The Public Sector CEO

Introduction: The Tough Truth of Government Leadership

When former US President Barack Obama was asked to share his most important career advice for aspiring leaders, he had a simple answer: ‘Just learn how to get stuff done.’
Easy, right? You do not need an elite education or rigorous training. Obama did not say, ‘Get a law degree from Harvard because that’s what made me president.’ He did not ask young people to make sure they learn about a certain topic or gain a certain skill. Just ‘get stuff done’.
Not everyone has what it takes to be president or prime minister, but we can all get stuff done. Every day, every person across the globe gets stuff done. We wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and almost immediately start to complete a series of tasks—whether that’s feeding our kids, getting to work on time, responding to emails, picking up groceries, setting time for family entertainment, or not forgetting to take the dog for a walk. We all get stuff done every day. So then why can some people exceed their goals and others fall short?
Leaders of organisations seem to be great at setting aspirational goals, but more often than not their visions do not become reality. In the business world, a survey of chief executive officers (CEOs) found that only about 60 per cent of new CEOs meet their performance expectations after a year and a half on the job. A study that compared public sector projections of key economic variables (growth, costs, unemployment, etc.) found that the promises were always more rosy than reality. Approximately 80 per cent of government projects don’t fully meet their objectives, according to a survey of nearly three thousand public officials across eighteen countries.
This gap between promises and performance influences the public’s satisfaction with government effectiveness. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), known as the ‘rich countries’ club’, on average only two out of three citizens are satisfied with government services. This may seem like a decent scoring, but consider this: When was the last time you picked a hotel with a 6/10 rating or bought a product online with just three out of five stars? Moreover, the satisfaction level drops to as low as 20 per cent in some countries. If these are the outcomes in the most advanced economies, one can only wonder how much lower the satisfaction with government services is in developing countries. (No data was found to corroborate this surmise.)
There is an opportunity to get more things in the public sector. The few studies that have adequately compared performance between government and businesses find that on financial efficiency, customer satisfaction, or project execution, businesses typically do better. For example, a study of ten thousand organisations across twenty countries compared companies in the same industry and found that government-owned companies performed worse than private companies.
At the same time, there are few places where not getting things done has a larger impact than the public sector. Public sector leaders oversee almost all aspects of people’s lives: their health, their education, their homes, their safety, their food, their futures. Business leaders may be able to create massive amounts of profit, but public sector leaders have the potential to completely reshape the paths of our lives.
This potential leads many public sector leaders to set high goals for themselves. High goals are the first step towards creating impact for the people served. Unfortunately, the execution sometimes falls short.
Despite these trends, there are many public organisations around the world that are exceptional in serving their public. The book Mission Mystique, for example, identified and studied some of the best performing public organisations in the US, such as the US Navy and the National Park Service.
These are not the only examples, of course. Many countries have similar examples of equally effective public organisations. Yet only few countries can claim to have effective government organisations across the board.