El sujeto, forma y materia de la educación

Leadership is not a set of skills that can be learned from a textbook. A leader who is the embodiment of organisational values must be self-aware and able to exercise judgement. A leader must be able to be aware of and separate the duties of the position as described in the job description, the job-in-action and how actions are perceived by others (Mant 1997). There is a difference between these three roles and the successful leader can understand it. This is self-awareness in the CEO. She can see what she thinks she is doing, what the job description says and what people around her feel and project into the job. Mant (1997) details his concept of the ‘role-idea’, which is an unconscious belief in the purpose of the actions we take and it governs actions. For me, the role idea is the value set of the leader.

Judgment is the word several CEOs used for that ability to differentiate between the various role expectations of the position. They believe it is their own value set that guides them in determining the appropriate action. They are aware of the perceptions of others as forming a part of the whole package of leadership.11 _{This notion of the perception of others is explored}

in detail in the next chapter on experiences at Glenview.

A capacity for reflexivity is important. A good CEO is not only aware of the projections and expectations of others onto the position but of her own capacity for splitting and denial. A good CEO does not have to conform to the stereotype of a private-sector leader. She can acknowledge and reclaim the nurturing aspects of the work in the public sector as valid. The good CEO uses values as a guide, not as a rulebook and can sit calmly in the midst of tension and contradiction, wait and listen to both staff and the inner voice. Rationality would have the CEO always busy, active, moving forward, decisive. However, action often disguises fear of uncertainty and promotes decisions based on denial of rejected aspects of self.

In summary, a good leader in public enterprise must be able to exercise judgment based on her own values, understand and articulate the primary task of the organisation (service) and acknowledge and use authority in the pursuit of the primary task. The leader must be able to articulate and embody these values for significant others. The leader owns her authority and accepts the potential for corruption. The leader accepts that some measure of self-interest and self-confidence are needed to inspire followers and that these are not negative qualities. The leader desires to serve the common good, however defined, to envision the big picture, to empower others, to have a tolerance for slow decision making, to have the capacity to engage others in the decision-making process, to make a mark on a community and to have the capacity to contain projected material from staff, community and elected representatives.

So what does a CEO in local government need? A leader in this field needs a robust sense of her own values and limitations. She needs to dare to look at what is dark or difficult: to accept and acknowledge the calling of service and the authority that comes with it. The public sector manager can lead the way in giving back a level of complexity to humanity

that economic rationalism has buried; understanding that paradox, contradiction and confusion is part of living. There is no simple prescription, no tool kit, and no 10 easy steps. As complex as these requirements may appear, they are what is needed in a CEO in local government. The interviewed CEOs acknowledged no theory of management can provide the answers for all situations and that the most difficult aspect of the work is dealing with relationships within the enterprise. The CEOs in this research were aware that they are the embodiment of values for their staff and they used words such as judgement and nous to try to explain their understanding that success in the work is dependent on engagement with these factors.

Conclusion

The CEOs interviewed in this research brought to light the diversity and complexity of the job role and emphasised the nurturing, caring aspects of local government service. They are attracted to the work primarily because of its diversity. These comments remind me of the parenting role. It, too, is complex and diverse and serves the purpose of nurturing and caring for the family. The parenting role is also a position of great power and has the capacity to affect people’s (children’s) lives. Similarly a local government CEO has the authority to provide services or not and to raise fines and fees that affect quality of life. In the private sector, the power of a CEO is about personal wealth and aggrandisement and it can be more easily measured in quantitative terms, i.e. the bottom line. The public sector, on the other hand, is about the quality of other people’s lives.

The dominant model of the heroic leader with idealised male character traits is limiting in many ways for managers wanting to act differently. It is especially problematic for women leaders. It denies complexity, it denies the feminine and it denigrates the idea of leadership as service to the common good. Most importantly it assumes that all that occurs in the workplace is rational and can be resolved by application of a technical tool-kit. Economic rationalism denigrates caring. Yet caring is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be denied. We are all embedded in it, including the CEOs, who expressed the difficulty of being a leader who follows both her conscience and also the mainstream model of management. In the next chapter we look at the local government CEO in the context of the work environment. Another layer of complexity is added to the role of CEO by looking at how

the CEO enacts her values in the day-to-day, how others perceive her, how the history of the organisation and the expectations of others impact on the performance of the CEO. Each of the factors adds a degree of complexity to being a local government CEO.