For the past 50 years the PPMA has championed the work of HR professionals in the public sector. To mark this anniversary, we brought together seven past presidents who have shaped our profession across decades of change.
What emerged was a powerful shared perspective. If we want public services that are fit for the future and truly fearless, we need to be far more honest about what actually drives progress and what doesn't.
But before we can move forward we must confront one uncomfortable truth: we have spent decades confusing motion with progress. We reorganised ourselves into exhaustion, restructured departments while community needs have shifted beyond recognition and pursued efficiency targets while losing sight of effectiveness.
The impending reorganisation of local government and creation of larger metro areas reflects rare cross-party consensus that fundamental change is needed. It also echoes the last great age of municipal delivery more than a century ago, when civic leaders didn't just manage services, they transformed entire cities through bold investment in people, infrastructure and services that built local prosperity.
Meeting today's challenges demands the same ambitious civic leadership combined with a fresh commitment to changing the way our organisations are managed and led.
Rethinking our approach to transformation
Our first challenge is to stop mistaking reorganisation for innovation and improvement. Too often, transformation is described in grand terms, but lacks depth, coherence or lasting impact.
We have become addicted to structural change because it feels like progress. New operating models, fresh organisation charts and different reporting lines all create the illusion that something significant is happening.
Transformation does not come from moving boxes on a diagram. It comes from fundamentally changing how we work, listen to our communities and trust our people to deliver. It is cultural, not cosmetic.
Every reorganisation has an opportunity cost. When we reshuffle teams or redraw responsibilities, we must remember we are choosing not to build capability, develop leaders, or create conditions for people to do their best work. True innovation requires us to stop rearranging the furniture and pay attention to these foundations.
A new vision for leadership
As a sector we are blessed with some outstanding leaders, but we do not have enough of the right ones in the right places.
Too often, leadership roles are given for tenure or deep technical knowledge rather than genuine leadership skills. Our system favours functional expertise over the ability to inspire, guide and transform.
When we promote based on technical competence alone, we are gambling that leadership skills will emerge naturally. They rarely do, and we miss the opportunity to level up our organisations.
Great public services need leaders who can navigate uncertainty with confidence, build trust across complex stakeholder groups and create environments where teams thrive under pressure. These human skills determine whether bold strategies actually happen or gather dust in filing cabinets.
The cost of getting this wrong is enormous. Poor leadership does not just limit individual performance, it cascades through entire organisations, stifling innovation, demoralising talented people and ultimately, failing the communities we serve.
We need to identify leadership potential early, create structured development programmes and celebrate leadership excellence with the same intensity we apply to technical achievements.
Instead of promoting the best accountant to run finance, we need to ask who has the leadership skills to transform how finance operates. The technical knowledge can be learned, the leadership mindset is much harder to develop.
Politicians influence culture and performance
Leaders are not the only people who shape organisational culture. While politicians are one step removed from day-to-day service delivery, their actions have a critical bearing on culture, performance and progress.
The most successful public organisations have elected members who understand they are stewards of culture, not just scrutinisers of performance.
They model behaviours, create psychological safety for calculated risks and demonstrate publicly that they value the people who serve their communities.
But this is far from universal. Too often, politicians treat staff as costs, not assets. When things go wrong, the focus is on blame, rather than learning. Perfection is expected from the outset rather than progress through iteration.
The impact cascades through organisations. In environments of fear, teams become risk-averse and innovation dies. Talented people leave for environments where they can actually make a difference. The very outcomes politicians want become harder to achieve because the conditions for success have been undermined.
Culture does not happen by accident, it is shaped by every interaction, with every priority set and every value demonstrated.
Great public services require political leaders who take responsibility for the conditions they create, not just the outcomes they demand.
Trust the potential of our people
There are many places we look for improvement in our organisations – technology, new ways of working, efficiency programmes – to name the most common ones. But what if the biggest opportunity for transformation is sitting right in front of us?
Middle managers are where change either flourishes or fails. They occupy the crucial space between strategy and operations, yet they are often the most overlooked and under-supported layer in our organisations.
These are the people who deal with the unpredictable, complex, and deeply human moments that define public service. They know what works, what does not, and what communities actually need.
But, instead of harnessing this expertise, we consistently overload them with implementation while undervaluing their leadership potential.
When we empower middle managers to lead rather than just manage, when we listen to their insights and involve them in shaping solutions, transformation becomes possible.
The same applies to frontline workers. They have expertise no consultant can provide and relationships no system can replicate. They see patterns, understand community needs and spot solutions senior leaders miss entirely. Yet we rarely create meaningful ways to harness this wisdom.
Instead of genuine consultation and collaborative problem-solving, we impose solutions designed in boardrooms by people who haven't delivered a service in years.
This has to change. Unlocking the potential of middle managers and frontline workers means investing in their leadership capabilities, not just their technical skills. It means giving them real autonomy to solve problems and genuine influence over how services are designed.
We must stop treating middle management as a problem to be flattened and start recognising them as the engine room of organisational success.
Acknowledge complexity
The first thing any frontline worker will tell you is that the one predictable thing about their role is its unpredictability.
This is what public services handle: the complex, multi-faceted challenges that other sectors will not touch. We work with people in crisis, navigate competing demands and deliver essential services in environments of constant change and scrutiny.
This complexity is not a failure, it is the point. Yet we persistently judge ourselves by private sector metrics that ignore our fundamentally different purpose and context. We apologise for not being streamlined enough, predictable enough or profitable enough.
This has to stop. We need to reclaim the narrative and celebrate the skill, judgement and resilience it takes to deliver public services in the real world. When we embrace complexity rather than fight it, we can design services responsive to human need rather than spreadsheet logic.
A new place for HR
The convergence of challenges we face today demands that HR moves from asking for permission to showing leadership.
Too often, we have allowed ourselves to be seen as the ‘policy police', rather than strategic partners. We have focused on process when we should have prioritised outcomes.
It is time to seize our place at the table when transformation is being discussed. We need to champion the development of leaders throughout our organisations and call out the problems that hold organisations back.
This means HR professionals who are bold enough to disrupt established thinking, data-literate enough to make evidence-based arguments and courageous enough to say when the emperor has no clothes.
The sector needs us to become the architects of future transformation, professionals who can envision how roles might evolve, who understand both technology and human psychology, who can build capabilities in change leadership alongside technical skills.
The activism our sector needs comes from HR professionals who stop waiting for invitations and start driving change, who put people at the centre of every decision while never losing sight of the outcomes we are trying to achieve.
Where we land
Fearless public services will not emerge from another digital transformation or efficiency programme. They will come from leaders who understand everything depends on the people who do the work and who create the conditions for those people to succeed.
The civic reformers of the late Victorian era understood this. They knew great public services require great people, supported by strong institutions, guided by clear purpose. We have the same opportunity today. The question is whether we will take it.
Pam Parkes is president of the PPMA (Public Services People Managers' Association)
