Public Values Leadership

Instead of private gain or corporate profits, what if we set public values as the goal of leadership? Leadership means many things and takes many forms. But most studies of the topic give little attention to why people lead or to where they are leading us. In Public Values Leadership, Barry Bozeman and Michael M. Crow explore leadership that serves public values—that is to say, values that are focused on the collective good and fundamental rights rather than profit, organizational benefit, or personal gain. While nearly everyone agrees on core public values, there is less agreement on how to obtain them, especially during this era of increased social and political fragmentation. How does public values leadership differ from other types of organizational leadership, and what distinctive skills does it require? Drawing on their extensive experience as higher education leaders, Bozeman and Crow wrestle with the question of how to best attain universally agreed-upon public values like freedom, opportunity, health, and security. They present conversations and interviews with ten well-known leaders—people who have achieved public values objectives and who are willing to discuss their leadership styles in detail. They also offer a series of in-depth case studies of public values leadership and accomplishment. Public values leadership can only succeed if it includes a commitment to pragmatism, a deep skepticism about government versus market stereotypes, and a genuine belief in the fundamental importance of partnerships and alliances. Arguing for a "mutable leadership," they suggest that different people are leaders at different times and that ideas about natural leaders or all-purpose leaders are off the mark. Motivating readers, including students of public policy administration and practitioners in public and nonprofit organizations, to think systematically about their own values and how these can be translated into effective leadership, Public Values Leadership is highly personal and persuasive.

The legitimacy of any national health system depends on how it serves the interest of the poorest and most vulnerable people. As such, a commitment to equity should be at the heart of human rights discussions regarding universal health coverage. Human Rights, Public Values, and Leadership in Healthcare Policy is an essential reference source on the importance of access to timely, quality, and affordable healthcare, and how overt or implicit discrimination in the delivery of health services violates fundamental human rights and can have serious health consequences. This publication covers current health-policy debates and reforms that focus on extending universal health coverage, decreasing the growth of costs through improved efficiency, and expanding prevention and wellness of programs. While highlighting topics such as authority hierarchy, HIV/AIDS experiences, and veterans' mental health, this publication is ideally designed for health practitioners/professionals, scholars, researchers, institutions, students, consultants, and policymakers.

Mark H. Moore’s now classic Creating Public Value offered advice to public managers about how to create public value. But that book left a key question unresolved: how could one recognize (in an accounting sense) when public value had been created? Here, Moore closes the gap by setting forth a philosophy of performance measurement that will help public managers name, observe, and sometimes count the value they produce, whether in education, public health, safety, crime prevention, housing, or other areas. Blending case studies with theory, he argues that private sector models built on customer satisfaction and the bottom line cannot be transferred to government agencies. The Public Value Account (PVA), which Moore develops as an alternative, outlines the values that citizens want to see produced by, and reflected in, agency operations. These include the achievement of collectively defined missions, the fairness with which agencies operate, and the satisfaction of clients and other stake-holders. But strategic public managers also have to imagine and execute strategies that sustain or increase the value they create into the future. To help public managers with that task, Moore offers a Public Value Scorecard that focuses on the actions necessary to build legitimacy and support for the envisioned value, and on the innovations that have to be made in existing operational capacity. Using his scorecard, Moore evaluates the real-world management strategies of such former public managers as D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Revenue John James.

A brand new text that examines the latest thinking in values-based leadership in the public sector. Assuming no prior knowledge, it draws on the experience of the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA to present students with an invaluable account of public sector management and leadership.

Over the last 10 years, the concept of value has emerged in both business and public life as part of an important process of measuring, benchmarking, and assuring the resources we invest and the outcomes we generate from our activities. In the context of public life, value is an important measure on the contribution to business and social good of activities for which strict financial measures are either inappropriate or fundamentally unsound. A systematic, interdisciplinary examination of public value is necessary to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. In reflecting on the ‘public value project’, this book points to how the field has broadened well beyond its original focus on public sector management; has deepened in terms of the development of the analytical concepts and frameworks that linked the concepts together; and has been applied increasingly in concrete circumstances by academics, consultants, and practitioners. This book covers three main topics; deepening and enriching the theory of creating public value, broadening the theory and practice of creating public value to voluntary and commercial organisations and collaborative networks, and the challenge and opportunity that the concept of public value poses to social science and universities. Collectively, it offers new ways of looking at public and social assets against a backdrop of increasing financial pressure; new insights into changing social attitudes and perceptions of value; and new models for increasingly complicated collaborative forms of service delivery, involving public, private, and not-for-profit players.

This book provides a framework for understanding the creation of public value in urban environments. The ability of cities to produce value is related to their capacity to generate meaningful resources for city residents and workers that enable them to craft meaningfulness in life and work. Meaningfulness and public value require new ways of leading and developing city governance. This extends to designing inclusive structures and processes for people to grapple with the meanings and values underpinning public value creation. A public value framework demands that city governance goes beyond ordinary government to considerations of how to involve city residents and workers in creating and maintaining the common good. The common good is determined by an inclusive associational life characterized by deliberative processes and opportunities for social contribution. When acting upon their entitlements to make the city, urban residents and workers – as members of diverse civic, public and private organizations – co-create the meanings that facilitate the collective action necessary to translate values into value. The experience of cooperating for the common good produces meanings that people can adopt into a sense that their lives have significance and purpose. This is particularly relevant to understanding how to motivate just and inclusive sustainability transitions, especially as cities recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on cities and urban policy, the main theme of this book is to elaborate on public values for cities and city policies, and to further develop the concept of the meaningful city. This book aims to provide new kinds of tools for city development that can help them co-create resilience against future shocks.

Designed to help midlevel and senior managers in organizations dedicated to public purposes, this book provides trained self-awareness to deploy values to guide decisions and build the culture of their organizations. The book explores how all managing involves leading and identifies the levels of ethical responsibility for managerial leaders. Highlighting the fundamental role that ethics plays in organizational life, J. Patrick Dobel uses insights from cognitive and social psychology to discuss how to anticipate and address threats to integrity and value informed decision making. Building on traditional ethical theory and modern research, the book begins with the fundamental assumption that individuals possess responsibility when they act for ethical purposes and results in taking a position within a public or nonprofit organization. This assumption of responsibility recognizes the inherent discretion in all positions and claims that effective ethical management requires self-awareness, self-mastery, integrity and a working frame of one’s values and character. The book pays special attention to the challenges of integrating diverse people and perspectives in public organizations as well as attending to the slippages to integrity in organizational life and how managers and leaders can foresee and address ethical slippage and corruption. The book provides checklists and decision frameworks that individuals can adopt and deploy to guide decisions. Public Leadership Ethics: A Management Approach will help create strong value informed cultures supported by communication, transparency, incentives and strong management cadres to achieve high quality service and integrity based actions. It will be of special interest to managerial leaders in public service and teaching in public administration and policy programs or executive training.