Developing an integrated and comprehensive training strategy for public sector leaders
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0144739416655598 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Special Issue Article
Teaching Public Administration
Developing an integrated
2017, Vol. 35(1) 88–104
ª The Author(s) 2016
and comprehensive training
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DOI: 10.1177/0144739416655598
strategy for public sector
journals.sagepub.com/home/tpa
leaders: The French
experience
Fabrice Larat
Center for Expertise and Research on Public Administration, Ecole nationale d’administration,
France
Abstract
Because of their tasks and their high level of responsibilities, leadership aptitudes, besides
managerial competences, are key for civil servants who will occupy top positions. The
institutions in charge of their training and education must not only provide the leaders of
tomorrow with the knowledge and skills they need to do their current job properly; they
must also ensure that the leaders have the qualities required for the exercise of their
responsibilities at all stages of their professional career. Based on the experience of the
French national school of public administration (ENA) and its key role as the training
organisation both for pre-service and lifelong learning for French public sector execu-
tives, this paper presents the different elements of the French approach for training
future government administrative leaders. This comprehensive and integrated strategy
takes into consideration the challenges of training for leadership and the needs for a
permanent adaptation to the evolution of the administrative environment.
Keywords
French public service, leadership, lifelong training
Introduction
The main characteristic of public administration as a means of public action is the fact
that it addresses and affects the entire nation, and that it is vital for the very functioning
Corresponding author:
Fabrice Larat, Center for Expertise and Research on Public Administration, Ecole nationale d’administration, 1
rue Sainte Marguerite, Strasbourg 67000, France. Tel: þ33 (0)3 69 20 48 60.
Email: fabrice.larat@ena.fr
Larat
89
of societies and political systems. In this sense, training the elite who will be in charge of
public administration in the future must go further than merely teaching administrative
rules and management techniques. However, this cannot be a simple everyday appren-
ticeship, for the exercise of public administration is accompanied by an imperative of
performance and accountability, transparency and traceability, and adherence to values
of public service. By extension, the institutions in charge of their training must not only
provide the leaders of tomorrow with the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs
properly; they must also ensure that these individuals have the qualities required for the
exercise of their responsibilities, in particular in terms of ethics and professional stan-
dards (Larat, 2013). This requirement is all the more vital now that there is increasing
mobility between the public and private spheres, even though these two worlds operate
according to rationales that are, to say the least, different (Bartoli and Blatrix, 2015).
The methods and contents of the training given to the future administrative elite are
therefore far from neutral and, indeed, cannot be neutral. What is at stake is on the one
hand the ability of administrative managers to carry out their mission of public service to
the full and to meet the expectations of the citizens and, on the other hand, due to the
training they receive, to determine the values and benchmarks for public action they
will refer to. The same applies to the ability of the authorities to act efficiently and
appropriately, as well as to the coherence and cohesion of their actions. In this
sense, an appropriate training of the elites in charge of public administration clearly
represents a need for society and a duty for the state. Nowadays, this means in
particular broadening the scope of knowledge and skills required of future senior
executives to enable them to take and implement decisions in a complex environ-
ment (Bouckaert and De Vries, 2013).
In most public administrations systems, the senior civil service (SCS) contains several
levels of managers. The highest level of SCS personnel is in charge of leading reform
processes and has to effectively manage organisational change in their public admin-
istration system. They therefore need to have vision and strategy, strong leadership
competences and people management skills, in addition to political and environmental
awareness. As to mid-level managers, they have to deal mainly with day-to-day man-
agement within the organisation. What they need is more general management skills
(e.g. human resource management, finance and communication, team and relationship
building). In other words, depending on the functional level of SCS and also on their role,
different competences and skills are necessary for specific positions. Yet, all levels need
to be increasingly result-oriented, in order to ensure the effective and efficient organi-
sation of processes in the public administration and to involve all stakeholders (Kuperus
and Rode, 2008: 28).
In addition, effective public sector leaders have to identify and respond to the issues
and challenges of the institutions within which they operate. As a matter of fact, there is a
need for modern public administrations to develop a dynamic, adaptive and differ-
entiated system of selection and training of their senior civil servants in order to ensure
that not only all public sector executives do possess the skills and competences required
for their present position, but also that for those who are capable, they can be promoted to
higher positions and then be prepared for this.
90
Teaching Public Administration 35(1)
In developed countries, despite converging diagnostics as to the existing needs and
challenges to be met, training programmes for senior civil servants can take on various
shapes and have different focuses. In the first part of this paper, we provide examples of
the managerial and leadership competences that are now required in different public
administration systems before, in the second part, introducing the concrete challenges
related to the identification and selection of potential leaders to be trained, taking the
case of the French public administration in this process. In the last part we will present an
attempt to organise a coherent training system for public service leaders in France at all
stages of their professional career with regards to managerial and leadership compe-
tences, and analyse the benefits, but also the difficulties, of this integrated approach.
Defining leadership and management competences
In recent years, some governments have made on-going investments to maintain and
improve their civil servants’ mastery of their policy leadership functions. In addition to
the remedial aspects of education and training, more proactive activities have been
organised in order to upgrade the competence levels and to enlarge the skill sets of the
civil servants to prepare them for redeployment in the multi-tasking job environments of
the 21st century (Yiu and Saner, 2013).
Nowadays leaders are expected to distinguish themselves from managers by their
‘innovative’ instead of administrating behaviour, by carrying out original instead of
routine tasks, by focusing on people instead of on systems and structures, by inspiring
trust instead of relying on controls (in a long-term instead of short-term perspective),
by doing things instead of doing things right, being interested in the what and why
instead of the how and when, and challenging the status quo instead of accepting it
(Bouckaert and De Vries, 2013: 16).
Over the last two decades, competence management has become a real trend in the
public sector (Op de Beeck, 2010). Public service authorities have developed some
competence frameworks for senior executives to provide capability development gui-
dance for individuals, government bodies and agencies in the form of descriptions and
behaviours for all levels of public administration.1 Approaches in terms of competences
underline three main trends in public service human resource management: attention
paid to talent, experience, and capacities and behaviour instead of to diplomas alone.
Referring to competences as a tool for change management goes together with the belief
that individuals and human competencies are key and make the difference in the way that
organisations work (Hondeghem et al., 2005: 563–564).2
Yet, in order to use them for strategic human resource management, competences
need to be integrated into competence models or frameworks, as practical tools to chart
leadership development. The ability to shape competence frameworks on an
organisation-by-organisation basis ensures that organisations can adapt such tools either
as individual development tools, shared organisational commitments of work values, or
as strategic mechanisms for organisational change (Van Wart, 2012: 162).
Parallel to the rise of competence frameworks in many advanced public
administration systems, an academic debate on the strengths and weaknesses of
Larat
91
competence-based approaches has emerged. Whereas providing a relatively well-
defined terminology and being able to integrate individual traits in well-organised fra-
meworks to be used as mental maps are seen as positive contributions to modern human
resource management in the public sector, the most frequent criticism is that situational
variables are excluded altogether and that competence-based leadership...
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