Leadership Counts: Lessons for Public Managers from the Massachusetts Welfare, Training, and Employment Program - Softcover

Behn, Robert D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674518535 ISBN 13: 9780674518537

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1998

Synopsis

How can public officials move large government agencies to produce significant results? In Leadership Counts, Robert Behn explains exactly what managers in the inherently political environment of government need to do to obtain such performance.

In 1983 the leadership of the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare―Charles M. Atkins, Thomas P. Glynn, Barbara Burke-Tatum, and Jolie Bain Pillsbury―set out to educate and train welfare recipients, place them in good jobs, and move them from dependency to self-sufficiency. From these efforts to accomplish a specific and important public purpose, Behn extracts the fundamental ingredients of successful public leadership.

Behn’s analysis spans the spectrum of managerial tasks―from the almost spiritual responsibility to create and communicate a public mission to the seemingly mundane chore of motivating specific individuals to accomplish specific tasks. He describes how to manage for performance, examines how effective leaders can use external success to build internal morale, and analyzes the dilemmas of evaluating ongoing and evolving public policies. He explains in detail how accomplishing specific purposes requires “management by groping along.” And he analyzes three different metastrategies for government executives―strategies that emphasize policy, administration, or leadership.

Leadership Counts is more than an intriguing success story. It offers specific lessons that the nominal head of any government agency can employ to become the organization’s true leader. This insightful book will be of interest not only to students and teachers of public management but to leaders at all levels of government―from the principal of a school to the secretary of defense.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Leadership Counts offers specific lessons that the nominal head of any government agency can employ to become the organization's true leader.

Review

“Leadership Counts is vintage Behn. It combines a deep understanding of public management with a thoroughly engaging, colorful, and memorable writing style.”―Alan Altshuler, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

“This is an excellent book. It illuminates important aspects of public administration and management; it provides much useful information about an interesting public policy; and it tells its tale engagingly and briskly.”―Eugene Bardach, Graduate School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

“A splendid study of creative and effective management.”―Aaron Wildavsky, University of California, Berkeley

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0674518535
• ISBN 13: 9780674518537
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 266