Why Efficiency Is a Hard Ask for Senior Managers in Public Administration

Efficiency sounds like a reasonable demand. For senior managers in public administration it is often a hard ask in practice, because it requires decisions that nobody enjoys making.

Few areas of public administration have faced as many change initiatives in recent years as the public sector. Digitalisation projects, organisational reviews, process management, programmes for cutting red tape, recruitment and retention projects, new management instruments, reporting obligations and funding programmes have become part of everyday business. Yet the impression remains that the underlying overload barely changes. This coexistence of reform activity and persistent overload is not a contradiction. It is a pattern that becomes clear once you look more closely at who actually makes the decisions in these processes and what is asked of that person.

Overload has become the normal state

Public authorities have been operating under permanent strain for years. This is not the result of individual poor decisions, nor a temporary phenomenon. A steady rise in tasks, growing regulatory requirements and rising expectations from politics and the public meet limited staff, financial and time resources. What stands out is less the existence of these burdens than how entrenched they have become. As I put it in my book Effiziente Verwaltung: overload is no longer an exceptional state affecting individual public bodies, it has become the normal mode of day-to-day administrative work.

For senior managers this means a permanent state in which prioritisation often happens implicitly, reactively and on a case-by-case basis. Strategic steering takes a back seat to short-term problem solving, because day-to-day business simply leaves no time for systematic weighing of options. Decisions get made wherever the pressure is greatest at that moment, not where they would deliver the greatest benefit in the long run. It is precisely into this situation that the demand for more efficiency lands, on a management level that is already working at its limit and has little capacity left for further trade-off decisions.

Efficiency calls for decisions, not tools

A common misunderstanding is to treat efficiency purely as a cost-cutting instrument or a technical optimisation problem. Anyone who does this develops solutions without lasting effect and often creates additional work instead of relief. Efficiency is first and foremost a management and steering decision. It requires senior managers to determine which tasks matter, which can be reduced and which should be dropped altogether. That is the hard ask: the real difficulty lies not in rolling out a new tool or an optimised process, but in the prior decision about what will no longer be done.

Such decisions are uncomfortable because they make responsibility visible. Anyone who declares a task dispensable has to justify that to staff, to political bodies and sometimes to the public. It is more comfortable to introduce additional software or document a process than to say that a particular service will be delivered to a lesser extent in future. This comfort explains why many public authorities invest considerable energy in improvement measures without achieving any noticeable relief. The tool becomes a substitute for the actual decision, because it seems more manageable than an open debate about priorities.

Why activity does not equal relief

The real question, then, is not why public authorities fail to act, since that clearly is not the case. The question is why so much activity so rarely leads to lasting relief. A key reason is that many measures address symptoms without resolving the underlying prioritisation question. A new reporting system may improve oversight, but it does not solve the problem of too many tasks being handled in parallel. A process optimisation may speed up individual workflows, but it does nothing to change the fact that the overall volume of tasks keeps growing, as long as nobody decides what to give up.

For senior managers this means that efficiency work does not begin with the question of how something can be done faster, but with the question of what actually needs to be done at all. That is more demanding than any tool project, because it requires real trade-offs and exposes shortcomings that had previously been hidden behind general busyness. Anyone who has so far managed to cope with everything now has to reveal what fell by the wayside, and why.

What this means for everyday leadership

In practice, this difference often shows up in small but consequential moments. A manager who introduces a new digital tool usually wins approval, because nobody loses anything as a result. A manager who scraps an existing reporting obligation or reduces a service, by contrast, has to expect pushback, even when the decision is right on the merits. This asymmetric reaction explains why additive measures are taken so much more often than subtractive ones. It is structurally easier to add something than to take something away, even though the latter is usually far more effective for genuine relief.

Senior managers who take efficiency seriously therefore need to be willing to openly defend unpopular priorities and accept that not every improvement idea will win immediate approval. This changes the self-understanding of the leadership role: away from moderating an ever-growing list of projects, towards clearly setting out what takes precedence and what does not. This shift is uncomfortable, but it is the precondition for turning individual reform activities into real, noticeable relief, rather than letting the administration lose itself in ever more initiatives without gaining any capacity to act.