During 33 years in the federal public service, Kevin Lynch thrived in the big, hard jobs, including deputy finance minister and Clerk of the Privy Council, which made him the country's top public servant. Now he is changing not only careers, but sectors - having moved to the post of vice-chair at Bank of Montreal, a job with both executive and board roles. He hopes he is not alone in making this shift. Canada needs more former senior public servants in business, he says, and more former business people in the top bureaucratic ranks. This melding of minds and mindsets is critical for this country to tackle the tough issues ahead, Mr. Lynch maintains.
As a former public servant, you are not allowed to lobby the federal government on behalf of the bank. So what can you do?
In my government career, there were all these issues that I worried about in a public-policy sense - productivity, innovation, competitiveness, demographics. After leaving the public service, what appealed to me was that the interlocutor on those issues with most Canadian companies is their bank. So how do you turn those broad public policy issues into practice at a business level?
It's a different world than when I started my career. It's dynamic, and the centre of economic power is shifting to Asia from North America and Europe. How do we think through that? There is a lot of strategic thinking that needs to be done and that's an area where I can add some value.
How do you see your role within the bank?
It is strategic, not operating. The question is, how you bring to business a public-sector perspective that has looked horizontally at issues.
The strength of the private sector is knowing their business lines deeply and intensely. In the public service, we train folks to think more horizontally, kind of strategically. How do you bring those two ways of thinking together? There is very seldom a right answer but what you really want to find is a better answer.
What do you have to learn about the private sector?
An enormous amount. One of the things that we've talked about is the lack of mobility between the private and public sectors. You can count on one hand the senior people in the private sector who have joined the non-elected side of the public sector over the past 10 to 15 years; equally, you can count on a couple of fingers the leaders who have gone the other way.
That's a real problem. We benefit from those other perspectives. But you have to go back to [former Canadian National and Bombardier CEO]Paul Tellier, who was one of the last to leave the public service [for the private sector in the 1990s] I've worried about that for years and now, at 59, this is an opportunity to actually do something about it.
We can't have two solitudes in a country where they really have to work better together. Part of it is not just the policies, but getting people moving from one to the other. From the bank's side, they were very interested in something that bridges some of those solitudes.
We've had public-private interchanges, but I get the sense there are not a lot at a senior executive level.
Not at all. We have an exchange program but, to be honest, it is not as active today as 15 to 20 years ago. And it tends to be used more for technical skills than for broad kind of management and leadership skills.
If you go back into the 1970s and 1980s, you would have seen much more cross-fertilization. The [Canada-U.S]free-trade agreement and all the sectoral committees created an enormous amount of networking. We haven't had that for 20 years and I think it hurts us.
So why is this interaction between sectors so important?
It means that being a small country [in population]isn't a disadvantage. It is an advantage, as long as we're well networked, we're agile and we're flexible. Smallness can be a huge plus if you gear yourself up to take advantage of it. Part of that is to make sure we have good engagement between all sectors on the issues that are really important.
As Privy Council Clerk, weren't you worried about the public service's future as a career choice for young Canadians?
The public service is a really important institution to this country. We've got to make sure it is as strong going forward as it has been in the past.
So what is the problem?
The first challenge is demographics. The public service is aging like everybody else, but we also stopped hiring in the 1990s, and that is what the additional concern and problem are. We have missed a generation of hires and therefore we have real gaps in our leadership. We have a real succession problem. My generation is retiring - they are 58, 59, 60, and the next generation coming through has gaps.
We had to reinstate our recruitment. When I came in to the public service, government was the major player in the economy. But over the last 20 or 30 years, the private sector has been such an interesting place for recruiting people. We in government have lost a lot of our recruitment brand and we have to build it back.
The public service has to excite the best graduates, not with salary but with the potential to make a difference. That requires a very personal element in recruiting - to meet these young potential public servants and convince them they can achieve their personal professional goals and make a difference. That has to be our marketing pitch.
What else must change?
The nature of the work is very different than it was 20 or 30 years back. If you look at where we are hiring today, it is much different - much more, for example, in security and technology areas. It's not the same sort of public service. That's a big culture change.
The advisory committee on the public service plays a huge role because it tries to bridge the private and public sectors. I thought we needed a group that could talk to the private sector about the importance of the public sector. It's very difficult for a public servant to do that - it's self-serving and conflicted. You need a neutral group who have enormous personal credibility.
Does the current political partisanship in Ottawa make it hard to develop long-term strategy?
We're moving into a phase where we're facing a number of long-term structural problems. It is always difficult to get public engagement on longer-term issues, and that's not just a comment about Ottawa in the current time.
The FTA [free-trade agreement]was an example of very intensive public engagement and, on a number of these other issues, we have to get that engagement going. There has to be, for example, a detailed conversation about what productivity means.
We are at a period when you have a number of quite unique structural events - many global, not just Canadian. The challenge is how we develop engagement strategies to get all parties talking about these issues and work towards Canadian solutions.
Because we have to differentiate ourselves, and there is a first-mover advantage. The countries that move earlier in dealing with productivity, demographics, and innovation are going to be in a better position than the ones that wait and deal with it when they become more problematic.
Don't senior public servants have less clout today than in the 1970s?
There is a tendency to remember back a little more fondly than it actually was. It was a very different era. Government was disproportionately powerful in the economy. It was before we started deregulating things, and privatizing Crown corporations.
It's a global economy today and it was a closed economy then. Your relative ability to influence things is smaller now. So the question is: Do we have the skill sets to deal with the issues of today? It is not the 1970s, an era of social change, but it is a time of global economy, productivity, innovation, security, information - those kinds of things. That requires a different skill set and you have to actually engage the private-sector civil society. It's much more complex.