Released earlier this month, the Prime Minister’s mandate letter laid out seven priorities for his government, including the reduction of spending on government operations “so that Canadians can invest more in the people and business that will build the strongest economy in the G7”.
The message is clear and reflects a growing sentiment among the public and in the media: current operations of the government and federal public service are failing at their primary task of providing value added to Canadians. Service delivery departments have seen for the most part a downward decline in the level of satisfaction for the client experience they provide; internal and external processes have become cumbersome and inefficient; and there is an apparent inertia clogging the ability of the federal public service to modernise itself and to deliver anything structurally substantial.
The country’s current fiscal stance, global issues and the need for a more effective, technologically enabled and client focused federal public service provide an unique opportunity to modernize its role and augment its value added. But how should it be done?
From a renewed IT infrastructure, to policy simplification and the streamlining of program delivery, the to-do list to overhaul the federal service is endless. The success of all these initiatives, however, rests first and foremost on the re-alignment of the performance incentive structures of its leaders. Tell me what you measure, and I will tell you what you value as an organisation and where you will put your efforts.
If a call centre measures the performance of its agent by the percentage of calls ending in a resolution for clients as opposed to the length of time on the phone, call agents will be solution-oriented and focused on high client satisfaction rather than working the clock. It goes to the core of human behaviour.
In March 2024, the federal public service was led by 9,155 executives, up 35% since 2010. Their performance has been guided since 2015 by the Key Leadership Competency (KLC) framework, which outlines the “expected behaviours of its leaders” and is used to recruit, train, manage talent and assess performance of executives.
Largely unchanged in the last ten years, the framework’s focus on competencies, that is skills and abilities, have meant that its practical application has been leaning towards favouring results over good management practices (the how). Focusing on the journey and not only the end goals is essential to achieving efficient allocations of resources and empowering staff to go the extra mile. A healthy work environment brings about meaningful outcomes.
Organizations across the public service, such as the Canada Revenue Agency, have recognised this shortcoming by complementing the KLC framework with one that emphasises a leader’s character, namely the Leader Character framework. Others have on an ad hoc basis attempted to modify the application of the KLCs by looking at how results were accomplished, but without a clear overarching direction from the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), responsible for the public service.
The lack of direction from the center in the application of the framework and the ad hoc use of tools across the public service has meant that executives are not held to the same standard. Moreover, the absence of a clear vision to modernise the federal public service and the generality of the incentives structures have meant that these competencies are not deliberately assessed against a desired end. The promoting and guiding change competency is defined as having the “courage and resilience to challenge convention” and creating “an environment that supports bold thinking, experimentation and intelligent risk taking”. How does this create incentives to determine how and implement, for example, artificial intelligence-based solutions that can streamline processes. Granted, each executive has a performance agreement with more precise objectives, but at the end of the day, the lynchpin to assessing performance pretty much allows the justification of any results.
This is illustrated by the distribution of performance ratings since the implementation of the framework. As shown in the table below, there has been an upward trend in the percentage of executives exceeding expectations since 2013-14 (43.8% in 2023-24 versus 39% in 2013-14). This trend is even more pronounced for the most senior leaders of the public service: 72% of assistant deputy ministers (ADMs) exceeded expectations in 2023-24 (up from 65.5% in 2013-14), with 20% of them getting a “surpassed”, that is, being assessed as exceptional. In other words, there seems to be an inverse relationship between external and internal satisfaction regarding the public service.
It is astonishing that this type of distribution has not been under scrutiny by top leaders and suggests an urgent need to overhaul expectations for leaders, both in terms of what they are and how they are assessed. Clearly, if almost everyone is getting a gold star, corporate expectations are way too low and/or are out of sync with those paying their salaries.
Given the link between an executive’s performance and at-risk pay, there may also be a need to review compensation if the at-risk pay is simply a way to compensate more adequately senior leaders.
Perhaps what is most troubling is the fact that Deputy Ministers are generally pulled from the pool of assistant deputy ministers, with the Privy Council Office making recommendations to the office of the Prime Minister, solely on the basis of an assessment against the KLC framework. Both the PCO and TBS (responsible for the talent management of ADM) have confirmed through access to information requests that they solely use the KLC framework to assess potential candidates and do not leverage psycho-metric assessments, interviews, references or other standard evaluations tools when determining if someone is ready to be considered for a Deputy Minister position.
With these types of results, it is perhaps not surprising that the TBS affirms in an access to information request not having done any evaluations, assessments and/or surveys pertaining to alternatives to the KLC framework since 2020. If the government wants to bring real changes to the public service, it needs to do a deep dive to understand current shortcoming, develop a tangible vision of what the public service should be doing and how it should be doing it, and ensure that incentives are aligned with the plan to get there.
Source: Treasury Board Secretariat