In defence of an elite Fast Stream
Last week, friend of Re:State and font of Whitehall knowledge Martin Stanley wrote a Substack post on our recent report on the Fast Stream.
After commending the report’s “excellent recommendations” on better career management, mentoring and improved training in hard skills, Martin raises an interesting question about our conclusion.
How feasible is the introduction of an “Executive Leadership Scheme” which focuses on identifying and cultivating cross-functional leadership “from day 1”? Particularly, as he says, when one of the “worst features of the old civil service” — something Re:State has repeatedly drawn attention to — is the promotion of a largely insular and culturally homogenous set of generalists (reinforced by incentives that militate against against specialisation).
Certainly, it’s a good thing the Fast Stream now has schemes aligned with professions that would be expensive or difficult to attract from the private sector — including in commercial, finance and digital — and which promise future leadership opportunities. And, as Re:State has argued, there should be more routes to the top for people who choose to specialise (but who may not want to trade-off specialisation for SCS roles, which are often dominated by management responsibilities).
In Making the Grade, we recommended the introduction of a “Specialist Development Scheme” (targeted at mid-career professionals) for exactly this reason:
Far from attempting to embed a kind of generalist bluffer — ‘more Sir Humphreys’, if you like — the Executive Leadership Scheme is instead aimed at introducing real rigour and expertise into how cross-functional leadership is identified and developed in Whitehall. It’s for this reason that graduation from the Executive Leadership Scheme would be based on passing a core curriculum of hard and soft skills (rather than the “generic management competencies” which interviewees told us characterised the now-disbanded Generalist Scheme).
Recruitment to the Executive Leadership Scheme would also be much more demanding. While no process can guarantee, with certainty, who will be an exceptional future leader, our recommendation to have Senior Civil Servants and a departmental NED involved in the final selection board for the Executive Leadership Scheme gets us closer to an accurate assessment (as things stand, Fast Stream assessments are often carried out by people who have little management and leadership experience themselves). As does having more demanding entrance exams, which test for core knowledge.
And as a number of studies have found, there are relatively obvious and robust ways of predicting a graduate’s future performance (having them complete work sample tasks, for example, or testing for creativity and adaptability, conscientiousness, or emotional and cognitive intelligence). Many Fast Stream applicants have several years of professional experience, which can be used as an additional benchmark.
In fact, in many ways, the Fast Stream is at odds with leadership programmes in the private sector for not giving more challenging leadership responsibilities early in someone’s career, such as Aldi and P&G do, in exchange for higher pay and more professional support. As our report says, in 2015, 90 per cent of Aldi’s UK business director joined the company as graduates (including the then-Chief Exec of their UK Business). Many of the senior employees of Apple, Meta and other innovative tech companies were identified for having huge potential as graduates — and worked their way up over decades.
The problem is not with schemes being elite. As the Chief Exec of any high-performing organisation will tell you, talent is (almost) everything. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI describes hiring as “probably the most important thing a founder does”. It is that, in too many ways, the Fast Stream does not take the components of what it means to build an elite scheme seriously enough — a demanding recruitment process, highly competitive pay offer, training in hard skills, and providing high-stakes management responsibilities.