Jennifer Lees Marshment
Associate Professor Jennifer Lees-Marshment specializes in political marketing and management at the University of Auckland. She is the author of ‘Political Management: The Dance of Government and Politics’.
employment opportunities
The major parties grapple with allegations of bullying and rogue. Jennifer Lees-Marshment writes that the political sphere is lagging far behind the corporate world in basic people management and training
Opinion: Imagine having to have surgery for a brain tumor, only to discover at the last minute that your surgeon is not trained, and neither is their assistant. Would you still go under the knife? Of course you wouldn’t.
We expect professionals to be fully trained and qualified. Yet there is more training and regulation of construction workers and hairdressers than of our politicians and their staff.
We are guided every day by politicians without checking whether they are qualified and trained to do the job. An unqualified surgeon is bad enough, but untrained politicians and their staff decide the policies and budgets for not just one surgery, but for every hospital and every segment of society.
When I was in Canberra interviewing senior political advisers for political management research, I asked them which aspect needed the most research and the answer was unanimous: political HR. Staffing problems in politics are not limited to New Zealand, and certainly not to the Labor Party.
And while there are plenty of books and courses on human resource management in business and the public sector, little is known about how to effectively apply HR principles to the unique political workplace. What we do know is that it doesn’t work in the same way as other professions.
Standard HR selection processes do not exist in politics. Politicians and political personnel are not recruited or appointed by testing their skills against a job description. Party members select candidates and voters choose MPs for a myriad of reasons, including what they look like; and MPs often choose staffers based on their ideology or to reward their help in an election campaign.
Political offices are often assembled at short notice. Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s chief of staff explained how they “got into the job without actually going through an election” and “it was a pretty unique and remarkable period of time where they held positions of 15 overnight. up to about 50 years of age”.
Mike Munro, Ardern’s first chief of staff, agreed, admitting that finding consultants was “the most challenging part of the job” because “it’s very difficult to find the right person” for these positions.
Once in office, politicians and their staff must learn on the job, as there is little or no training, advice or mentoring to ‘do politics’ and collaborate effectively. There is also no transition; the previous office holder will not sit down for a handover with those who just removed them from power, especially if they are from another party.
Political advisers recall being “thrown into the absolute depths”. And the politicians who employ them also lack training and appropriate management experience. MPs will start their positions shortly and are expected to start. Yet there are no defined qualifications or criteria for their role, nor is there a training program based on research into how politics works.
Telling them the official rules and processes, or even offering short leadership courses using research into commercial organizations, will not prepare them to do their job effectively. And there is no sense of a profession, despite the importance of the job. As the secretary of one party explained: “There is no professional university…and there will never be a meeting at the Royal Society where I and my colleagues from all the other parties come together and talk about what we are all dealing with” Because in politics everyone is ‘naturally very secretive’.
Business experience can help, but it is not a substitute. Politics involves more complex stakeholders, expectations, pressures and goals because politicians, and even ministers, have far less direct power than CEOs.
Even those who have led political parties must scale to manage thousands of employees and millions of budgets once in government. Most ministers have little experience running an office in a government environment.
Given the importance of government in society, the lack of HR for those who run it is a major concern. If we want those who represent us to serve us, we must properly support and train them, just like other professionals. But as an Australian Prime Minister’s chief of staff noted, “The political world is 20 or 30 years behind the business world.”
It is time to invest in a good vocational training program for politicians and political staff, based on thorough research into the realities of politics. We should not only spotlight individual parties when a problem arises, because that inevitably leads to everything that caused the issue being buried in the interest of limiting the political consequences.
This is a problem that affects political parties worldwide, so we need to engage in an impartial debate about how this problem can be solved in the interest of better functioning democracies.