Leadership as Public Management 117
Horizontal or collaborative leadership recognizes that eff ective leadership can
create self-managed teams. In other words, good leaders reduce the need for for-
mal leadership. Van Wart notes that teams that are working well can be left alone
and in these instances delegation is the best form of leadership. Many of these
features (fl at hierarchies, worker self-management) can be found in the tenants
of the New Public Administration of the 1960s and 1970s. Horizontal leadership,
assuming a high-performing system, does not rely on the formal mechanisms of
(dis)incentives and control of classical management theory. Indeed, those mecha-
nisms are seen as impediments to performance.
Finally, ethical leadership theory is based on the approach that good leaders
build trust, demonstrate integrity, and base their leadership on service to others.
Ethical leadership is particularly important for the public sector. Public service
motivation has long been identifi ed as a key feature of a successful civil service,
and good leaders will be able to develop that in their workers.
Distinctions between leadership and management are sometimes found, the
most famous being the Warren Bennis couplet “Th e manager does things right;
the leader does the right thing” (2003, 42). Bennis argues that there is too much
management and not enough leadership, particularly in American business. Ron-
ald Heifetz (1994) uses group theory and communication theory to formulate
a particularly perceptive argument that leadership is helping groups and orga-
nizations do “adaptive work” and that it is particularly diffi cult to do that from
positions of authority. Th ere is not much convincing evidence that there is an
important distinction between leadership and management, aside from labeling
some things as leadership and therefore important, and other things as manage-
ment and therefore less important.
In the bigger picture, the emphasis on leadership in public administration has
doubtless been infl uenced by the general resurgence in the study of leadership
in many fi elds and disciplines. Certainly the previously identifi ed theories that
Van Wart reviewed have been generated from a variety of studies and many dis-
ciplines. For the purpose of understanding public administration, the two best
treatments of public management as leadership are Mark H. Moore’s Creating
Public Value: Strategic Management in Government (1995) and Heifi tz’s Lead-
ership Without Easy Answers (1994). Neither of them relies on the principles of
management, although Moore references much of the NPM literature. Th e char-
acteristic or quality of leadership that Moore identifi es aft er reviewing many of
the case studies in the Harvard collection is
a certain kind of consciousness: [leaders] are imaginative, purposeful, enterpris-
ing, and calculating. Th ey focus on increasing the value of the organizations that
lead to the broader society. In search of value, their minds range freely across the
concrete circumstances of today seeking opportunities for tomorrow. Based on
the potential they see, they calculate what to do: how to defi ne their purposes,
engage their political overseers and coproducers, and guide their organizations’