Fixing Phoenix means fixing management

Good leaders need technical smarts, not just ambition, says Bob Ryerson.

The government says it will start testing prototypes of replacements for the Phoenix pay system very soon. But have the essential lessons been learned?

Phoenix is simply the biggest and most obvious example of a wider management and leadership malaise that has been growing for decades within the federal public service.

When I began my career as a scientist in government in 1973, my director general, Dr. Larry Morley, was a leading scientist in his own right, as was the deputy director general, Lee Godby. Future leaders, including those from minority groups, were grown within the organization from among scientists and engineers either in the organization, or in the field, who had an interest in management. These potential managers were given the opportunity to acquire the “generalist” skills a manager needed.

When I later worked on secondment at Statistics Canada, the head of the research division was a statistician, Dr. Ivan Fellegi. He asked good, tough and fair questions when I proposed a new program and he could do this because he knew the business of his organization. He went on to lead Statistics Canada for some 23 years. Why was Statistics Canada run so well for so many years? The people who ran it knew their business.

So what has happened? Some years ago, General Electric was espousing a new management paradigm built on the premise that “a good manager can manage anything.” That, however, only worked for as long as there were managers in the system who understood their business, too.

The GE concept was adopted in the public service — the Career Assignment Program was one of the first manifestations — and potential managers were placed in a variety of assignments over time to learn how to be “executives.” Certainly, a manager who is an expert in finance can manage a finance activity in any number of departments; the same might be said about other generic activities that are similar across departments. However, the concept falls down where fine nuances of technology or other areas must be understood. Here, knowledge-based leadership is required.

In industry, the concept of the generalist manager has been widely debunked, including within GE, as recently documented in Bloomberg Business. Over a 16-year period, GE was the worst performer in the Dow Jones industrial average. Since November 2016, the Dow has risen 41 per cent and GE has lost 46 per cent of its value. So much for the GE concept that “a good manager can manage anything.”

Quite simply, a good manager cannot manage anything. How can someone who does not understand the core principles of IT be expected to run an IT shop? A leader must have at least some inkling of what is important: What you don’t know can hurt you.

Then there is the churning of staff at the executive level. Few directors general or assistant deputy ministers are around when the results of their latest management “improvements” come home to roost.

Finally, there is the apparent desire of most directors to become a director general, and directors general wanting to become assistant deputy ministers. The result is that we have a very knowledgeable workforce often poorly managed, and led by people whose knowledge is often inadequate and at worst dangerous.

Those at the senior levels who have benefited from this obviously faulty management paradigm have little incentive to change it. The result is a focus on process and shortterm results, lack of leadership and poorer management than the people of Canada are paying for — or than the thousands of competent and caring public servants deserve. The Phoenix fiasco is simply the most visible result.