Book shows right and left route for public manager – 02/08/2023 – Market

How do public managers face the challenge of implementing changes not only with planning, but with the ability to put their strategy into practice?

This is what professor Robson Leite, master in administration, management and public strategy, seeks to analyze in the book “Strategy and Leadership in Times of Profound Changes: the path to success in public organization”, released by Dialética publishing house.

The initiative for the work arose from the master’s thesis presented by Leite at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, awarded in 2019 by the Brazilian Society of Public Administration.

A public servant at Petrobras and a former state deputy for the PT in Rio de Janeiro, Leite evaluates the manager’s performance in the public service based on his experience and also with reports from ten public service managers, who have different ideological views.

“Conceiving the strategy, putting that strategy into practice, involving the team, even facing changes and adapting the plan, has nothing to do with ideology. That’s a little bit of what I try to show”, he says.

Among the managers heard by the author are Tarso Genro (PT), who was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, twice mayor of Porto Alegre and headed ministries in the first two terms of the Lula government; Jandira Feghali (PC do B), with passages through secretariats in Niterói and the state of Rio de Janeiro; Nilo Batista, governor of Rio for the PDT in 1994 to 1995; and Arolde de Oliveira, who was a senator allied with former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) before he died in 2020.

They are questioned about their work in public management based on four theories: transformational leadership, by James MacGregor Burns; situational strategic planning, by Carlos Matus; strategy as practice, by Richard Whittington; and stakeholder theory, by Robert Edward Freeman.

The book makes it clear that dialogue is essential in maintaining the strategy developed by the manager, regardless of whether he is from the left or from the right.

“It is obvious that the content of the strategy has a strong ideological component in public organization. Where are you going is the question you ask. Now, how are you going, how do you plan to go, has nothing to do with ideological identity”, says the author.

Much discussed at the beginning of the third term of the Lula government, the balance between the technical and the political is also cited in the survey. For Tarso Genro, this mediation is necessary.

“If you don’t involve the technical agents politically and value their importance, the plan ceases to exist, because it is blocked by the bureaucracy and by fractional interests within the bureaucracy”, says the former governor of Rio Grande do Sul.

The survey was carried out before the Covid-19 pandemic, so there is no approach to the significant changes that have taken place in all sectors of society, including the public service, in the last three years. But the influence of external factors on the work of managers is one of the themes analyzed.

“The pandemic is a perfect example, because it is a variable that few people have been able to map”, says the author.

In the strategic planning of the public service, route changes are natural. The author seeks to detail the strategies for not losing track within management, highlighting the impact of behavior and dialogue on the results of public managers.

“One thing that Brazil has lost in recent years is the ability to dialogue. This is very bad in the exercise of leadership. through dialogue, is to make it clear”, says Leite.