In the past five years Mick Williams has found himself in three different work environments – in the RAF, in management consultancy and as a temporary civil servant in the Home Office. He is therefore able to bring considerable insight from the military, private and public sectors on management and leadership styles in all three.
After a long career in the military, latterly as head of HR and corporate resources at the Defence Academy of the UK, and previously as head of employment policy for the RAF, Williams's most recent posts have been with management consultancy Accenture, where he worked for clients such as BP, QinetiQ and EMI Music, and, most recently, in an interim management position at the Home Office.
How difficult has it been to move from the military to the private sector and then to the civil service?
Williams says the behaviour of people in all three organisations tends to be very different, but adds that there are also many similarities. The stated values of all the organisations in which he has worked have been broadly similar, with an emphasis on strong leadership and management, but in practice there are differences.
"In the services, trust, subordination of self-interest, a sense of mission and hard work are fairly normal," says Williams.
"In the Home Office, a huge organisation going through massive change, I found people were facing up to challenges and living and breathing civil service values.
"In the public sector more time is spent on process, but accountability matters and delivery is looked on as important. I became interested in that, because one of the key facets of delivery is how much people walk and talk and believe in the objectives of their organisation."
Williams acknowledges that it is easy to fall into stereotyped views.
"It is easy to think all commercial consultants are only interested in the bottom line and not interested in the common good," he points out.
"It is easy to think that public servants are nine-to-fivers who don't go the extra mile and are only hanging on for their pension; it is easy to think of the military having a particular style. The truth is of course that people are people and they adapt to the cultures they find themselves in."
But at senior levels, Williams believes there are real differences.
"One has to be very careful, but I did find a great deal of management activity in central government that is almost management following up on targets and measurements that frankly didn't always have an impact on face value for the taxpayer," he comments, adding that this can perhaps make it difficult for leadership, rather than management, to emerge.
"My experience in the military was that by and large people were trusted to get on with the tasks they were going to do and that had been articulated to them. Of course there's a great sense of mission command in the military, where a leader explains what he or she wants to achieve and empowers the people below them to work out the best way of doing that. In that way one grows the leaders and managers of tomorrow.
"In the public sector, I found a huge amount of emphasis on describing how things needed to be done, not necessarily on what needed to be achieved. The opposite end of that would be my observations of the RAF at the end of the 90s when we were taking part in the Kosovo campaign.
The aim was very clearly stated and leaders then trust people to get on with their roles. That makes a big difference to how empowered people felt. I think you could take quite a junior soldier in his or her platoon and would find they feel very empowered to act in prosecution of the overall effort."
Ironically, perhaps, Williams left the RAF because he felt it was disruptive to be posted every 18 months – and has instead become an interim manager, working on short-term projects. "I like the freshness of the challenge and I like networking," he says.
The public sector is a major user of interim managers, but the nature of interims, rather than management consultants, is not always understood, according to Williams.
"Contractors do tasks; consultants carry out projects; but interims are part of the team," he comments.
In a senior interim role within the civil service, Williams was able to represent the organisation at Cabinet Office meetings, something a management consultant would never do.
To be a successful interim needs experience, a good track record, marketable skills and the knack of "hitting the ground running". You also have to be a good networker, says Williams, and be registered with an agency with real "matchmaking" skills.
Williams works with specialist agency Rockpools, for which he has a high regard.
Despite the continuing pressure on public sector budgets and the continual calls to decrease the use of consultants, Williams believes temporary managers of all kinds will still be needed in the years to come across the public sector.
He believes that some permanent senior managers will leave the public sector as the cuts begin to bite and that will result in gaps in public sector leadership that will need to be filled. "Gaps will appear and for all the politicians say they are going to drive down consultancy and interim costs, if you need a transformational change lead in a department or section and you haven't got that, there really is only one solution," he concludes.
Guardian's interim management supplement
