Bringing in and bringing on talent
Bringing In and Bringing On Talent reform (1999-2003) contributed very significantly to changing the skills, diversity and experience of the Senior Civil Service within only five years. The way it was led and refreshed under successive Cabinet Secretaries makes it the best (and one of the only) examples of sustained corporate leadership by permanent secretaries over the last 20 years.
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The primary purpose was ‘to strengthen leadership of the Civil Service across the board’ by cultivating talent and building the capability of staff, as well as accessing a wider range of talent from outside. Opening up the Civil Service to outsiders was seen as very new and risky at the time, given the norm of a ‘career for life’ in one organisation.
The Cabinet Secretary, Richard Wilson wanted to give the agenda some structure and push, but understood that it could not be driven by the Cabinet Secretary alone and had to be ‘owned’ by permanent secretaries themselves. In April 1999, he created a working group of permanent secretaries and delegated leadership of the group to the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, until around 2002.
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The working group developed a vision of what ‘success’ would look like in 2005 and worked backwards to operationalise how exactly to get there. In this ideal future state, the senior leadership would contain as many women as men, those from an ethnic minority or disabled background, those who had taken a career break, those who had worked in local government, the voluntary or private sector, and those who had a scientific or technological background. Also envisioned was a ‘failure’ state: here, the senior leadership would still be largely male, from the same backgrounds and almost entirely white.
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They developed a strategic plan for getting to the desired future. This consisted of five objectives:
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1. Provide the individuals for strategic leadership of the service with relevant experience.
2. Create a broader-based, more professional Civil Service.
3. Spot and develop talent by providing opportunities for people to gain experience in more than one department or outside Whitehall.
4. Recruit in mid-career to fill specific posts needing outside experience, such as service delivery.
5. Attract a wider, more diverse group at entry level.
They deliberately avoided the imposition of specific rules, targets and progress chasing (although they did track progress against objectives), and instead gave departments a menu of options. The rationale was that if departments did ‘at least some of them, the whole thing would move in the right direction’.
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More generally, the role of the centre was limited to connecting people and sharing best practice between departments in order to accelerate trends already under way.
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Subtle incentives demonstrated the importance of outside experience. People started to see that those who had experience from outside were promoted, while those who didn’t were prevented from reaching the senior positions that they were once seen to be natural successors. This had a powerful effect and compelled people to get on board with the agenda of promoting secondments and interchange.
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Within a couple of years, there were a number of visible ‘quick wins’. By 2002, two-thirds of senior vacancies were filled from outside, an increase of 88% from 2000.
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Within just a few years the diversity of the SCS was significantly changed, and the actions became embedded. Although the reform project team was wound up swiftly, the embedded reform actions continued to be pursued and were subsumed within new agendas. All the key themes were an integral part of the Civil Service Capability Plan, published in 2012.