Jennifer Lees-Marshment Literally Wrote the Book on How to Run a Political Office
We talked about the practical tips and tricks Lees-Marshment learned about political management from interviewing senior political staff in four countries for her groundbreaking book.
One very common refrain I hear from staffers is that there’s “no manual on how to do these jobs”. Jennifer Lees-Marshment is proving that old adage wrong with her writing.
Lees-Marshment, a Professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland, has written or edited 19 different books on political management and political marketing, including my favourite political book: “The Human Resource Management of Political Staffers”
Lees-Marshment interviewed an extensive collection of senior political staffers1 in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand to investigate common challenges in political management and investigate best practices across Westminster democracies, and the result is a compelling, practical how-to guide on the best ways to manage offices that have often suffered from a lack of consistent structure.
In my mind, this book should be required reading for anyone in a managerial position on Parliament Hill. In fact, if I was still working as a staffer I would be encouraging everyone in my office to read it as a way to prompt some of the conversations that don’t happen enough in political offices.
If you want to read the book yourself, you can purchase it here or read the ninth chapter that summarizes best practices learned from her research for free here.
Earlier this week, I talked to Lees-Marshment about her book and some of the simple, practical measures that Canadian political offices can implement to retain staffers and ultimately improve political outcomes:
AK: Can you give a short description of the research project you conducted for your book and the questions you were looking to answer with it?
JLM: Yes, absolutely. So the goal of my research project was to try and find best practices that staffers had developed over time the longer they're in the job or that they'd experienced or observed. We already knew there was a lack of effective political management of or human resource management of staffers and advisors across the world in all democracies. But what I wanted to do was try and capture, move beyond the problems to find solutions.
The reality is, when people get into the posts, they don't have these things in place. It's not working very well. But over time, because they're smart, they actually develop resources. So I wanted to try and capture those solutions and put them all together. Even if for each person interviewed - I interviewed over 80 advisors - even if each of them said three things that were worth doing or they thought they'd seen done well, or they'd developed over time with their manager of a team, or they'd heard of or observed being done in another office, I thought if I gather all that and put it all together, that actually can create a comprehensive resource so that somebody starting the role can pick up the book and go, here are some ideas for how to set up an office, these are the things I need to worry about. Yes, giving people feedback is important. Okay, there aren't all these formal training processes in place, but we can have somebody observe what we do and we can get them to talk to an experienced staffer and so on.
So it was really trying to identify and harness and put back out there what people learn probably towards the end of by the time they've left the role, but nobody's taken with them. So I was trying to keep it all in one place so that people when they start, they've actually built on each other's wisdom.
AK: As someone looking into political management in depth from an outsider’s perspective, what surprised you the most when learning about how these offices are run?
JLM: That's a good question. I suppose I was surprised at the depth and extent of solutions that people managed to develop and how pioneering and resourceful people were under extremely difficult circumstances. So yes, they did talk about the pain, they talked about the need for reform and the case for change. And I definitely respected that in the book with one chapter about it. But it also showed how innovative and incredibly smart and capable people are, that even in the line of fire and working incredible hours, they're able to find ways to kind of cope with that and ways to support each other. That strong sense of team and camaraderieship that can come in a political office.
When you put together everybody's experiences, a lot of tools could be used, and none of them are a magic wand. I always say with this, it's not about waving a magic wand. You can't do that. You can't make everybody work 35-hour weeks, like normal standard jobs. You can't make everybody make sure they have six weeks holiday a year. You know, you can't make it like a standard job. But there are things that can be done, small bits like take off a Friday and a Saturday and Sunday and don't use your phone so that you have a long weekend two or three times a year to just allow that pressure to ease off so you can go back and cope with work again. You know, there are little tools like that that are very practical.
And because they came not from academic theory from the outside, not from management theory or political science theory, but they're very much based in the data and from the people who've done these jobs, they were more practical and useful and things that people can actually do. And I was very much focused on doing that. I didn't want to pie in the sky. I didn't want to just talk about the problems of everybody had already done that. And at the same time, I didn't want pie in the sky, rose-tinted glasses kind of solutions. I wanted them to be reality and forged in the fire of politics, if you like. So things that people could actually put into practice.
AK: Yeah, I'd say that's been my experience talking to people as well. I feel like the lack of standardization and professionalization can be frustrating at times, but it also means everyone's trying their own thing. And just naturally having hundreds of people trying to find different solutions for something, you end up with some people who find some really interesting ones and everyone tends to find a couple of those things across their time in politics. And it's important to share that with people who maybe haven't found the solution to that particular problem.
JLM: And they could be small things, like people said it's important to take 15 minutes sometimes to have a cup of tea together, just chatting. Or it's important to take in the moments where you do achieve success. So they're very small things, but they make a difference. And that was important. The other thing I'd add is it's a very much people focused industry, this. It's all about people to people to people. And that's why human resource management is really important, right? Because otherwise you can't get through and you can't cope with the challenges. So it was very people based.
I was very honoured by the stories that people shared with me and just wondering if perhaps more people took some time like you are now to listen to people whether it would actually do a lot of good. because I'm not sure people always get heard in this profession.
AK: That makes sense.
JLM: That's [the other thing that] surprised me. The one thing that struck me was how similar people's experiences were across the four countries. And these were different ideologies. So I had two right-wing parties, two left-wing parties and four different countries. Similar time periods, but very different leaders. The same pain came out and the same innovative solutions came out as one of the same things came out. So there wasn't any difference between the countries or the parties.
I remember distinctly somebody who worked for Jacinda Ardern talking about how she sacrificed her own mental health to put out communication under high speed about mental health for the public. And that really struck with me. So it's not a case of, oh, well, in the UK it was the conservative leader, Boris Johnson, who was a problem for all sorts of reasons. If he goes out, well, they're supposed to solve it. That's not the case. There's something much more deeper here that does need to be solved. And positive lessons and solutions and practices do need to be shared.
AK: Do you think that's organically because politics is such a high pressure environment, people aren't thinking about this as much as they might be in other industries? It's just kind of the baseline that people are not?
JLM: I think it's because there's no one person who's responsible. So you've got civil service or public servants who don't want to get involved in politics because they're not supposed to. They're supposed to be neutral. And they're the people who are permanent, but they don't feel they can do it. Then you've got political parties coming in and they feel that pressure to deliver for the public and to appear like they know everything as well. And yet they don't. That's the thing, you know, they campaigned to be elected on knowing the job. If they admitted day one, actually, I don't need some training, right? You know, they'd get in trouble. They wouldn't get elected. So it's just kind of this show, this funny thing where we let people then assume and expect them to be able to do this job they've never done before. Because it's the same for politicians. It's not just political staff. So I think there's a bit of that.
And just maybe it's just this lack of professionalisation of politics that's a really big problem that you don't get in other industries. It is weird. It is unique. And of course, there's no transition. There's no handover. So when I speak to people in business about management of politics, they just assume it's the same as business. And they say, well, surely they'll hand over like they do in business. No, they don't, you know. So there are all sorts of reasons. But I think there was this big, this high pressure, high speed. There's no time to sit and think. There isn't time to plan generally. But then also there's this image where people are supposed to know what they're doing. And that's on the side of the politicians and then the staff, the same thing in the staff. You know, there's this expectation. They're in such a position of privilege to work for politicians. And they feel that. They very much feel that they'll just know what they're doing and they can't complain.
AK: Training is a big theme in the book, especially orientation for new staff. There’s a quote in your book that stuck with me from an Australian staffer who said there’s more onboarding training to fry chicken nuggets at a fast-food restaurant than to advise the Prime Minister, and clearly that has to change. How should our new government be approaching training for the many new staff that will be coming to Ottawa in the next few months?
JLM: There's got to be a mixture of short, sharp, quick [training] getting people up to step on it. And in the beginning, you know, onboarding training. And then it's got to be ongoing, more in-depth training. You can't get people in for a week and teach them everything they need to know. They can't afford a week off. So it's got to be an hour here, an hour there.
And in terms of content, it needs to be a mixture of generic skills that are relevant to the job. So time management, for example, resilience, dealing with the ups and downs of politics. But it also needs to be specific. So the best way to do that would be to use materials like are in the book or in the interviews that you're doing, but also to get previous staffers in to talk to current staffers or more experienced staffers to talk to current staffers to bring that material alive. So you can have some professional expert give advice on time management, but then you need somebody to come and talk about what it's like using time management in politics, bearing in mind you can't just do it like the civil service or public service do, because it is entirely different. You need that combination of stuff about the tips and tricks like that's not professional, but it is professional. It's about the human reality of doing these jobs. So you need that kind of wisdom and advice in terms of how to do that.
The other key thing though, and this was a very strong sentiment in the data, was you need to train the managers. Anybody who's going to be chief of staff, obviously, but also directors of team, even people who might not have manager or director in the title of their job, but are actually effectively leading a team. You need to get them advice. And particularly about maintaining morale and wellbeing, because that was a major theme in the book, which actually thinking about surprises in your other question, I didn't anticipate that would be such a big theme, but it definitely came out in all of the interviews in all of the four countries. So that's a major issue as well about how you maintain well-being and some of the tools that you can use to do that.
So train individuals, but also train people who are managing the individuals.
AK: Absolutely. That's the number one thing that came up when I was doing staff surveys back in the day, and I do know there's been a bit more effort done in recent years in Canada towards management training, but so many people have never managed a team before and are being thrown into those roles in politics because they've done really well at writing policy or at doing comms or something else, but they're not being promoted to a management job because they have managerial experience. So I think it'd be important to fill that gap.
And to your point earlier about empowering some of the people who are doing the job well and some former staffers and stuff, I think one of the things that people push back on for training is this will be expensive or this will be time consuming, but I've met so many people in politics who would be very happy to devote some time to coming up with a training deck and going in and presenting it, and that doesn't cost you anything. You're already paying in their salaries if they're employed for you. So I think that's a bit of a no-brainer is to find the people who are doing things well and say, teach this.
JLM: Absolutely. I would do it in an hour and a half format, like once a month or maybe once a week, but that'd be quite a lot. But you just have 15-minute presentation of some key general tips on a theme. Then you have 15 minutes of experienced or former staffers talking about what they did in their role. Then you have 15 minutes of people in breakout rooms because you can do all this online discussing it. And then they can leave at that point if they want, but you bring them back and they can talk longer. And some people might just come for the first 15 minutes, but it will give them one idea that they take away with them. And it's really just about getting people to stand back and think about them.
Having said that, those who are managing others, and again, this came out very strong in the data, they perhaps do need something a bit stronger, you know, three hours. You have got to learn all these key things for keeping people's motivation, how you can give feedback, what's the best way, you know, don't just tell them they're wrong. Don't just redo it for them, but explain why and how you do need to devote time to that in the beginning. And I know it's hard, but it was really clear in the data that that is really important. So they probably do need some more mandatory training. But it could be done.
AK: Yeah, and it matters so much if you have energized staffers who know what they're doing. It makes just such a real difference in policy for the country, right? These things have domino effects.
I find your book very energizing when it comes to advocating for reforms in political staffing. We really don’t have the type of conversations that you were having with senior staffers in any professional setting here, and I think that results in cynicism about intentions so it’s heartening to see how much agreement there actually is that these are problems that need to be solved.
That being said, it’s frustrating to hear so much agreement that changes are needed and not see those changes being implemented. How can we structure political offices or change cultures to ensure desired changes become actual changes?
JLM: It's a really good question and it's not an easy answer. What I'm pushing for is that the civil service and the public service need to play a role in leading this, because they are the people who have a permanent position. Now, I know they can't deliver political content, but they could arrange it.
So, for example, if they were directing the program when the new Liberal government formed, they could arrange a time for the leader of the Liberal Party or the leader of the Liberal Research Bureau or whoever it is within the party to come and talk to Liberal staffers. They don't have to give the talk themselves, the civil servants, the public servants, but they can arrange for it and make sure that they organise it and so on. They can organise outside experts, academics like me and people from the Carton Political Management Programme in Ottawa, for example, to give talks. They will have a list of former staffers and they could invite people there.
So they can facilitate and organise things and have it so that they do that for, yes, the Liberal Party now, but then if, say, the Conservative Party in Canada won the next election, they do the same thing but for the Conservative Party. And, of course, they should also do it for the opposition parties. But the point is that the civil service, the public service, do need to play a part in this.
And I remember, Michael Wernick who was head of the Privy Council said political staff ought to be managed as a whole cohort because then you can actually have the economies of scale and you can make it worthwhile.
And I know there are staff in the House of Commons on the Members' Services team in Canada as there are in the UK and they're doing what they can with limited resources. So you need to build on those existing people and they need to be given more resources to make it work and work with the Prime Minister's Office and Minister's Offices.
I understand there are, in Canada as in the UK, New Zealand and Australia, there are lots of different legal arrangements for all of these different cohorts of staff and they are called different things. But from a staffer's point of view, I don't think they, are just saying: “I don't care. I want somebody to move beyond that and go, well, actually, we need leadership on this.”
So it will take some brave public servants who have, the political capital and the professional reputation and the dedication to do that so that it could be done not just for, this Liberal government but for the next government, whether that's the Conservative one or the Liberal one. And I know it doesn't happen very often in politics, but it really needs to.
It does not make sense to me to have this whole cohort of practitioners and not treat them as a professional group, cohort or body of people. We do for all other professions. There are regulations, training requirements, you know, review process evaluations for all the other professions. Why not the people who run the country? And that goes for politicians as well as staff.
So I think it's got to come from them. But, of course any, pioneering political staff like Katie Telford, it might take people like that who've worked there before to argue. But ideally, you'd have political advisors from all sides of the political spectrum, NDP as well, to actually decide to prioritise it. But it's hard.
Aside from that, all the political staffers themselves have got to get together and form some kind of association and start doing something and push for change. I do think it's criminal that the public service or civil service don't do this and don't think it's their job. And I understand that they don't. And I know there are individuals who do, who do take responsibility for trying to achieve change as much as they can.
But in the UK Parliament, there's thousands of political staff who just work for MPs and they're not being catered for. And it's just crazy.
AK: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm trying to think through how we would structure that in Canada. There is a House of Commons HR that is on the public service side. So potentially it could be through there. But, you could almost argue for like a secretariat in Treasury Board or in the Privy Council or something that would be responsible for this kind of government wellness type approach.
But it would take some sort of a mandate being given and a carve out for a team of people on a more permanent basis to try to make some of those cultural reforms. I think that'd be really interesting to explore - I don't think that's something that people are having a conversation about yet, but maybe it's something that could be in the conversation in the future.
JLM: Yeah, the new Liberal government should do that. And I know they've got other matters that, again, there always are other matters that seem more important. But they're theoretically likely to be the last Liberal government for a while, so this is the chance to do it and to institutionalise the reforms and developments that did take place under the Trudeau government. Time to pay attention to this kind of thing. But it's hard.
The biggest reform happened in Australia because there was a big scandal into political staffer behaviour in the media and the courts and so on when the Liberal Party was in power. So then the Labour Party that was in opposition made noises and said all this stuff, and then they got into power, so they had to do it. It was just the timing of it worked. But of course, it doesn't always work that way.
AK: On that front, you said it surprised you how similar a lot of the different countries were. That is something that came through in the book for me too, both in positive ways and negative ways. It was interesting to see that the experiences that felt very individual and sometimes didn't even feel like something that was being shared across Canada was actually universal. I read the book and realized most staffers in Canada pretty much have some of the same concerns, but also so do people in the UK and Australia and New Zealand. But I'm wondering if there are things that stood out as best practices or things that were being done really well in the UK or in Australia or in New Zealand that maybe aren't being done in Canada that we can learn from and we can adopt in our own system here.
JLM: Yeah, there wasn't anything in particular that was specific to a country. There were, you know, ad hoc things that individuals were doing, but they weren't, you know, specifically in one country than another. Apart from in Australia.
I interviewed people who were working for the Liberal government and then they lost power. But I also did a few interviews with the new Labour government and they came in on the back of proposed reforms where there was an investigation into political staffing. It was called Set the Standard and the various recommendations that came from that. Labour backed that they did create an Office of Staff Support that was for political advisors. That's probably the biggest development and revolution that's happened. I haven't been able to find out how that's gone in actual practice, but I know they were doing that.
The Prime Minister's Chief of Staff said they were trying to put in better practices, just small things for the office, like do not disturb with exceptions for the phones. Because one of the problems with staffers is they're working 24/7, the phone is on 24/7 and no human being works well with that kind of workload. They said the Prime Minister is really good at respecting that. So yes, of course, there'll be emergencies. But the idea is it's not an emergency every day unless it's COVID.
Also, trying to culturally to move away from boozy parties in Parliament, because that's what caused some problems, and moving away from what he called the hero culture, where people say, I've worked, you know, all the hours God sent this week. Aren't I clever? Trying to move away from that and say, that's actually not good. We need you to take breaks. Katie Telford in Canada tried to tell her staff and managers of staff the same thing. You need people to take breaks so they can connect with reality.
I describe it as a bit like a saucepan on the boil. If you keep it on the boil for too long, it will boil over. But if you take it away off the heat for a while, then you can come back on and it can simmer away again. You never know put it in the fridge, there's no cold or cool or undemanding time in politics. But it's just trying to reduce it a bit. That's important. The solution to all of this lies in those little things to take the pot off the boil. Give people a long weekend every so often.
People talk about various cultures like don’t call each other on an evening if it can wait till the following day. Like really ask yourself, is it really, really needed? It just really requires that culture from the top of going, yes, this is a really important job. Yes, government's important. Yes, we need to serve the public to the best of our ability. But to do that, we're not going to work ourselves into the ground because otherwise we'll leave and then we'll have to get new people and that won't be helping the people of the country.
AK: Yeah, I was one of those people who had to be told to take a vacation in 2019 or something because I hadn't at that point. It is quite helpful. Those little things like do really stick with you. I remember one of the first times I was in a room with the Prime Minister, he told all the interns to remember to get like at least seven hours of sleep. And I wasn't always good at that. But the fact that he said that and had that as an expectation from top down, I think was enormously impactful. He probably doesn't remember saying that in the moment. But to have all these people on literally day two or three of their staffing careers getting that prompt that wellness and work-life balance is something you should prioritize from the prime minister himself, I think was actually something that probably resulted in some people lasting a little longer in politics because they approached it with a bit of a different mindset.
JLM: Yeah, it's so important. We can't make them normal jobs and we can't make them standard jobs. You can't just adapt basic standard general HR concepts and transplant them into politics. They do have to be adapted. They have to think creatively about how to use them. But you do need to use some of them to some extent.
So just things like: Okay, that person will not be contactable by phone for this weekend. And then in a month later it might be somebody else who's not contactable by phone.
Just little things like that that make a difference to people's well-being. And ultimately they're going to perform better. This isn't about being terribly nice to political staffers. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about trying to get the best performance out of everybody, actually, so they can serve the public more effectively. But to do that, you've got to remember they’re human and therefore they need these breaks. They need the limitations. They need the workload being constrained. They'll never make the job easy, but they need clear priorities to make it more manageable, even though, again, it will never be easy or simple. Those things are just really important.
And it's not saying this stuff that I came up with wasn't all blue sky, pie in the sky kind of thing. It's not, it's designed to be small things that make a significant difference. And they're just really important. And then a tone of people from the top is really important.
AK: Do you have any other advice for political staffers as we start a new mandate here in Canada?
JLM: The new ones, I mean, obviously enjoy the job, but you've got to look after yourself as well. And sometimes taking a pause point to reflect on how things are going and try and address problems individually to go, okay, what are my main priorities? What are my goals? Monitor when, okay, things are becoming too much and you therefore need to take a break, even if it's a short one. A short break is better than nothing.
Also understand any new staffers understand coming into the job, if you're feeling bewildered and overwhelmed, that is entirely normal. It's not just you, everybody goes through it and to reach out to other people and for experienced staffers to reach out to new staff, because it's not a question of knowing it all and having all the answers, but it's just offering that kind of connection and support.
And that takes me to another final point that I think is really important for the public service or civil service to arrange. And that's to get staffers together to create that sense of community so they can self-solve, they can peer solve problems. Because what worries me is everybody's in individual offices, they're not necessarily interacting face-to-face as much as they used to, which creates lots of flexibility, which is good and needed. But on the other hand it means that there’s not that connection. That's why they're creating community so that people do connect in some ways is really important. So people have got a sense of being part of a political staffing profession and get a chance to talk to people and realize that if they struggle, it's not just themselves and it doesn't mean they should give up.
Including me! Other names you’d recognize include Katie Telford, Gerry Butts and most of the Canadian PMO senior staff team circa 2022.