Developing Public Sector Leadership by Petri Virtanen & Marika Tammeaid

Author:Petri Virtanen & Marika Tammeaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030423117
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.8 Synthesis

The concept of cognitive ergonomics has been deployed here to highlight the need to refresh and upgrade our views of how to think about organisational life in public organisations. The complexity of organisational life is not the key issue here. The biggest problem is that we are currently facing tomorrow’s problems armed only with yesterday’s old mindsets. As a result of societal diversification, the concept of ergonomics has received a completely new meaning. Traditionally, ergonomics focused on optimising the way that our bodies operated in a work environment. The concept now offers the possibility to focus on ensuring that our minds and thought models can be renewed in an ever-changing world. For the everyday work of leaders in public organisations, renewing how one perceives things and understanding how one’s mind works is crucial. Our brains need new challenges, but also the opportunity to rest. In everyday life, this means that leaders should possess the ability to create space within their own minds and thus find the time to think while they go about their hectic everyday tasks.

This chapter stressed the importance of the identity changes taking place with respect to public sector leadership and leaders in public organisations. These identity changes concern the public leadership dimension, public organisations, the contents of public sector leadership competencies and public service ideology. To enhance cognitive organisational rethinking, public organisations need to upgrade their conventional human resource management systems and protocols and make the best use of competence management which is based on maximising the individual and collective strengths an organisation possesses. Given this, there is a need to think again about the existing tools and practices which would add to self-reflection in leadership, communication and dialogue based on human emotional intelligence and the courage to take steps towards more collectively self-steered organisational entities.

In a rapidly changing work environment, public sector leaders require constant help from other people to remain aware and to be able to make decisions. Today, leaders in public organisations are more dependent than ever on the things that other people know and the skills they possess. A good sense of self helps leaders in public organisations meet different people in a deep, multidimensional and approving manner. This, then, helps to create an organisational atmosphere that is based on psychological security and trust. It is important to remember that organisations are, ultimately, a product of our own minds. They are not biological or physical systems, but to a large extent social entities. When we talk about leadership and management, we should focus more on the basic structures of our organisations, as these are the result of the way we perceive things—leadership and management styles may change, but these basic structures remain the same. Since things are now more diverse and more contextually bound than ever before, the need for new ideas and methods as regards perception has become even greater.

As the world around public organisations changes, the learning and unlearning process will also change. Our learning capital will most likely become time-shortened.

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