Strong leadership from senior civil servants key to policy

Berman is professor of public management and director of internationalisation at the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington. 

There are two types of leadership in the public sector, namely political leaders and senior civil servants, and they are explicitly not on the same team and have different agendas, with political leaders “only best for political and ideological priorities”, he told a National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA) seminar.

Meanwhile, the trend around the world is that senior civil servants are responsible for almost everything else, including taking the lead in creating better departmental policies and undertaking capability development, so they must serve by example, he explained. 

“Around 30 per cent of government agencies in Taiwan, where senior civil servants did not take strong leadership to come up with new ideas and capability development, were ranked as ‘poor’ or ‘fair’ in terms of performance in their government’s department rankings.

“But when the senior leaders took leadership for new long-term development and new policy initiatives, then only 14 per cent of those national departments were still ranked as poor,” Berman said at an academic seminar arranged by NIDA to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its Graduate School of Public Administration.

Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda, who chaired yesterday’s seminar, said the efficiency of the Thai public sector and its government agencies had to increase alongside the Kingdom’s population, which has expanded fourfold since the 1950s, in order for the agencies to be able to serve their public-service purpose fully. 

Berman said that while people might not be impressed by the rise from 70 per cent to 86 per cent in the number of Taiwan’s agencies that were ranked “good” as a result of the increase in senior civil servants’ leadership, they should be very impressed by how strong leadership from these officials reduced the level of “poor” performance, as it had been halved.

Examples of international recognition to address the problem of a lack of senior civil servants’ leadership are the introduction of the Performance Improvement Framework, whereby external teams are brought in to evaluate each national department to see its preparedness to tackle social and economic problems over the next couple of years, he said.

This means that the departments’ performance will be put online for the public to scrutinise and criticise, he added.

“This allows the senior civil servants to go to the minister and say this is what we need to do, and through that there are differences being made and new projects that come from it, and they are put online for the people to see whether the senior leader has actually done that. I believe that this helps [improve government agencies’ efficiency],” Berman said. 

Other efforts, including South Korea’s public regulation that bars civil servants from being promoted until they can come up with new ideas to help with the development of their department or their city, also work, he told the seminar.

Some 45,000 civil servants in Seoul have produced a quarter of a million proposals over the five-year period since the regulation was introduced, he added.

Another South Korean development is a gadget in the Seoul metro where passengers can use their smart cards to make a small financial donation to social services.

This has become a very popular crowd-sourcing idea for social services, and most of the ideas that have been financed by the donations are from civil servants, and not the general public, he said.

“Civil servants are the ones who know the issues, but more leadership within their departments is needed to implement those ideas,” Berman said.