The public service is suffering from the downgrading of the role of professionals, experts and those at the workface with the public.

There is a management fashion that believes that by imposing layers of generic managers, public spending will become more efficient because they will control the professionals, who cannot be trusted. It is true that professionals often have objectives which are dismissive of fiscal considerations – objectives like the welfare of those they are working for – and that some cannot be trusted not to act in their commercial interests. But there is surprisingly little evidence that the layers of generic management have worked well – most managers are not very good at evaluating themselves – and there are numerous anecdotes of them adding to costs with bullshit jobs or those which actually reduce the effectiveness of the professionals on the front line.

For instance, one DHB had a team which set out ethics for medical personnel. The professionals were irate; they were not consulted and in any case, of all the professionals I have worked for, none have been more ethically concerned than medics.

I bet no teachers were consulted over the recent megapolytech, Te Pūkenga, thirty-page (‘patronising’) document with a list of words should and should not use; there is to be no ‘students’ but ‘ākonga’. (Māori are less than half its students and most do not speak Māori fluently.) Readers will recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four the dictatorship tried to limit thinking with newspeak. (Not that I would accuse most generic managers of being literate enough to have read the novel.) One effect of newspeak is to isolate the organisation, and those inside it, from the rest of the world.

What precipitated this column was a harassed GP explaining to me that his local hospital had changed the way it deals with referrals of patients from GPs. It had made the task much more difficult. No doubt the designers are delighted with their ‘improved’ codification, with its multiple channels where, if the GP gets it wrong, the referral has to start all over again. The GP explained that often one did not know exactly what the patient’s problem was, so the correct ‘channel’ was not always obvious. He found himself wasting time trying to navigate the system, time which he could better spend with patients. The impression is that the new system was designed for management and had given no thought to doctors’ or patients’ actual situations. That we have a shortage of doctors and a surplus of managers did not influence their design.

Generic managers multiply. Retired chair of Health New Zealand (a.k.a. Te Whatu Ora) said that there was extensive waste in the healthcare system and that some of the duplicated administrative and managerial jobs could be shifted to the front line. That, he said, would address critical shortages, and shift ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ away from the overheads towards primary care.

Really? If each generic manager costs, say, $100,000 p.a., Campbell is suggesting there are thousands of them in overheads doing bullshit jobs.* Mind you, while the reduction in waste would be welcome, one doubts the usefulness of shifting the medical know-nothings into medical jobs. I suppose some would be more productive as orderlies.

In any case, that does not address the problem of the shortage of medically trained personnel. It is partly a worldwide phenomenon. (I argued that insofar as Obamacare in the US would be successful it would create an international shortage of trained healthcare staff. But it is also partly because we have been casual with our medical-force planning. It takes years (and a bit of forward thinking) to train a doctor, nurse or medical technician.

The culture of generic management has little interest in training the professionals it manages, instead downgrading them. For instance, in recent years the chief archivist (at third level in the Department of Internal Affairs) rarely has had any knowledge or qualifications in the management of archives. Programs to develop professional archivists have been dropped. In contrast when a retiring Government Statistician, Len Cook who was both a professional statistician and a very good manager, was appointed to head the British statistical service for five years, his instructions were to develop its career structures including for his successor.

Frequently the role of professionals is downgraded in an organisation; apparently generic managers often have difficulties dealing with people possessing expertise. The danger is well illustrated by the senior management team running the 2018 Population Census which had no members with any expertise or experience in running a census. The result was a disaster from which we are still suffering.

One of the reasons for the wide use of consultants is that having downgraded professionals in their organisation, the managers have to turn to outsiders when expertise is required. Frequently they get screwed by the consultants providing over-expensive and poorly informed responses because the managers lack the skills to commission, supervise  and evaluate consultants’ work.

Such is the culture of generic management that, having botched one job, the manager goes onto the next. They seem immune to the Peter Principle that one rises to one’s level of incompetence for in many cases they continue to rise. It seems that one’s position rather than one’s performance is the criterion of success. Apparently no one in the management team is ever responsible, in contrast to professionalism where personal responsibility is integral. This lack of responsibility may be the reason why there is so much inertia, as a problem is moved from desk to desk rather than dealt with. At best, things get lost in committees and garrulous do-nothing reports. 

Dealing with this management culture will not be easy. A useful change would be to require all government agencies to have a professional development program which would be audited every year – by its outputs, not by aspirations (which generic managers are very good at articulating but not getting around to delivering). Perhaps the audit should also include an evaluation of the number of professionals and where they are located in the hierarchy. We should also insist there be sufficient numbers of people with a professional background  in senior management and make sure there are people with professional expertise  on selection panels for senior positions.

However, generic managers are dug into management and will resist any reduction in their jobs or power. Directions from the top – mainly generic managers themselves – will be thwarted by lower level generic managers when asked to implement them. (You may think this is a harsh judgement on generic managers, but consider the measures they take to  avoid responding to requests under the Official Information Act.)

One is left with the uncomfortable feeling that the primary purpose of managerial ethos is to provide jobs for the manager class. It must be the biggest job creation program in the country – and the most expensive.

* One of the readers of a draft thought the $100,000 figure is too low. He cited Creative New Zealand whose 85 staff average a salary of $107,000 (more than double the income they recommend for those working in the arts). However layoffs tend to be at the lower remuneration end. (The arts sector often complains about management decisions made by the organisation, like destroying New Zealand books, whose reviews were an integral part of the literary infrastructure or dimissing the significance of Shakespeare.)