Gordon Brown's remodelling of the landscape of public service governance - devolved powers, enhanced local accountability, an emphasis on collaboration and new partnerships at community level - will require public managers to rethink how they operate in a "political" environment.
Managing politically, however, does not merely mean being able to interact with the formal institutions and representatives of government. Research by Jean Hartley, professor of organisational analysis at Warwick Business School, shows that relations with government are second on the list of what constitutes political awareness. Most important of all is the requirement to build alliances that will enable an organisation to achieve its objectives.
All leaders, whether elected politicians or public sector managers, must behave politically, in the widest sense, by exhibiting sensitivity to different viewpoints and hidden agendas. But do enough public sector managers know how to operate in a political environment? Recent research suggests that the answer is no. Public sector managers feel they have insufficient skills to manage in a political context, and this applies also to private sector managers and those running voluntary organisations.
Sir David Varney, former chairman of HM Revenue & Customs and author of last year's report on transforming government services, says political skills should no longer be viewed as the domain of the specialist, but as a mainstream element of leadership, needed across all sectors; no organisation can afford to turn a blind eye to the political dimensions of their business or service.
This concept of political awareness is more to the fore in public sector organisations, where leaders, by their nature, have to understand and negotiate the sometimes fraught boundary between politics and management.
Also important in this picture of leadership is a view of managers who, despite the focus on self-interested politicking in most management literature, are very firmly not just in the business of individual achievement. While some managers do still see politics in terms of people protecting their turf or pursuing personal advantage, the most common understanding of politics is the need to work within a political framework to deliver the objectives of an organisation, either through collaboration with other organisations or through reconciling differences.
There is recognition of a growing need to influence decision-makers outside one's own organisation and to understand that organisations have to operate in an increasingly complex and inter-dependent world.
Hartley identifies the five main attributes needed to manage with the requisite levels of political awareness: personal skills - particularly the ability to understand the motives, interests and influence of others; interpersonal skills - including the ability to influence others, to make people feel valued, and to handle conflict; reading people and situations - the ability to recognise both overt and underlying agendas is at the heart of political awareness; building alignments and alliances - requiring managers to recognise differences, but to forge them into collaborative actions; and strategic scanning - the ability to undertake long-term planning and think about longer-term issues that may affect an organisation.
Few leadership programmes explicitly include these elements of building political awareness, although they may be implicit in some aspects of leadership frameworks. Hartley believes that political awareness is more about being aware of the context in which individuals and organisations exist, as well as being aware of potential events and influences that may have a future impact - often in unexpected ways.
Public sector managers looking to brush up their political awareness in today's changing political climate can consider a number of options, Hartley advises. They should start by checking whether their political awareness skills are as good as they think they are (they may be surprised by the feedback). They can then start work on developing good skills of observation, reflecting and questioning - asking themselves after key meetings how well they managed to read people and situations - and improving their strategic scanning skills.
But this isn't just about individual managers. Organisations, too, need to assess and develop their political awareness skills more systematically and to understand how these skills can assist public sector bodies deliver services more effectively.
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