these things well (if they arise at all). Most public sector organizations have great leadership, sound management structures, pro-active human resources teams and excellent training and development practices.

I would encourage more people to apply their skills in public sector roles, and I would point out that most public service careers offer rewarding professional experiences without any undue stress, pressure or negativity.

And who knows, maybe a role like that might be great for me too.  

But do I still want to support that group of organizations who would rather describe their work as challenging, fast-paced and high pressure, than address poor leadership and toxic cultures?

No. I’m good, thanks.

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Thumbnail Photo by Matthew Osborn on Unsplash