Already a subscriber? Log in
Management in business is comparatively simple. You think of an idea. You persuade those above you to let you put it into effect. If it succeeds, well and good, the credit is yours; but if it fails, you carry the can. You judge those reporting to you on the same basis. You can pick someone out of the pack, give him or her a chance, and if your choice does well they are on their way. If they fail they might be on the way out, but they had their chance. Everyone can judge how well you and they have done by the effect on the bottom line.
The Civil Service is quite different. For one thing, there is no ‘bottom line’ and your progress up the ranks depends more on peer esteem than anything else. You have job security, so unless you put your hand in the till or commit a crime, you can look forward to your pension. In practice this is a real problem, for how do you motivate a 40-year-old who realises that he has risen as far as he is likely to get, yet still has 20 years to go to his pension? The short answer is that you give him a new job every three years or so and this provides the motivation. Some jobs you enjoy and some you hate, but each provides a new challenge. And in the end the system creates an army of generalists.
The one expression I could not abide during my time was officials referring to ‘the department’s policy’. I used to remind them, rather tartly, that the department can offer alternatives but it is ministers who decide policy. In practice that expression only came to be deployed when there were ministers with no policy ideas of their own. The real problem of departmental policies lay in the way they were created. Most would start deep in the bowels of the department. At every stage there would be a committee and the overriding policy of every committee was all too often ‘equality of misery’ — the process of compromise to ensure the decision was such that all parties were equally upset. Any innovative suggestion would be watered down until only the blandest ideas would ever reach the ministerial desk.
Successful ministers were those who arrived with a clear idea what to do. You first sold the idea to your department so that it would be adopted by your officials. If you didn’t, then all too often they would return with long faces and wax lyrical on the problems. I even played that game myself when I was an official and I did not like what ministers were proposing. In later years, when officials would come to me and say how this or that proposal simply would not work, I would merely ask them to return the following day and show me how it would. They always did!
A successful minister is one who spends as much time selling his policies to his own department as he does to the voter. If you fail to create enthusiasm among your officials your ideas quickly run into the sand; if you succeed, your ideas return enhanced and more likely to be workable. You have to remember at all times that you do not employ your civil servants, and that they will be there long after you are gone. It is all very different from the private sector.
Those who work for the mayor of London are not strictly civil servants. I suppose Alan Sugar could use his favourite expression and fire members of his staff, but if he wants to succeed he will find out the hard way that only persuasion really works.
The trouble for most businessmen in politics is that, even if they do learn the lesson, it is almost always too late.
Lord Young of Graffham is a former Cabinet minister and chairman of Cable & Wireless; he is now a private equity investor.
Also in Society
Also by David Young
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in