Leadership meta-skills in public institutions

Abstract

This paper maintains that public institutions’ and public leaders’ role is important in providing the conditions for reasonable living and guaranteeing accountable spending of public resources. The paper explores the idea of meta-skills as a new leadership concept. It focuses on meta-skills particularly from the perspective of meta-governance, distributive leadership, and metacognition. Meta-skill capacity involves the ability to use overarching skills to learn other skills and proactively engage others in skill development and new learning. Meta-skills of learning to learn, harnessing thinking skills, and putting lessons learned into practice are brought up as universal meta-skills important for all public sector leaders despite branch of government and at the same time largely neglected in research on public leadership. The paper reflects the learnings from an empirical case of a long leadership training program conducted in Finland and discusses enablers and hindrances to public sector leadership meta-skills development and concludes that the role of leadership training should be re-thought—to enable structural and mental boundary crossing which is an elemental part and ingredient of any successful and effective leadership development practice.