Empower staff, don't lean on org charts, PM&C secretary Glyn Davis tells senior APS leaders

In his first public address since taking the most senior role in the Australian Public Service, Glyn Davis urged department and agency leaders to avoid restricting staff within "organisational straitjackets", and to instead draw on their diversity of opinions and experiences.

He also had a blunt message for public servants who lent on their seniority within chains of command to exert authority.

"If you have to rely on an organisational chart to demand attention, you're not much of a leader," Professor Davis said.

"But if regardless of formal lines you can share ideas, and you can empower others, and you can draw on diversity of opinion and experience to achieve a shared goal, then you are exactly the type of leader we need in the Australian Public Service."

Professor Davis, speaking on Tuesday at an Institute of Public Administration Australia event in Canberra, spoke after the public service released a new charter of leadership behaviours promoting a less hierarchical approach among senior leaders.

The charter, released last month along with the review into public service hierarchies urging flatter management structures, committed secretaries and senior executives to supporting and growing the capability of staff, building relationships with them, seeking out views that challenged their own, and embracing risks.

The new secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, appointed by Anthony Albanese after Labor's election win, said leadership shouldn't rely on geometric lines of organisational hierarchies, but involved working with people.

"Leadership requires conversation and negotiation, and dealing with the question right. Leadership must have an abstract goal, a mission, a task, and you cooperate with others to make it happen," he said.

"It's about judgment. It's about values. It's about a unique personal style that complements and contributes to a collective effort."

Professor Davis admitted the leadership charter's emphasis on empowering staff would involve challenges for the public service, as empowerment wasn't always compatible with hierarchy.

"'Empower' and hierarchy don't go together all that well," he said.

"We have a system that tends to aggregate authority upwards, and we have a rhetoric that says, 'We want teams to be able to work and make their own calls'. That's a hard thing to reconcile."

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Department of Employment and Workplace Relations secretary Natalie James also said the charter's call to empower staff may be challenging for some senior leaders, who were used to carrying a lot of responsibility.

Ms James, who has worked in the private sector, said she had seen what people with less experience can do when asked and given space to act.

"But that involves risk, that can sound a bit scary to a leader who, by and large, we get promoted based on our ability to deliver things ourselves. So there's this weird dissonance, because you've got to let go of that," she said.

"The empowerment piece possibly requires more work and discussion about what that looks like. 'What does that look like?' I think is a question we need to put to our people."

Ms James, who started as secretary in July, said her staff had found it disarming that she had asked for their opinions when they sought hers during meetings.

"And as a leader, it's my job to understand what that is and to bring that out. And if you don't feel confident in sharing that, then that's a leadership failing on my part, because you are more expert than I am in whatever it is we're talking about."

Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water secretary David Fredericks, who helped develop the leadership charter, said it was designed to let secretaries speak to leaders in the public service at different levels.

"We want to push past hierarchy and talk to leaders wherever they are," he said.

Mr Fredericks also spoke out against "punishment culture" in workplaces, saying it was a "cancer" in any organisation.

"The starting point is, we all make mistakes. And mistakes, as we all know, can either be a cause for punishment, or a constructive opportunity to learn and to try to do things differently," he said.

"And so as leaders, I regard myself as needing to hold the conch to find constructive opportunities where mistakes are made."