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Further Discussion–Article
Performance Management and the Decline of Leadership within Public Services in the United Kingdom Barry Loveday∗ Abstract This article considers the impact of performance measurement and performance management in
the public services with particular reference to the police service in the United Kingdom. It suggests that, contrary to the argument made within much current managerial literature extolling the values of leadership to effective management, the current emphasis placed on performance measurement serves to reinforce the central importance of management over leadership. This is found to be the case particularly within public service delivery, where the imposition of targets has helped create a tyranny of conformity within public services including the police service. It considers the influence of a target culture and the rise of deliverology in public services, arguing for the development of a more sophisticated ‘systems approach’ to service delivery. This would help sustain a citizen focus based on effective local feedback mechanisms, which might encourage a renaissance of leadership qualities while also encouraging public services to become far less risk averse.
Introduction In public services, the current most significant managerial characteristic continues to be that of performance and target attainment, usually set by the central government. In relation to league tables in education or throughput and targets set for hospital trusts, the underlying assumption has been that the primary
driver for improving efficiency in delivery and effectiveness is the application of performance measures which can be expected to drive up performance within public sector services. This basic assumption can as is argued be challenged. Recent and substantial increases in public spending on services by the Blair government between 2005 and 2007 were predicated on the
*Reader in Criminal Justice Administration, ICJS University of Portsmouth, St George’s Building Old Portsmouth, PO1 2HY, UK E-mail:
[email protected] Policing, Volume 2, Number 1, pp. 120–130 doi:10.1093/police/pam070 The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail:
[email protected]
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universal application of performance targets to public services. These targets provide a basis for government to make, as far as they are able, an accurate judgement as to the degree of success (or not) achieved by individual services following this investment. The application of performance measures to public services is itself a matter of contention. This article considers the application of performance targets on leadership within public services. It assesses the impact of this approach on any distinction presented within the literature as to the nature of management and leadership. It argues that the emphasis placed on performance regimes by the government only results in the demise of leadership within these services. Performance measurement in effect allows no opportunity for leadership while helping to create what has become an apotheosis of managerialism.
Leaders and managers It is a continuing challenge as management literature demonstrates the need to distinction between leadership and management. One management writer has recently argued in distinguishing between management and leadership that: ‘Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall’ (Lewis, 2007). In whatever manner the distinction is made, it remains the case that any assumption underlying the debate as to status of management over leadership, is that leadership stands above management. This remains the role to which managers may aspire but where few are called. Progression from manager to rarified leader is underlined by a number of characteristics serving to differentiate leadership from management practice. For example, Landsberg has
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argued that managers seek to control risks, use positional authority and operate within organisational boundaries. They also like to establish order. These characteristics of management contrast particularly with those of leadership. Landsberg argues that: ‘Leaders take risks, use personal appeal, challenge boundaries and seek opportunities’ (Landsberg in Lewis, 2007). This assessment of leadership characteristics has indeed been supported by operational personnel in the management field. One has argued that leaders: ‘Set the vision and direction for the team or organisation while managers are concerned with how that vision is implemented’. Within the literature, leadership has now moved on to the identification of ‘authentic leadership’. Here leadership style is adapted by the individual to suit the situation. ‘Authentic’ leadership would encompass for example, those leaders who can be trusted and are self aware, are not afraid to reveal their weaknesses and also know how to adapt their style to different situations (Goffee in Lewis, 2007). Risk-taking and an ability to break through organisational boundaries are seen along with personal qualities as encapsulating those characteristics best associated with leadership. They are not the only qualities contributing to leadership identified within the literature. Within American management writing which considers characteristics of leadership, great emphasis is placed on leaders fostering integrity within the organisation. A commitment to ethics and high ethical standards are both identified as a crucial element of effective leadership within the organisation (Whisenand and Ferguson, 1996:47). With this would be added that of the ability of the
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leader to identify and work towards a vision for the organisation. Here the leader is able to identify and choose a direction based on a desired image of a future state of the organisation. This in effect becomes the ‘mission statement’ for the organisation (Whisenand and Ferguson, 1996:58).
Reality check for public service managers The most cursory evaluation of current demands placed on public service delivery suggests that under a performance regime there is no requirement for leadership skills. The application of performance measurement acts indeed as the antithesis to leadership. This is because the primary determinants of leadership—if demonstrated at all—could undermine both its short- and long-term objectives. Within a performance management framework the primary characteristic is seen to be the commitment not to an organisational vision but to conformity in both running and delivering services while also aiming to achieve externally set targets. The primary emphasis here is directed to the effective management of targets rather than on qualities of leadership which have become within this context almost entirely redundant. If the benefits of espoused leadership are extolled within business and management schools, for the management of contemporary public services they have, in fact, no application whatsoever. The use of comprehensive performance targets for all public services over the last 10 years has made service delivery a managerial function which rejects inspirational leadership of any kind. Instead it favours a neo-Taylorian approach. This highlights the value of a mechanistic style for both managers
(and operatives) in the pursuit of centrally set targets. Performance management can moreover in the application of targets for individual services be expected to challenge the ethical basis within which all public services have traditionally worked. First identified as a management feature within the Health Service, the use of ‘Gaming’ techniques now characterise the operation of most public service managers. Here the primary purpose is not, in any sense, to demonstrate leadership which might be expected to challenge the unethical use of data. It is in fact to ensure conformity to the target culture by ‘managing’ such data in order to reach targets set for each public sector organisation. Examples of unethical recording and reporting of performance data within public services are now of course all too common. They would however, include the recent resurrection with police forces of questionable crime recording; and within education the manipulation of Standard Attainment Tests (SATs) results for the purpose of reaching or sustaining a school position within the national school league tables (Loveday, 2006).
Deliverology Just how insidious the performance culture has proved to be for public services can perhaps itself be measured. Thus the total silence demonstrated within the public services by chief officers and senior managers in conformity with the target culture might itself be thought to be highly revealing. This has perhaps proved to be most clearly visible even among those who traditionally have been viewed as being least likely to conform. Thus within the ranks of Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), any challenge or opposition
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to the target culture has been noticeable by its absence as chief constables conform to Home Office demands currently identified within the Professional Policing Assessment Framework developed within Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC). But ACPO is far from being alone. Many other services have clearly exhibited the demise of leadership as the target culture has engulfed the public sector. This has of course been led (and policed) very largely from the centre, where the Prime Minister’s executive arm was to be significantly strengthened by the creation of a policy directorate along with specific public service strategy and delivery units. To date the drive to deliver increases in performance across the public sector has been the responsibility of the Prime Ministers Delivery Unit (PMDU). Within this unit there has been a total commitment to the use of targets as a means of identifying and measuring success. As has been argued, for example, by the former head of the PMDU within education targets and league tables have provided both ‘transparency and accountability’ as the public are now able to see how their money has been spent and with what result (Crace, 2007; Barber, 2007). Yet within this concept of targets and tables—identified within the PMDU as ‘deliverology—little attention appeared to be directed at the local level to gaming decisions. Here, for example, schools now often only enter for exams pupils that are likely to achieve a pass. Or where, as with SATs, teaching is directed at securing the school position in the league table rather more than providing a rounded education for school pupils (Crace, 2007). Other than challenging the ethical basis of public service delivery by crude measurement,
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the end result of ‘deliverology’ can often mean that the data so generated is itself highly questionable and misleading. This is because the primary aim and purpose of public service managers is one of achieving the target set by the centre. This distinct and unwelcome orientation is moreover, reinforced by the audit and regulatory infrastructure created to monitor and oversee public service performance. One example of a regulatory system is provide by the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) to which all local authorities are subject. Other than raising immediate concerns as to the opportunity—costs of this kind of assessment, it is also evident that this regime may be likely in terms of the management of services to encourage conformity rather than risk-taking. This is primarily because the risk of failure and what follows on from that is seen as outweighing any potential reward for success. Irrespective of the type of regulatory system, whether an auditing body or a central government inspectorate, the overall target culture creates a demand not for leaders but for managers who are able to negotiate the ground—floor challenges which surround performance regimes. Managers not leaders are better able to encourage the level of organisational conformity that performance management will always be likely to generate.
Command and control One crucial element to the rise of deliverology has been the reification of public service targets and the resurrection of command and control as a management practice. Command and control can be linked very explicitly to the scientific analysis of factory production lines in early C20 America undertaken by
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FJ Taylor. This was to lead him to recommend the adoption of functional management based on specialisation and explicit control of the production process by managers (Pugh, 1979:100). As has been argued by Seddon, Taylorism continues to remain the bedrock of command and control thinking. Additionally work specifications are also likely to be determined by those who may have no real knowledge of the services for which they are set. Thereafter service specifications or ‘targets’ and their attainment become the primary focus of the specifiers. In the case of public services, this will primarily mean government ministers but is also likely to include senior department officials. Within the world of centrally set targets, the specifiers will rarely be concerned about levels of demand confronting a public service. Instead as Seddon was to discover, Ministers did not ask for data about demand, rather they asked for data about targets and their achievement. These were seen as being the primary indicator of efficiency (Seddon, 2005:200–212). Yet the nature of specification and micromanagement of services towards set targets thereafter has undermined the value of the very data so collected. As targets have become the espoused guide to judgements about efficiency, so public service managers have directed all their available resources to achieving them. As a result, targets have in effect distorted the work of every public service subject to them while also ensuring that target attainment will have little or no relationship to the real performance of the service. Little else can be expected however, when many managers in the public sector now
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describe themselves as being on ‘P45 warnings’ should they fail to meet their targets (Seddon, 2005:204–212). Other than generating problems of suboptimisation and the distortion of public service delivery, a command and control approach places next to no value on qualities of leadership espoused so frequently within management schools and management literature. A checklist of characteristics of a performance driven ‘command and control’ approach has recently been developed within West Midlands Police Force Intelligence Department, which clearly demonstrates the limited application of any qualities of leadership required for the implementation of this particular management approach. Within its ‘Cultural Force Field Analysis’ performance management can be expected to be top-down; short term; micro-managed; concerned with efficiency not effectiveness; compliant and risk averse and wholly focused on the delivery of an externally generated plan. This contrasts with an intelligence—led management system that is holistic in approach, information driven, macro-orientated concerned with both efficiency and effectiveness and is not risk averse and where elements of leadership might be encouraged (see Table 1). A summary application of this analysis to police managers was to highlight how significant a performance driven management approach had become. The use of an ‘Intelligence—led approach’ was found to be rarely adopted as this was pushed out by the immediate demands generated by central targets (Bowers, 2007). Within the target culture, informed decision making or risk-taking has no place and only reflects the further degradation of leadership qualities within public services.
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Table 1 Cultural Force Field Analysis Performance Driven
Intelligence-Led
Business Planning—a Top Down Approach Short Term Knee-Jerk Resolution Micro-Management Focus on Efficiency Emphasis on Compliance/Risk Averse Focus on Delivering a Plan
Holistic Mature Planning Approach Informed Decision Making Macro-Management Focus on Efficiency and Effectiveness Informed Risk-Taking Focus Protecting the Public/Delivering a Plan/Becoming a Learning Organisation
Source: Bowers (2007) West Midlands Force Intelligence Department.
Managerialism and the inspection industry There is an additional factor which serves to cement the performance led approach to public service delivery. This relates, as identified earlier, to the audit and regulatory arrangements put in place to monitor public service outputs and efficiency. Representing what is in effect a ‘new’ accountability mechanism the audit inspection and regulatory infrastructure is designed to provide the government with information concerning service performance across the public sector. The domestic inspection industry, the result of a growth of inspectorates, audit bodies and special monitoring units now means that the United Kingdom has the most regulated public sector in Europe (Strachan quoted in Seddon, 2005:222). This only serves to reinforce the performance management and target approach to public services. It has also increasingly meant that public services have ceased in any meaningful way to be accountable to the public as the regulatory regime has in fact increased detailed centralised control of every service. It has also created a blame culture where the implications of failure can, for service deliverers and managers be potentially career limiting. This has been recently argued by the chairman of the Audit Commission. He
stated that while it was normal for managers in the private sector not to achieve all their targets, for many public sector managers failing to meet targets is now viewed as a sackable offence (Strachan quoted in Seddon, 2005:222). In this environment any move towards ‘earned autonomy’ for successfully performing public services can only mean that they have first of all demonstrated their complete compliance with the target and regulatory regime. They can therefore be trusted to conform to the performance culture in the absence of close monitoring from the centre. The emphasis within this culture is directed towards the management of targets rather than to encourage leadership skills. Nor could any commitment to ethical leadership accommodate the use of ‘gaming’ to encourage those led to achieve centrally set targets. This would ultimately be seen as undermining the integrity of the organisation they directed.
Gaming in public services One additional feature that now characterises all public services concerns ‘gaming’: a system of managing targets by individual services which has grown in tandem with rise of performance management and targets. ‘Gaming’ was first encountered within the health service. This should not occasion surprise as
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this public service has been subject over the longest period to perhaps the greatest number of targets set for a public service. As a result, ‘gaming’ has now become a central management tool within the National Health Service (NHS) where it is now commonplace for local managers, for example, to manipulate hospital waiting lists. Yet the impact of the target culture on the health service has been considerable and has been the subject of highly critical comment from professionals within the NHS. Thus a former chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) attacked the creeping moralesapping erosion of doctors’ clinical autonomy, generated by micro-management from Whitehall (Bogle quoted in Seddon, 2005:211). This intervention has been most fully evidenced in relation to A&E wards where a 4-h waiting for patients has been identified as the central target. One result of this has been systematic gaming involving irregularities in the recording of waiting times to significant increases in spending on agency staff in order to meet the 4-h waiting target. While in successive years, the Healthcare Commission was to report that in 2005 that all the Health Trusts had for example met the target of 90% of patients waiting less than 4 h, it did not report on the gaming of the trusts to achieve that target. This was however to be challenged by a member of the BMA who questioned the need for continued application of this target which potentially threatened the welfare of patients rather than helping them. This was because in ‘gaming’ to reach the 4-h target for A&E, managers were now swamping other wards with cases for which they were not equipped to deal (Loveday, 2006:289). As has been noted elsewhere, the use of ‘gaming’ as a management tool within the health service
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is now ubiquitous (Seddon, 2005:215). It is also evident that those that work within this environment can be subject to bullying and other forms of intimidation if there is some danger of not reaching targets. As was to be argued in 2007 by the BMA: A&E nursing staff use any means possible to ‘fluff’ the results to make sure a patient does not breach the 4-h target because if there are any breaches they are systematically bullied as to why this happened. The target is not achievable when there are not enough hospital beds or staff to meet the demands of the public. Nothing gets done about this as there isn’t enough money to sort the problem out. So the blame gets placed elsewhere (British Medical Association, 2007:12). The same report was to identify gaming methods used regularly to boost the figures to ensure that the 4-h target was seen to be met by the ward. These were, inter-alia, found to include: inaccurate recording of times; middle manager revising figures before being submitted; patients ‘moved on the computer tracking’ but still kept in the department to meet targets; bullying of nursing staff by senior management (British Medical Association, 2007:14). Nor, of course, is ‘gaming’ confined to the health service. As long ago as 1999, HMIC in its Thematic Report on Police Integrity, was to draw public attention to the real dangers that
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could arise from performance management and targets for police forces in the United Kingdom. The report was to note that the performance culture had encouraged evident lapses in integrity and that a number of police forces had trawled the margins for detections (HMIC, 1999). Most recently, the President of the Police Federation has drawn attention to the nature of many arrests which can be now be expected to be often directed at the easiest detections, which will achieve next to nothing, other than ensuring that central targets, now policed by both the Police Standards Unit and (ironically) the Police Inspectorate, are seen to be attained. Some evidence of the consequences of this target-led management style was to be highlighted at the 2007 Police Federation Conference. One senior member of the Federation was to relate how, in one force, police spent weeks conducting door-to-door investigations to turn a single theft (the withholding of a donation to Comic Relief) into over 500 crimes, in order to bolster crime-fighting targets. He commented that: ‘to bump up the targets they spent 2 weeks on door-to-door inquiries, sending Police Community Support Officers to get a target of 542 crimes. Five hundred is better than one’ (Tendler, 2007). The same conference was to be told that in the United Kingdom, police officers were now expected to meet their monthly targets while also getting points for their work. In North Wales, it was discovered that an arrest was worth 5 points ‘and so was a Penalty Notice for Disorder (PND)’.One result (not confined to this force area) was that the use of the notices,
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regarded by the Home Office as a detected crime, was now being widely directed against minor offences. The use of PND directed at ‘low lying fruit’ was unnecessarily directed at young people who were being criminalised as a result. However, as was to be argued by the Chairman of the Police Federation, the points system now clearly rewards officers who most liberally use PNDs whatever their ultimate, and highly questionable, value. As a result of government diktats, the police service has been reduced to a bureaucratic target—chasing, points—obsessed arm of Whitehall. There is no better example of the control freakery, that is eroding common sense than the PND. It is madness that an officer gets 30 points if he or she issues a penalty notice but only 20 for charging and pursuing a case through the courts (Berry, 2007). Elsewhere in the United Kingdom it was to be learned that officers are now given monthly targets for cautions, arrests or fixed penalty notices. This interesting regime also extends to trainee-constables in a United kingdom force who are also expected to reach the set targets ‘or face poor performance reports’ (Tendler, 2007).
A systems approach to public services Performance management and its translation into a close command and control system based on micro-management of public services and regulatory oversight has effectively buried any concept of leadership with the public sector. Yet it is clear that performance management is likely to end ultimately in
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failure (Seddon, 2005:204). It is against that potential outcome that alternative approaches to public service management need to be identified. One alternative which meets new needs is the development within a systems approach of a high performance model for public services. As has been argued, there is a growing need for public sector managers to develop their own approaches to improving quality and service levels which if ever implemented would turn the rhetoric of autonomy into reality (Emmot, 2003). A systems approach would encourage local management discretion and also re-establish a high level of professional autonomy. The Systems Model has a long pedigree and was to be first explored as a model of the political system by Easton in the 1960s (Parsons, 1995:23). An application of the Eastonian ‘Black Box Model’ could begin to capture the local environment within which public services operate and would place an immediate emphasis on environmental inputs as demands on those services. The subsequent outputs would be monitored within a feedback loop that would have an additional function in the identification of ‘outcomes’. Here the emphasis placed on linking local environment to demand and final outcomes could within, for example, the health and education services begin to match up outputs against need rather than reflecting changing ministerial priorities. Elsewhere, a similar systems approach has been recently developed to cater to the new strategy of neighbourhood policing which all police forces are required to have in place by 2008. In developing their Citizen Focus Model, Smith and Alderson have created a framework for Effective Future Policing which is closely linked to future police service delivery within a Partnership and Neighbourhood Policing
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context (Smith and Alderson, 2005; Loveday, 2006). The Citizen Focus Model emphasises the importance of the local environment for effective policing and which overrides central target setting. This model also provides a local feedback mechanism which in turn generates additional inputs into the system and which provides a basis for assessing outputs and outcomes. A systems approach has a number of other advantages which if made operational, could be expected to enhance service delivery within the public sector. Where there is a growing recognition that for most services knowledge concerning outcomes will be judged as being far more significant than output levels, a growing awareness of the need for partnerships across services is likely to develop. A partnership approach has of course been a long-term objective of New Labour, which has regularly emphasised the benefits of joined up government. This was exemplified within its early legislation, most notably the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Yet ironically, New Labour’s commitment to performance management and targets has served to undermine that policy aim. This is because as targets are set centrally for individual services, these, rather than partnership objectives, can always be expected to be given pre-eminence by service managers. The identification of performance targets have served, in effect, to ring fence individual services as the nature of compliance makes reaching these targets the central test of managerial efficiency. In this context performance targets become a significant impediment to both improving overall service delivery and service outcomes and also to establishing effective partnership arrangements (Loveday, 2006b).
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Conclusion A cursory examination of the impact of performance management and central target setting indicates that this approach has no place for leadership. All the evidence suggests that this approach drives out both imagination and innovation, rewarding those who are best able to manage services in such a manner that targets are attained. Given the potential career-limiting dangers of failure in not achieving performance targets, it is hardly a matter of surprise that within the public sector, managers of services have become highly risk averse. This trend serves to only reinforce the emphasis placed on management where public service managers rather than leaders are much more likely to achieve performance success and where staff are not ‘led’ but bullied if there is a perceived threat of non-attainment of targets. Reaching the targets can of course be achieved in a number of ways, but it would appear that the fundamentally unethical use of gaming practices is now nearly universal across the public sector. Ironically, while government ministers remain committed to simplistic and ultimately highly misleading data generated through measurement by target setting, any effective evaluation of organisational performance is unlikely to be undertaken. The result of not engaging in a serious evaluation of performance has been that across the public sector a management orientation which is based upon the control of risk, the use of positional authority and an operational mode that is closely bound within organisational boundaries, has now been firmly established. Within this regime managers do not take risks or innovate. Rather they follow directions by accepting targets handed down to them by the
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centre and these now dictate their own rather limited management horizon. To the extent that targets are used, as now, to guide future public service delivery there will be a continuing need not for leadership but a specific management orientation within the public sector. Deliverology, as pursued within the PMDU over a number of years, has created a model (and mentality) for centrally driven delivery of public services which has in effect shaped the management of contemporary public services (Walker, 2007). The big question now to be asked is therefore the extent to which the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will seek to pursue a similar agenda for public service delivery and reform which he now inherits. For public sector services, much can be expected to ride on the degree to which the change in leadership provides an opportunity for the performance model to be subject to a balanced and critically objective evaluation than has been attempted to date.
References Barber, M. 2007. Instruction to Deliver, Tony Blair, the Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets, London: Politicos Publications. Berry, J. 2007. Keynote Speech by Jan Berry Chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales to the Home Secretary, Blackpool 16th May 2007. British Medical Association. 2007. Emergency Medicine: A Report of a National Survey of Emergency Medicine, Health Policy and Economic Research Unit. Bowers, A. 2007. Cultural Force Field Analysis West Midlands Police in ‘The National Intelligence Model: Strategic Concepts’, Presentation to SLDP Bramshill June 14th. Crace, J. 2007. Rose–Tinted Memoirs, The Guardian 12th June. Emmot, M. 2003. ‘High Performance Workplaces’ CIPD Report, London. HMIC. 1999. Police Integrity- Securing and Maintaining Public Confidence, London Home Office. Lewis, C. 2007. ‘How Leaders Manage’, The Times 31st May.
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Loveday, B. 2006. ‘Policing Performance: The Impact of Performance Measures and Targets on Police forces in England and Wales IJPSM’, Vol 8, no 4. Loveday, B. 2006b. ‘Learning from the 2004 Crime Audit. An evaluation of the National Community Safety Plan and current impediments to the effective delivery of community safety strategy by local Crime Reduction’ Partnerships, Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal Vol 8, No 3. Parsons, W. 1995. Public Policy: ‘An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Policy Analysis’, Edward Elgar, Aldershot.
B. Loveday Pugh, DS. 1979. Writers on Organisations Penguin Books. Seddon, J. 2005. Freedom from Command and Control a Better way to make Work, Work, Buckingham: Vanguard Publications. Smith, T and Alderson, M. 2005. ‘Effective Future Policing: The Citizen Focus Model’, SLDP Bramshill, NPIA. Tendler, S. 2007. ‘Why Police Officers Turned a Single theft into 542 Cases’, The Times May 16th. Walker, D. 2007. ‘Loose Delivery’, The Guardian June 20th. Whisenand, P and Ferguson, R. 1996. ‘The Managing of Police Organisations’, Prentice Hall.
