Reinventing Public Leadership: How a Norwegian City Is Tackling Radical Change

• In Event: Reinventing Public Leadership in Norway: How Trondheim Is Moving to Create Its Future

Short Description

In the face of multiple adaptive challenges, the city of Trondheim, Norway is undertaking a major reorganization and radical change effort. To address increased public and political expectations combined with meager funding, the city is redefining leadership for city leaders, restructuring teams, and undertaking training to build the requisite capacities.

Detailed Abstract

The community of Trondheim Norway, like many cities around the world today, faces unprecedented challenges. Public leaders must navigate the tension between meeting the immediate practical needs of citizens and inspiring change through a transcendent vision (Chrislip & O'Malley, 2013). Yet recent research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) looking at innovation in the public sector suggests innovation is still very much framed as a question of "quality improvement." There is a blind spot (no real change) as far as new organizational configurations go. The same situation is found for recruitment and organizational identities. There is little to suggest a radical change in the profile and self-perception of municipal employees.
As a whole, city leaders face four main tasks; engaging in democratic processes of governance, fostering social development along with industrial growth, providing public services, and public administration. While each of these responsibilities on their own are challenging, their interdependencies lead to these challenges taking the form of wicked issues (Brown, Harris, & Russell, 2010) that require complex coordination. For leaders in Trondheim, this is further complicated by a large span of control, with an average of 40 employees per leader. On top of this, increasing external expectations from both public and political sources are not matched by equal increases in funding. Altogether, this forms a clearly adaptive challenge for the city (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009).
Trondheim has a population of about 190,000 inhabitants, (220,000 including students) and its main industries are education and technology innovation. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology is the largest institution in the region and SINTEF is an independent research institution connected to the university. Technology innovation emerges out of this educational environment, with 550 tech companies producing things like micro-processors that are running the majority of touch screens on smartphones. Trondheim is also home to a world leader in the production of wireless chips. As well, there is a regional hospital and an extensive aquaculture industry.
Increasingly, education is seen as part of the municipality’s responsibility in specific sectors, with approximately 3,500 students in fields like nursing and teaching doing parts of their formal training within the city organization. As well, for large groups of professionals (teachers and some technical services) the municipality is the only significant employer.
In this context, a significant portion of the city leaders have little or no leadership training, whether through formal training or in-house programs. Leadership standards and practices have, for better or worse, (most of the time it works!), developed organically over time, from the bottom-up. The result of this is massive differences in the formal organizational structures, leadership practices and expectations across units and sectors. Complicating matters further, the sector is marred by an average sick leave of 10%.
To address this situation, a comprehensive overhaul of the city’s leadership structure, models and training are being undertaken. This started with the review and redesign of leadership models (unit and sector levels) operating in the city, looking at full array of positions and roles across all sectors. This is followed by the re-recruitment of approximately 400 level three leaders to new leadership teams. This is designed to enable the city to reduce the leader to employee ratio from 1:40 to 1:25. Finally, leadership development work is being initiated to implement a unified model and set of practices across the diverse sectors. This holistically oriented program will implement innovative approaches and pilot the use of recently developed breakthroughs in the use of cognitive developmentally designed assessments and learning cycles focused on building key decision making skills (Dawson & Stein, 2004; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010; Stein, Dawson, & Fischer, 2010).
At the same time, this project faces macro level challenges. These begin with insufficient funding and capacity relevant to the scale of ambition the project aims for. Political ambitions and the need to show results are not always aligned with the patience necessary to engage adaptive work over time. Finally, getting sufficient participation, engagement and coordination of the multiple, concurrent facets of the project is in itself a significant challenge. In many respects, the municipality lacks the leadership it is setting out to develop in order to make the very changes that are needed to bring about this leadership in the first place. This translates into a number of practical and social constraints.
At a more meso level, level three leaders currently deal with issues of knowledge management without a clear understanding and authority of how to direct money and people. With the organizational structure and role changes being implemented, these leaders’ responsibilities will become more like those of conventional division leaders, with the full burden and authority to deal with emerging issues within their division. They will be required to enforce their professional decisions and at the same time be held accountable for outcomes such as customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction and governance. This is a significant change from their previous roles and responsibilities.
The current situation is exemplified by a number of issues. The role and importance of issues of participation are not readily appreciated and generate ample space for confusion and misinterpretations to emerge. Leaders at the unit level charged with recruiting the new leaders have a hard time seeing themselves in their new roles. Non-compliance with official guidelines among leadership and a lack of fundamental understanding for basic planning, risk and performance management, (systems understanding), is widespread. Affect driven leadership practices (e.g. failure to refuse incompetence for fear of hurting peoples’ feelings) often override espoused values and explicit guidelines and procedures.
Symbolically, the project is organized as part of the Move Trøndelag Program that has set as its goal to redefine public health and making Trøndelag the movement capital of the world. The program deals with movement in terms of physical, mental and social movement and includes initiatives such as the World Ski Championship 2023.

Participant

• Kristian Mjoen, City of Trondheim