What are the key challenges for an executive crossing over from private to public?

Executives entering the public sector from the private sector can experience a considerable degree of culture shock. Any senior position can involve a degree of risk, but this can be exaggerated when the organisation is alien to the incoming executive.

Then process of decision making can be different, a wider range of interest groups are involved in decision-making, the motives of the people that you are working with will can be different and the outcomes of your decisions can affect a far wider range of people.

What are the key challenges that people should expect when they take on a public sector role from a private sector background?

How can these challenges be mitigated?

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Decision making tends to be driven by different motives in the public sector, and this can take some getting used to. In the private sector, drivers such as profit and shareholder return are very clear cut, while the policy drivers in the public sector can be more ambiguous - there are more trade-offs to decision making and more interest groups involved.

The pace of decision making can be very different - in the public sector you have to steer decisions through a long and complex process that can take months to complete, while in the private sector equivalent decisions can actually be made very quickly indeed.

I agree with Mark and Neil. The fundamental driver is the link to democracy. Public sector choices are very hard choices that we're only prepared for people who have been elected, and who have that kind of accountability, to make, albeit guided by experts. That impacts on the task of the non-elected public servants, and to be succesful they need to able to empathise with this situation, without giving in to it and therefore not being prepared to challenge how things are done. Partcularly for people making the transition at a senior level they should spend time listening to the elected officials, understanding what makes them tick, and if possible watch them as they go about their contact with the people to whom they are accountable - which leads to a profound respect quite rapidly. This is much easier in Local Government than Central Government.

Key here really is mindset - you need to embrace the realities of working in the public sector as responsibilities rather than inconveniences. You realise pretty quickly the human implications of what you're doing - these are people you are dealing with rather than customers and clients and a hard-nosed attitude can be self-defeating. Personally, I think that the public sector could teach many executives in the private sector a thing or two about service delivery!

As said, the accountability is really very different in the public sector, not only to boards/elected politicians/other levels of government, but also to the public (service users and non-users.) The level of scrutiny can be intense, especially for interim managers brought in to deal with a particular crisis: your pay rates, CV, and where you had lunch can all end up on the front page of the local paper! You may well be engaged on something that local people feel passionately about: hospital changes, building a football ground or road management and find that you have to publicly engage in those debates.
This means that people making the change must take the time to listen to the politicians and the public, and, as Jonathan Flowers, understanding what pressures apply. It also means being ready to take the stick regularly laid on to public servants while continuing to believe both in your own work and the ambitions of the organisation.

I don't have any problems with Governance and accountability - after all it's tax payers' money that is being used. From my perspective, I've ALWAYS had to account for every Penny of budget spend in the private sector and would apply the same principles, if some forward thinking person in an HR department could ever have the foresight to see what a great many of us have to offer from the private sector. It may well take longer for decisions to be made but given the opportunity, I could grow to like that, given the pressures that are endured in the private sector.

I crossed over from the private to the public sector four years ago, really enjoyed it, and intend to stay 'public'. But having taken the plunge to recruit me, and hopefully benefitted, I still found my public sector organisation at worst very reluctant, and at best very slow, to adopt some of the best practice ideas I brought with me, and resistant to change. And after all, isn't that the whole point of recruiting the best talent from private business ? The important thing is to accept everything will take longer than you're used to, stick with your convictions, work towards a positive outcome for your self and your organisation, and definitely not to 'go native ' !

In my experience, the majority of people work as hard in the public sector as in the private but the real difference is the clarity of purpose. In the private sector we all looked towards the customer, who is easy to spot, whereas in the public sector this is much more difficult. Often you are providng services where the consumer does not directly pay or where the customer (the payer) is hundreds of miles away from your organisation.

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