Author: Terry F. Buss

Since fall 2003, the Public Leadership faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) School of Government (SOG) has worked on the design and delivery of the Public Executive Leadership Academy (PELA), an advanced leadership program for local managers. PELA serves a diverse audience of twenty-five municipal and county managers, assistant managers, and department heads who aspire to leadership careers in local government and need to hone or develop their communication and collaboration skills. The program’s curriculum is unique in its focus on the manager’s role as community leader and change agent, and its emphasis on leading and managing in an intergovernmental and intersector context. Participants apply information and insights from class sessions to their “real world” change opportunity back home. To our knowledge, no other university-based public executive leadership program in the United States has this emphasis. As we reflect on the past two years of experience, we have learned a great deal. The purpose of this chapter is to share these lessons with those interested in developing similar leadership programs. Our focus is on: (1) partnership management, (2) collaboration, (3) curriculum design, (4) team-building techniques, and (5) program evaluation.

Cite as:

Morse, Ricardo S., and Terry F. Buss. Innovations in Public Leadership Development, Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/detail.action?docID=1900028.
Created from unc on 2019-04-05 11:47:52.

This book explores what this shift looks like and offers guidance on what it should look like. Specifically, the book focuses on the role of career leaders: those in public service who are change agents not only in their organizations but also in their communities and policy domains. These leaders work in network settings, making connections and collaborating to create public value and advance the common good.

Cite as:

Morse, Ricardo S., Terry F. Buss, and C. Morgan Kinghorn, eds. 2007. Transforming Public Leadership for the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

This book is grounded in several premises widely shared by our contributors. First, leaders can, and indeed must, be developed if the public sector is to meet its obligations to citizens and its constituents. It is just not the case or our experience that leaders are born and in short supply. Second, although it has some common attributes, public leadership differs from leadership in other contexts, such as military, sports, or business. Military models of leadership, for example, remain focused on hierarchical structures of authority, whereas public leaders now find themselves leading much more in a collaborative environment. Third, the practice of public leadership is in crisis, or at least in turmoil, necessitating new ways of leading and alternative ways of developing leaders. Public confidence in government is low, traditional ways of doing business are becoming obsolete, scandal appears to be permeating government, management and administration are becoming increasingly political, and the quality of public services seems on the decline. New leaders are desperately needed. And fourth, a wide variety of training and development innovations are underway that can, and are producing public leaders who have been or will be effective in today’s environment. These innovations, many presented here, are grounded in practice rather than theory, have been tested and evaluated for effectiveness, and are beginning to attract a large following in the field. The contributors hope that their work conveys the exciting times in which we find ourselves in the field of public management and the unprecedented opportunities for advancing leadership development.

Cite as:

Morse, Ricardo S., and Terry F. Buss. Innovations in Public Leadership Development, Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/detail.action?docID=1900028.
Created from unc on 2019-04-02 09:16:13.