I would like to begin by thanking the Saskatchewan Regional Group of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC) for their very kind invitation to deliver this second annual Vanier Lecture. I should also like to congratulate the Saskatchewan Region of IPAC for the wonderful initiative they have taken in establishing such an annual lecture, to be delivered each year by the winner of the Vanier medal. I hope that other IPAC regional groups may follow your very good example.

I am sensitive to following in very large footsteps. For the Vanier medal, of course, the former winners of which include those two illustrious sons of Saskatchewan, Al Johnson and Tommy Shoyama, for whom the University of Regina’s Graduate School of Public Policy is now, happily, to be named. To find myself in such company is something that passes all understanding.

But I am also standing in large shoes, as far as this lecture itself is concerned, because last year’s inaugural lecture was delivered by Peter Aucoin of Dalhousie University, for whom I, like so many others, have the very highest respect.

To stand here before you this evening is therefore a very great honour indeed. But it is also an exciting opportunity to reflect aloud with you about some of the important current challenges for the profession of public service that the Vanier medal is intended to celebrate. I want to consider some of the ways in which we can reclaim trust in public service by renewing our moral contract with public sector employees, with elected leaders, and with the citizens of Canada.

My remarks this evening will be in six parts. After describing what I call the “existential” crisis the public service has been going through for over 25 years, I will review two conceptual frameworks that can help us to think about the factors that influence trust in government and in the public service. Then I will talk about three of the “drivers” of public trust those frameworks suggest: service delivery, management and leadership, and values and ethics. And I will conclude with some final thoughts on reclaiming trust by renewing our moral contracts.

A special calling – and its existential crisis

In the spirit of celebration appropriate to a Vanier lecture, I’d like to start by reminding ourselves that public service is a noble calling. Some of you may remember the celebrated passage on this theme from the conclusion to A Strong Foundation, the report of the federal deputy minister Task Force on Public Service Values and Ethics (better known as the “Tait Report”), published in 1996. If not, perhaps you will allow me to recall its words.

Public service is a special calling. It is not for every one. Those who devote themselves to it find meaning and satisfaction that are not to be found elsewhere. But the rewards are not material. They are moral and psychological, perhaps even spiritual. They are the intangible rewards that proceed from the sense of devoting one’s life to the service of the country, to the affairs of state, to public purposes, great or small, and to the public good.

The rewards of this special calling, like those of other professions, come at a price. The price is submitting to very high standards of professional conduct; accepting public scrutiny and accountability; learning to hold a public trust and to put public interests ahead of self; respecting the authority of law and of democratic will; and entering into a community that values these as the foundations of good government. The values of public service are both its price and its reward.

Immediately after these words, the task force recognized, however, that a community based on such high ideals “is bound to have its moments of disappointment and discouragement.” In the federal public service, we have certainly been living through another one of those in the last few years, to say the least. Since about 2000, the federal public service has found itself under a cloud of suspicion. Various public events have tarnished the reputation of the public service for competence and integrity. During this time, much of the news coming out of Ottawa seemed to be about boondoggles, wrongdoing, and whistle-blowing, as if that was all that occurred in the federal government.

For federal public servants, as you can easily imagine, this kind of an atmosphere has been discouraging. Not just because the assumptions and implications of this discourse were usually false, but also because these events reinforced an “existential crisis” that has been going on in the public service for over twenty-five years, the very crisis that led to the creation of the Tait task force in the first place. This crisis had seemed to be waning in recent years, but these events have served to revive it, at least for a time.

By an “existential” crisis, I mean a crisis that has to do with the very existence and role of a public service: a crisis of identity compounded by a crisis of legitimacy and, for a time, a fiscal crisis as well. The public service is not alone in experiencing such existential crises: other professions have experienced them in recent decades (as Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon have pointed out, in their book, Good Work). But the public service’s own existential crisis has been long and profound, because it was related to deep social and cultural trends, and to what I call two “long cycles” of legitimacy since the Second World War.

In the first cycle, from the 1940s to the 1960s, governments could do no wrong, and, as far as public opinion was concerned, everything that could be in the public sector should be in the public sector. In the second long cycle, from the 1970s to the 1990s, that perspective was completely reversed: public opinion now believed the private sector could do no wrong, and everything that could be in the private sector should be in the private sector. Since somewhere in the late 1990s the pendulum has, I believe, begun to swing again, and we are gradually moving back to a more balanced and realistic view of both sectors, and therefore into a third cycle. (It remains to be seen how long a cycle it will be.) But the recent events to which I referred have helped to keep us acting and thinking as if we were still in the second, and in the existential crisis that went with it.

In an existential crisis of the kind I’m talking about, a profession loses confidence in its identity and a firm grip on its traditional reference points. As a result, it may thrash about looking for new ones, often imported from other professions or sectors perceived to have greater legitimacy or prestige, and greater public trust. That’s what happened to the public service, beginning in the 1970s, and reaching a peak in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. In those two decades, public servants often appropriated the language and model of the private sector, in a reflex of self-defence.

I am very far from thinking that this existential crisis, and the aping of the private sector that went with it, had only negative consequences. But it paid a very high price, a price that exacerbates and prolongs what was already a crisis of trust, both internal and external.

One of the prices we have paid is a feverish pursuit of public sector “renewal” since the late 1980s, a pursuit that is sometimes far removed from a confident spirit of continuous improvement and innovation. Another is that we have often been pursuing false futures, futures that never came, or if they did, for a time, brought with them unfortunate results. And a third is a frequent sense of failure rather than accomplishment, and a pervasive cynicism about change, and about those who lead it. It was into this atmosphere that the various so-called scandals and the Gomery commission fell. The over-all result has been to prolong, unjustifiably, what I called the “existential” crisis of the public service.

The most important result of this 25 year crisis, in my view, has been a temptation for the public service not to think deeply enough about the specific dynamics of the public sector itself. I think that a way out of this crisis, toward renewed confidence and trust in the public service – both internally on the part of our employees, and externally, on the part of the citizens of Canada – will require us to think again about the specific requirements of the public sector, as the Tait report did, not as a failed or lesser or paler version of some other sector, but as an essential institution in support of democratic government, with its own characteristics, imperatives and ethos.

Reclaiming trust: two frameworks

In reflecting on some of the ways in which the public services of Canada might begin (and already have begun) to reclaim public trust, I am going to make use of two conceptual frameworks. One comes from the Public Management Institute at the University of Leuven in Belgium, a leading European centre for research on public administration. The other comes from the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, a Canadian public sector institution, established cooperatively by the three levels of government in Canada, to assist them in their joint efforts to improve public sector service delivery.

These two frameworks are different but complementary. The Leuven framework identifies two broad categories of explanation for levels of trust. The first may be called the cultural or identity theory, and the second the performance theory.

The cultural or identity theory posits that there have been deep changes in the way that individual citizens relate to all institutions, including public institutions, over the past fifty years, mainly because of the impact of technology and communications, especially television, and now the Internet, and the iPod. In a nutshell, these technologies have allowed and encouraged citizens of western countries to retreat progressively into private and even virtual space, and have gradually detached them and their identities from public space and from public institutions. As a result, they no longer feel as deeply or personally engaged by public issues or public institutions as they did 50 years ago, and this growing psychological and cultural disengagement between individuals and public space is reflected in declining levels of trust in public institutions.

Although these deep cultural and identity factors may well be the most powerful influences on levels of trust, I’m not going to say much more about them here, for lack of time, among other things. Instead I’m going to turn to the second category of explanations that I called the “performance” theory, partly because it speaks about things that are more within the immediate control or influence of public service leaders. This second approach seeks to explain varying levels of trust on the basis of the “performance” of the public sector.

The Leuven framework divides “performance” theories into two further categories: those based on “macro-performance” and those which highlight “micro-performance.” Macro performance means the success of governments and public institutions in providing the large public goods that citizens expect from public authorities: goods like sustainable economic development and prosperity, social security, public safety, transportation and other public infrastructure, and so on.

The other half of the performance challenge is what the Leuven framework calls “micro” performance. This simply means performance on the smaller, day-to day stuff of behaviour and management, rather than the big picture stuff of macro-economic performance and societal well-being. Again, this micro-performance dimension of trust can also be divided into two sub-components: the domains of political micro‑performance and bureaucratic or public service micro-performance. The Leuven framework further suggests that bureaucratic or public service micro-performance might itself be sub-divided into yet further sub-areas, such as service delivery performance and ethical performance.

At these levels, we are clearly getting down into territory over which the public service itself can and should hope to exercise some influence, either through its own behaviour and performance, or through the nature of its relationship with, and influence over, political micro-performance. And, at this level, the Leuven hypotheses receive strong support, and some additional insights, from the Canadian framework I referred to. The Canadian framework comes from a series of studies carried out by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, acting on behalf of the three levels of Canadian government. Under the generic name of Citizens First, the Institute has been conducting a biennial national survey since 1998, to measure, understand, benchmark and track progress in Canadians’ satisfaction with public sector service delivery. The last two of these national surveys began to explore the factors that explain or influence levels of trust in government and in the public service. Citizens First 4 identified three strong drivers of trust and confidence in the public service, (in addition to “benefits for citizens and communities,” consistent with macro-performance theories). Two of these drivers are the “strong services” and “ethical and equal treatment” anticipated by the Leuven hypothesis about ethical and service performance. But the Canadian study found that the strongest driver of all is Canadians’ perceptions of the quality of leadership and management in the public service. Interestingly, the importance of this third factor turns out, at least for the time being, to be an especially strong driver of Canadians’ trust and confidence in the federal public service.

I think these frameworks and insights are a good place to start, for thinking about priorities for reclaiming confidence in the public service, by renewing our moral contract with Canadians, with public service employees, and with elected leaders: that is to say, the priorities of service delivery, strong leadership and management, and ethics and values highlighted by Citizens First 4. I will use these three “drivers” of trust as a framework for the remainder of my remarks, starting with service delivery.

The Canadian public sector service journey as a model

The Canadian public sector service delivery journey over the past decade is a good news story. If there is anything in Canadian public administration to show why the public service’s existential crisis should now be over, this is where it can be found. And the Canadian public sector service story can also provide models of practice for some of the other areas of public management that now deserve similar attention.

The service revolution in the Canadian public sector certainly did not start in the mid-1990s. In fact efforts to improve public sector service delivery have been going on almost as long as governments have been delivering services to citizens, and especially since the 1970s. However, by the mid-1990s, there was a widespread feeling that all of this worthwhile public sector effort lacked rigour and focus. As a result, representatives of service organizations across all three levels of government came together in 1997 to begin working cooperatively on a common, citizen-centred, service improvement agenda.

I want to highlight six things that occurred over the following decade, as a result. The first was the creation of communities of practice within governments and across governments, together with the institutions necessary to support those communities, including intergovernmental councils and the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service I already mentioned. The second thing was early agreement within these communities of practice on a common objective and results measure, an outside-in measure (not an inside-out or process measure, as so often occurs in the public sector), based on citizen satisfaction with public sector service delivery. The third was the undertaking of joint “action research” to achieve a deeper, shared understanding of the nature and dimensions of the challenge, as a basis for action. The fourth was the development of common measurement tools and methodologies, to facilitate results measurement, service improvement planning and implementation, and performance benchmarking within and between Canadian governments. The fifth was deepened insight (resulting from the “action research”) into the various dimensions of the performance challenge, especially the critical problem of “access” to public services, and the challenges of each service channel, and of a multi-channel universe. The sixth – and by far the most important result – was a shared understanding (also resulting from the “action research”) about the distinctive “drivers” of citizen satisfaction with public sector service delivery.

The last is the most important, because if you want to achieve a result – any result – you need to know the factors, or “drivers,” that influence that result. And you need to know more than simply what they are: you need to understand their relative importance, or the degree of their influence on the result you’re aiming at. Because unless you know that, you don’t know have a clue what to do, to achieve the result. You don’t know where to start, or where to focus your efforts. As a result, you are not only unlikely to achieve the result, but will probably waste time on things that have no impact on it at all, as we have done so often in the past. Setting a result target is pointless, or even harmful, if you don’t understand the actions that will get you there, and their order of priority.

Of course in many areas of public policy, we don’t have that kind of knowledge, and are unlikely to get it. The causal chains are too long, complex and remote: the links just aren’t there, or can’t be demonstrated. Governments just don’t have enough of the levers (nor should they) for us to expect to be able to attribute public policy outcomes directly to government actions. But some aspects of public administration are much more within our control, especially public management itself: the management and performance of public organizations, qua organizations. For these areas, what we have achieved in public sector service delivery can be an instructive model.

So what have we achieved for public sector service delivery in Canada, over the past decade? Well, ten years ago, a federal task force on service delivery proclaimed that public sector service delivery lagged woefully behind private sector service delivery performance, such as the banks. Ten years later, the service performance of many

Canadian public sector organizations now surpasses comparable private sector results and benchmarks, including the banks. In the process, Canada has become a world leader in public sector service delivery, the only country that has achieved, and can measure and demonstrate, continuous improvement in citizen satisfaction with public sector service delivery over a ten-year period. The international consulting firm, Accenture, has identified Canada as the world leader in public sector service delivery, and other countries are now looking to Canada as a best practice.

This public management story shows how an “outside-in” approach to public management can transform the performance of the public sector, and, above all, how understanding the “drivers” of public sector performance – especially in some key management areas – is critical to achieving the goals both of performance and of trust. It was clear understanding about the “drivers” of service results that allowed the Government of Canada, for example, both to set and then to exceed a target of a 10 percent improvement in service results between 2000 and 2005, overtaking the provincial level in the process, and even closing the gap with the municipal level in service reputation. I believe the lessons from this success can and should now be applied to the second driver of confidence in public service: leadership and management.

Leadership and management

There are both individual and organizational dimensions to this second driver identified by Citizens First 4, and I’ll say something, briefly, about each of them, in that order.

Individual leadership and management

The question of individual leadership and management, especially the management of people, is closely related to the challenge of service delivery I just discussed. Research and experience in both the private and public sectors have shown a pretty consistent correlation between “outside-in” service satisfaction and “inside-out” employee engagement. This equation is a simple one, even self-evident: committed public servants mean better public services, and hence more satisfied citizens. My colleague, Brian Marson, and I have explored this relationship and its implications for citizen trust in the context of what we have called “The Public Sector Service Value Chain.” I will come back to this concept. But for the moment, there are two key things to notice. The first is that our continued success in improving external citizen satisfaction depends, in part, on our internal performance in people management and leadership. And the second is that we can meet this second performance challenge, in part, by using some of the same techniques and models we have already developed and used successfully for public sector service delivery. Above all, we now need to identify the “drivers” of public sector employee engagement. And not just identify them: but use them for rigorous annual planning and performance improvement, target setting, regular performance measurement, accountability and benchmarking, just as we have done for service delivery.

Lest you think I’m being bold or unrealistic, I’d like to point out two things. The first is that this is not exactly a new idea. It was already put forward by the Tait report over ten years ago, by the sixth report of the Advisory Committee on Senior Level Retention and Compensation in 2003, and by the Working Group on the Disclosure of Wrongdoing, in 2004, among others.

The second thing to point out is that we are already doing it, in several parts of the Canadian public sector: at the provincial and municipal levels (in BC and in the Region of Peel in Ontario, for example), and even at the federal level, in some central agency pilot projects. And we have already begun to share and compare the data from these various initiatives, to identify common public sector “drivers” of employee engagement, through the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service Delivery. What is now required, among other things, is a major joint “action research” initiative, comparable to Citizens First. But also the will to use these insights, in the five ways I just mentioned – rigorous annual planning and performance improvement, target setting, regular performance measurement, accountability and benchmarking – to make our public sector workplaces second to none.

Public sector leadership is more than people management, however. It is also a question of knowledge and deep competence in the business of government. I start from the assumption that, as Michael Pitfield used to say (echoing Vincent Massey), the public service should be one of the “learned professions.” Being a “learned profession” is essential for genuine professionalism, in all three roles of policy advice, public management; and leadership. The question we should ask ourselves, therefore, is whether we still are a learned profession, in the tradition of Tommy Shoyama and Al Johnson. The more we talk about learning, the less genuinely learned we sometimes seem to become. In the federal public service, at least, I have sometimes been led to wonder whether we really know enough, at our highest levels, about our profession, about the functions we lead, about public management (especially from a comparative perspective), or about the world, to be the reliable advisors to government that we should be.

Some of the public management practices we have adopted over the past thirty years seem almost to militate against this kind of deep professionalism and learning. One such practice, for example, is the habit, even encouragement, of rapid horizontal mobility, especially at the managerial and executive levels. We have even gone as far as to build this principle right into some of our accelerated executive development programs. The churn and constant personnel rotation resulting from this kind of mobility culture bring with them an inevitable loss of focus, purpose, expertise and professionalism in our organizations. Public servants too often have the impression of being led by amateurs, travelling salespersons, who don’t have deep knowledge of the government business line they’re supposed to lead. That may be alright, if others do. But sometimes you now have to drill right down to the lowest levels to find that kind of organizational memory and deep competence. And sometimes it isn’t there at all. One result is a loss of credibility and confidence, both internally, with our employees, and externally, with stakeholders.