Building a Leadership Brand within the Public Sector: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential utility of leadership branding for the public sector by ap-plying it as a sense-making approach to recent cross-sector leadership development initiatives that have been launched in the New Zealand State sector over the past eight years. We critically assess the collective effort to build a new, distinctive and positive leadership brand for the New Zealand public service aimed at improving the material and perceived performance of the pub-lic sector. Based on a discursive analysis of documentary evidence produced by the central actors within the NZ government who are charged with leadership development across the state sector, we have sought to investigate the discursive practices of leadership roles and identities. Specifically, we ask two questions: what have been the dominant discursive constructions of leadership that have been promulgated within the New Zealand state sector? To what extent do these serve to strengthen or weaken a compelling leadership brand? The study observes that, while leadership is constructed in a loose and ambiguous manner, two dominant themes perse-vere: leadership is primarily cast as a top-down process that is required to serve managerialist ends. We conclude that the leadership brand building efforts to date might well be hampered because of their exclusive, functionalist, internal and leader-centered focus.