Leadership is to an organisation what brain is to the human body. Just as the brain controls the activities of an organism, leaders govern operations of their organisations. If the brain cells go haywire due to some malfunction, human consciousness crumbles. Similarly, poor leadership in organisations generates poor results.

Now let’s use our brains to ponder whether we have a leadership crisis in our country. Has genetics predetermined the birth of good leaders in our ecological system? Is our socio-economic structure conducive to production of effective leaders? Do we vote for leaders that can create value in our lives?

By and large, the world has learnt its lessons, but in our mindset time seems to have been frozen.

Now let’s explore the enigma of leadership in our public sector organisations. Sure enough, the notion of leadership is largely misunderstood in our public sector bureaucracies and underestimated in our country.

To almost all of us, leadership is about authority. For many, it is about politics. To some, it relates to private sector corporations and business enterprises. The concept of modern-day public sector leadership is extremely blurred, save to a few thinking souls.

Apparently, there is no desire to excel. Resultantly, there is no urgency, no responsibility and no accountability. The consequenes are but obvious – public sector organisations are invariably loaded with inefficiencies and waste of resources. The dominant cause seems to be a leadership failure. This is not merely an anecdotal observation; empirical evidence supported by a wide array of research, clearly highlights a strong correlation between incompetence of leaders and organisational failure.

Government and public services have changed substantially in the past few decades. So have the demands on public sector leaders. Personnel management has now become human resource management. Flexible and organic structures have replaced the rigid and mechanistic bureaus. Automation has modified orthodox work styles.

Most of the decision-making now is data based rather than grounded in the whims and wishes of the masters. The planning is now strategic, instead of being ad-hoc and sporadic in nature. Technical experts have largely succeeded generalists. Devolution has substituted centralisation. The duty of care has redeemed authoritarianism.

To what extent have our public sector organisations adapted to these modern world refinements? It’s been 73 years and our public sector organisational leadership is on a constant decline. The situation appears bleak and warrants a serious probe.

There are scores of public sector organisations in our country, including autonomous bodies and corporations. Essentially, these establishments can be termed as organisations i.e. entities comprising people with a particular purpose. Obviously, there are leadership positions available in these organisations for timely and effective achievement of organisational objectives.

The titles may range from minister to secretary, chairperson to CEO, and from managing director to the president, yet, at least theoretically, the position holder is expected to act as a leader – a head of department per se. Do they only head or also lead? Have we ever sincerely tried to investigate this million-dollar question?

The first point of enquiry is to see how well the potential candidates for leadership positions are commissioned. Inevitably, the major source of supply is a supposedly competitive recruitment process. Are those mandated with such critical resource mobilisation cognizant of the performance of the system, which provides potential leaders. What mechanisms have they put in place to encourage leadership traits, such as the ability to create vision, commitment to excellence, courage to challenge existing power bases and norms, strong desire for learning and development, openness to challenge and being challenged, and so on?

Is our public sector leadership selected, appointed, compensated and retained on these critical positions on the basis of these traits? Is there some other side to the story as well.

Next, where do the sources of motivation for our public sector leaders lie? We need to see whether the criterion for posting is a required skill-set or political connections and lobbying? What are the driving forces - an uninterrupted access to power or a genuine desire to bring improvements in public service?

What defines the nature of relationship to an organisation — ownership or apathy? Indeed, there are some good examples of leadership in our public sector milieu. Undoubtedly, in this unending race for powerful versus powerless positions, organisational effectiveness and higher order standards of leadership are compromised by vested interests.

The final subject of scrutiny is the efficacy of our leadership model. Admittedly, the quality of bureaucracy (the competence of civil servants) serves as one of the indicators used by the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project to gauge a country’s “government effectiveness”.

In WGI’s 2018 aggregate data source, Pakistan ranks within the bottom third of the countries surveyed. India has almost double the percentile rank and an upward trajectory. Our persistent decline in this governance dimension presents an extremely gloomy picture. This clearly demonstrates that our approach to leadership development is flawed and has consistently failed to respond to the changing demands of public service delivery. Then why is it not reformed?

As things stand, the proponents of the status quo and the beneficiaries of this retrogressive leadership pattern are unlikely to allow any sanguine reconstruction of the system. But, can we afford any further delay and decay? Certainly not. So, what is the way forward?

The political leadership of the country needs to take charge. The international best practices have to be embraced. The culture of merit, fair play, and equality of opportunity has to be promoted. The values of efficiency, transparency, and social capital need to be inculcated. A new breed of leadership has to be injected into the system. These leaders will have the ability to create mutual trust and motivation among the members of their organisations to achieve the desired objectives.

Above all, they will have the ability to lead by example and through a vision and mission spell a sense of common purpose. Let’s hope that this happens soon. We have already procrastinated enough to damage the system. This is a wake up call for the champions of civil service reforms.