Competency 3 of 8 - Multidisciplinary

“A digital era public service leader understands the need to blend traditional public service skills with modern, digital skills, and can effectively work within and lead multidisciplinary teams."

Background to this competency

Historically, civil servants in professional bureaucracies are trained to deliver uniform and standardized public services. Success therefore would typically be seen in terms of training and producing thousands of similarly skilled soldiers, forest rangers, or police officers.

Times have changed. The challenge for modern governments is to combine the skills of hugely diverse specialists with little skills overlap. But why is this the case?

To build even the simplest of services in a way that meets modern expectations about speed, ease of use and accessibility is a difficult and complex undertaking. It is so complex that in mature digital-era businesses no one person has all the skills required to succeed.

This problem is exactly the same for public services. For example, to build and run a system to enable citizens to register for unemployment benefits online requires building and leading public service teams which contain a wide range of differently skilled professionals.

Such multidisciplinary teams, that contain a rich mix of legal, technical, design, policy and management skills cannot be expected to emerge naturally within traditional bureaucracies.

These different skills are usually located within internal government silos that have their own traditions, and external communities that have little if any historic connection with government at all.

Moreover 'standard operating practice' within governments will often discourage close collaboration between different specialists.

Therefore a public service leader who wants to deploy multidisciplinary teams to solve digital policy or service delivery problems must expect that the construction and management of such teams will be difficult.

Meaning of the competency

A public servant who has this competency, essentially has three skillsets:

1 - The ability to identify which mix of skills are required within a digital-era government project.

2 - The ability to work with very different kinds of specialists and generalists who may need managing in different ways.

3 - The ability to overcome political and organisational challenges that push against the deployment and backing of teams containing skills that are, by historic standards, unusually diverse.

  1. Identifying skills

Public servants facing modern policy problems must now be able to recognise which skills are required to solve them, even where those skills are new to most governments.

For example, in order to do user research, teams must engage trained user researchers. Leaders need to understand what kinds of roles these individuals fill, and a minimum about what their work consists of and what value it creates.

User researchers are just one of many specialists required for successful modern skills. A blend of skills including law, finance, policy development, computer programming, product management, data science and interaction design are essential for project success.

2. Managing diverse skills

Public servants managing multidisciplinary teams can only succeed if they understand that different specialists and generalists normally need different management approaches. Furthermore, such leaders must understand how different specialists succeed and fail when working together: cross disciplinary collaboration must happen both horizontally as well as vertically.

It is worth noting that a digital-era leader may themselves not be a specialist in any of the areas named above - either new or classic public administration skills. This isn't as critical it seems: what counts is knowing a minimum amount about each role, and especially enough to know how to check that the person fulfilling a specialist role is doing so successfully, integrating each of their contributions and serving the whole team to support their shared goals.

3. Overcoming barriers to deploying and backing multidisciplinary teams

Digital era public servants who identify that a modern multidisciplinary team is essential will often find that the systems they reside within are unwilling or unable to permit the creation and successful use of such teams.

Challenges that they will often have to overcome include:

  • Working across organisational boundaries, especially budgetary boundaries.

  • Increasing administrative literacy.

  • Cynicism and snobbishness towards unfamiliar skills and working patterns.

  • Rigid recruiting, contracting and promotion structures.

Essential to overcoming these problems will be negotiation and coalition building skills.

Why was this competency developed and agreed?

Our list of 8 core competencies is designed to sit alongside current, existing competencies often taught in schools of public administration or public policy. All eight of our competencies therefore represent capabilities that are either not being taught to current and future public servants or current skills training that may require some updating to be effective in the digital era.

Members of our community have been part of efforts to build and deploy multidisciplinary teams in a variety of government contexts over the last decade and more. We found that a consistent problem across countries was the sheer difficulty of building the kinds of teams that we knew were now necessary.

We therefore felt that it was important to help public servants to understand that the formation and deployment of such teams needs to be routine, and that some novel skills are required both to create them and to lead them.

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