Are Public Leaders up to Standard?

The term leadership is so nebulous that no one has ever been able to measure it and yet everyone has tried to define it. Although the notion of leadership is beset by complexities in both the public and the private sector, it is particularly within the public sector that competing needs and expectations of diverse stakeholders exacerbate this problem. In both sectors it could be argued that leadership is not cross sectoral and leadership development is siloed. Within the private sector, strategic alliances may be formed albeit only when this can be perceived as a benefit to shareholders. This emphasises that the private sector is driven by customeroriented profit in comparison to the public sector which is very much driven by government-imposed targets. This paper suggests that improvements to leadership are required across both sectors. It will argue that to improve public sector leadership there must be shared aims and values in order to improve a sense of community well being. The paper further suggests that the development of public leadership standards is crucial to this improvement. Such standards should ideally apply across the public sector in order to help the development of a culture of “one-public-service” rather than many public services. The paper outlines a model of public leadership standards which has not previously been discussed by either practitioners or the research community and which has potential to offer a benchmark by which public leadership can be measured