Competency-based leadership recruitment, promotion, and training are now the order of the day in public services across the globe (Hood and Lodge 2005). In Australia, the SELC framework ensures that senior executives are now selected and assessed on the basis of their abilities to match skills with five core competency criteria derived from public sector experiences. These are:

Aspiring public executives must address each of these competency criteria and outline their relevant experience in applications for promotion to the SES — and referees are asked to assess their performance in each category. Many agencies also use the framework to structure their own internal staff development programs and performance appraisal systems.

So, for some jurisdictions, this codification system of leadership provides a useful approach. It establishes a generic framework for the public service against which to nurture and judge leadership potential. It has thus helped focus attention both on the distinctiveness of public sector leadership from its private sector counterparts and on the requirements of agencies and executives to develop leadership attributes in their organisations (Page, Hood and Lodge 2005).

At the end of the day, however, it is worth asking the question of whether leadership needs to be defined and detailed with precision into taxonomic categories and have criteria fastidiously applied? John Uhr (2005: 82) points out that the term ‘leadership’ is not mentioned in the Australian Constitution. Yet again, neither is the term ‘prime minister’ nor ‘cabinet’. That, according to Uhr, is the fascinating point and, in many ways, the beauty of the leadership concept. It rests on convention, on shared understandings that can shift and develop as times and people change. He prefers the notion of ‘matrix leadership’ contingent upon players, processes and structures, the public and personal, and the contextual circumstances.

Inevitably, the main problem with public service leadership as an object of study is that it is amorphous and obscure. While we tend to recognise leadership when it is both present and when it is lacking, either way we struggle to articulate exactly what it is. It is not clear whether public leadership is ‘smart politics’, ‘good policy’, ‘strategic direction’, or something ‘well administered’. Serendipity and luck can play a big part — the ‘right decision at the right time’ — which is not something that can be learnt or taught in training programs.

There appear to be different underlying premises espoused by various proponents as to what is meant by public service leadership. Academics tend to conceptualise it in terms of the theory of democratic institutions, framing leadership according to concepts of politics, accountability, and power. Practitioners view it as an administrative responsibility — in organisational terms and part of the management task to which they have been assigned. According to the ‘self-help literature’ on the topic, organisational leadership is about intrinsic qualities and achieving change through persuasion and example, but also couched within organisational culture. Meanwhile the public tend to view administrative leadership as being in decline — they bemoan the absence of vision, integrity, and hard work on the part of public officials — yesterday’s leaders tend to radiate with the passing of time!

It is an obvious but nevertheless important point to recall that leadership can be different things in different times and can be appreciated as different things to different people. Its malleability is simultaneously its usefulness and its bane. Who would not want great public leadership? But who knows exactly what this means? Codifiers can assist here and their criteria gain traction precisely because the bureaucracy adopts them, applies them in practice, and gives them cogency. Attempts to codify administrative leadership usually depend on formulating a number of ‘competencies’ which are then used extensively to develop training programs and skills development (Lodge and Hood 2005). If such competencies are mandated (or gain authoritative backing) then public servants must meet these criteria if they are to be recruited or promoted to senior ranks (APSC 2008). However, research undertaken on the Senior Executive Service by Althaus (2009) shows that links between leadership training and career progression remain weak. Senior executives themselves do not see a direct correlation between the undertaking of leadership training and promotion to executive positions. At the same time, these same executives do support a regime of leadership training although they tend to place greatest value in varied experience, on-the-job training and mentoring over formal training courses taught away from the workplace. As one participant observed: ‘you can teach content, but not leadership’.

In many ways, the problem is that today’s ordinary public servants, even if only implicitly, are being asked to deploy

This paradoxical demand for political passivity and responsivity mixed with finely honed appreciation for, and interaction with, the political dimension to policy making can be a volatile cocktail. Whereas the skills for navigating this delicate prudential site once rested within the leadership domain of the mandarins, now it is a widespread exercise given leadership has now been widely institutionalised within public service practice.