Back in the day I ran one of the larger sales forces in Australasia in one of the most competitive of industries: Office Equipment. And if you think loan sharks, used-car salesmen and the parliamentary wing of Te Pāti Māori are the best exemplars of fanatical, self-interested aggression, you’ve never seen a pack of OE salespeople chasing down a photocopier order. But I digress.
One thing I noticed during my years in that business is the way every sales team always had one or two individuals who didn’t pull their weight but the interesting thing was it was usually only the team managers who cared about that.
In fact, the rest of the team often supported the slackers because having someone in the team who is performing worse than you provides this safety net: ‘Since Charlie is doing poorly that proves the job is hard and no one will threaten to fire me while I’m at least doing better than him.’ A similar sentiment is the old joke about not needing to outrun the tiger chasing you and your mate – you just need to outrun your mate.
I fixed our problem by shifting some of the commission scheme over to a team bonus scheme where what anyone got paid depended on how well the whole team performed. Bingo! Peer pressure immediately shifted 180 degrees, from tacit support and toleration to condemnation of the slackers, forcing them to either shape up or ship out and results improved accordingly.
All of which is a long introduction to the situation in the public service bureaucracy, the fundamental problem at its core and the key reasons it embraces left-wing ideology and wokeness with such fervour. It’s because, for the most part, the public service is staffed by a community of underperformers. And I know that firsthand because, back in the day, I once worked there too.
In the public service, no one gets paid according to performance, they get paid for turning up (or, in the case of the new ‘work from home’ mentality, paid for actually not turning up). So it’s a safe job and ‘no one’s going to sack me, are they?’
Well maybe. Now and again new governments make threats to ‘slash’ the public service, some much more successfully (Trump/Musk) and some much less so (Luxon/Willis) so there is a need, as a government employee, to protect oneself against those pressures.
The biggest risk is the possibility that threats to slash will actually start to happen and ranks are broken as each individual tries to prove that they are ‘better than Charlie’ or ‘faster than their mate” as per the prior examples.
But you can’t do it by performing better because how can you measure ‘performance’ in the public service? More forms per day completed? More memos sent? More meetings convened?
(And they have all been tried – which leads to one other Parkinsonian truism about bureaucrats, ‘Whenever four or more are gathered together, then the paperwork they generate to prove the value of their existence will inevitably lead to a claim that they are overworked and must hire at least two more of their ilk to cope with the workload.’)
So, without performance as a metric for one’s protection, the only option is to fall back on both ‘equality of mediocrity’ and ‘differentness of personality’ and the supposed need for balance and diversity to fairly represent the complex makeup of NZ as a whole. Ergo the embrace of left-wing orthodoxy, unionism, DEI and across the (warning: oxymoron incoming) public service.
It’s no longer the ‘can’t sack me while Charlie is doing worse’ defense, instead it’s ‘they can’t sack me because I’m either the only one of my kind in this group, and/or we’re all equal (equally incompetent?) and therefore no one can be singled out for dismissal’.
Summarising, the difference between private business and public service is this: In the private sector, job security comes from over-performing versus your peers and the challenge for management looking for increased productivity across the board is to either bring the poor performers up to speed, or to replace them with those who do better.
In the public service it’s the exact opposite: Job security comes from the mutually agreed dumbing down of team members so that all operate at the same level of mediocrity and, since everyone is underperforming, no one can be singled out for dismissal on that basis.
Plus, as a backstop, one can always try to identify as someone entitled to ‘special treatment’ under DEI initiatives thus creating another reason why you can’t then be dismissed.
And as for management, themselves pretty mediocre, having, for the most part, risen through the ranks by dint of length of tenure rather than performance, the only answer to getting more outputs from your team of bureaucrats is to add more bureaucrats. A situation made obvious by the massive 34 per cent expansion of headcount: 16,000 new hires under Ardern’s Labour Government.
As a result of this there is no easy or ‘kind’ way to identify who should be trimmed from the public service workforce, nor indeed how it can be selectively done.
So the only real answer is the Elon Musk answer of ‘zero-based’ budgeting: a common business concept that is applied by first abolishing, or threatening to abolish, a department and then requiring those who don’t want that to happen to provide a proper analysis of the services that department supposedly provides, why they are needed, and how they can be supplied at the most efficient rate if and when the department is reinstated.
The result? Either you get a reconstituted service which is stripped back to its necessary bones without the bureaucratic bloat, or you do away altogether with any department that can’t actually prove its worth. (As in, ‘tell me five things you achieved last week or you’re out of here.’)
Brutal but necessary. The alternative is that the public service will continue to grow, and if it does so at the rate it did under Labour, by the year 2060 every worker in NZ will be a public sector employee.
In fact, the rest of the team often supported the slackers because having someone in the team who is performing worse than you provides this safety net: ‘Since Charlie is doing poorly that proves the job is hard and no one will threaten to fire me while I’m at least doing better than him.’ A similar sentiment is the old joke about not needing to outrun the tiger chasing you and your mate – you just need to outrun your mate.
I fixed our problem by shifting some of the commission scheme over to a team bonus scheme where what anyone got paid depended on how well the whole team performed. Bingo! Peer pressure immediately shifted 180 degrees, from tacit support and toleration to condemnation of the slackers, forcing them to either shape up or ship out and results improved accordingly.
All of which is a long introduction to the situation in the public service bureaucracy, the fundamental problem at its core and the key reasons it embraces left-wing ideology and wokeness with such fervour. It’s because, for the most part, the public service is staffed by a community of underperformers. And I know that firsthand because, back in the day, I once worked there too.
In the public service, no one gets paid according to performance, they get paid for turning up (or, in the case of the new ‘work from home’ mentality, paid for actually not turning up). So it’s a safe job and ‘no one’s going to sack me, are they?’
Well maybe. Now and again new governments make threats to ‘slash’ the public service, some much more successfully (Trump/Musk) and some much less so (Luxon/Willis) so there is a need, as a government employee, to protect oneself against those pressures.
The biggest risk is the possibility that threats to slash will actually start to happen and ranks are broken as each individual tries to prove that they are ‘better than Charlie’ or ‘faster than their mate” as per the prior examples.
But you can’t do it by performing better because how can you measure ‘performance’ in the public service? More forms per day completed? More memos sent? More meetings convened?
(And they have all been tried – which leads to one other Parkinsonian truism about bureaucrats, ‘Whenever four or more are gathered together, then the paperwork they generate to prove the value of their existence will inevitably lead to a claim that they are overworked and must hire at least two more of their ilk to cope with the workload.’)
So, without performance as a metric for one’s protection, the only option is to fall back on both ‘equality of mediocrity’ and ‘differentness of personality’ and the supposed need for balance and diversity to fairly represent the complex makeup of NZ as a whole. Ergo the embrace of left-wing orthodoxy, unionism, DEI and across the (warning: oxymoron incoming) public service.
It’s no longer the ‘can’t sack me while Charlie is doing worse’ defense, instead it’s ‘they can’t sack me because I’m either the only one of my kind in this group, and/or we’re all equal (equally incompetent?) and therefore no one can be singled out for dismissal’.
Summarising, the difference between private business and public service is this: In the private sector, job security comes from over-performing versus your peers and the challenge for management looking for increased productivity across the board is to either bring the poor performers up to speed, or to replace them with those who do better.
In the public service it’s the exact opposite: Job security comes from the mutually agreed dumbing down of team members so that all operate at the same level of mediocrity and, since everyone is underperforming, no one can be singled out for dismissal on that basis.
Plus, as a backstop, one can always try to identify as someone entitled to ‘special treatment’ under DEI initiatives thus creating another reason why you can’t then be dismissed.
And as for management, themselves pretty mediocre, having, for the most part, risen through the ranks by dint of length of tenure rather than performance, the only answer to getting more outputs from your team of bureaucrats is to add more bureaucrats. A situation made obvious by the massive 34 per cent expansion of headcount: 16,000 new hires under Ardern’s Labour Government.
As a result of this there is no easy or ‘kind’ way to identify who should be trimmed from the public service workforce, nor indeed how it can be selectively done.
So the only real answer is the Elon Musk answer of ‘zero-based’ budgeting: a common business concept that is applied by first abolishing, or threatening to abolish, a department and then requiring those who don’t want that to happen to provide a proper analysis of the services that department supposedly provides, why they are needed, and how they can be supplied at the most efficient rate if and when the department is reinstated.
The result? Either you get a reconstituted service which is stripped back to its necessary bones without the bureaucratic bloat, or you do away altogether with any department that can’t actually prove its worth. (As in, ‘tell me five things you achieved last week or you’re out of here.’)
Brutal but necessary. The alternative is that the public service will continue to grow, and if it does so at the rate it did under Labour, by the year 2060 every worker in NZ will be a public sector employee.
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