Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 6

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Our mission is to contribute to excellence in public service management
Editorial
Editor-in-Chief: Patrice Dutil
Associate Editor: Nestor Arellano
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Vic Pakalnis, Mirarco, Laurentian University; Denise Amyot,
CEO, ACCC; Lisa Sullivan, Federal Youth Network; Jodi LeBlanc,
Veterans Affairs; Guy Gordon, Manitoba; Peter Jones, OCADU;
Murray Kronick, Interis Consulting
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4 / Canadian Government Executive // June 2016
One can’t write about public administration in the spring of 2016 without mentioning
the heroic work done by public servants in combatting the forest fires in Alberta or
in looking after the thousands of victims of this terrifying tragedy. It takes guts and
dogged persistence to meet the challenges of natural disasters like this, from the
very top to the bottom echelons of the organizations involved. There were dozens of
them implicated in battling the flames and serving the people. A lot of the managing
was top-down—military in many respects, but what was impressive, from my perch
anyway, was the coordination of effort between the local, provincial and federal
governments, and between the many community agencies and volunteers and the
governments. The top-down leadership is expected; it’s the leadership exhibited in
getting multiple organizations to work together that is special. It takes unique forms
of leadership to get things done “horizontally.”
The community has long talked about managing “horizontal” organizations—flat-
tened hierarchies with relatively few middle managers. The reality is that unless the
department is very small, these experiments have failed. What has emerg is another
reality: the rise of networked organizations that involve employees dispersed across
a country, province, territory or even a city. It often also means the leadership of
networks: more or less cohesive webs of organizations that are somehow linked by a
common purpose, either in formulating policy or in delivering programs.
In this issue, Deirdre Moore reignites the interest in what it takes to manage a net-
worked organization. She observes that this is hardly a public bureaucracy issue. In
fact, she documents how the private sector has been investing heavily in developing
its leadership’s capacity to manage from afar. She also comes to the conclusion that
these efforts take time and effort. Her article sounds an alarm, and CGE will be cover-
ing this issue more closely in future issues.
Two other pieces in this issue cover aspects of leading through networks. My inter-
view with Ms. Maureen O’Neil, the President of the Canadian Foundation for Health-
care Improvement, reveals how her organization is leading by cross-pollinating
ideas—getting proven practices developed locally to be adopted elsewhere. It’s not
easy work! In his piece on the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), Managing
Editor Nestor Arrellano reports on another dimension of leading through networks
to discover ideas. PHAC last year went to the airwaves to literally get partners-in-
innovation through a national contest. It crowdsourced ideas—a new practice that all
public sector leaders must include in their policy and program delivery arsenals. Pe-
ter Jones’s piece on the Alberta CoLab points to other innovative practices in reach-
ing out to get new ideas.
Speaking of cross-pollinating, Christopher Lau’s piece on new incentives to lure in-
ternational companies to establish plants in Canada is a necessary read. We all know
the competition is brutal out there in the globalized economy, but his insights show
that the task of attracting international capital is not the work of just one depart-
ment. Whether it is education or social services, economic or cultural management,
all parts of government must be hands-on-deck on this file. It’s another example of
horizontal leadership.
Please take note that CGE will be taking its summer break with this issue. Look for
the September issue sometime in the last half of August. Happy reading until then.
Mastering Horizontal Leadership
editor’s note Patrice Dutil
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