Revelations over the weekend that civil service managers are
unable or unwilling to implement a performance management system designed to ensure higher
standards of employee performance come as no surprise.
Illustrating a twin culture of entitlement and subservient
acquiesce to preserving a carefully constructed status quo, it’s an admission
of leadership failure. As turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, it’s unlikely that
civil service managers would ever act to reign in their own salaries, least of
all within a system designed to ensure its own sustainability no matter what
political administration is in power.
Crafted through years of “partnership” agreements that
prevented real change, this state’s largest employer, Government is stuck in a
rut of its own making as the latest partnership manifestation, the Croke Park agreement, ensures that undeserved entitlements are ring fenced and protected.
If
this is the case, then there cannot be any real transformative change. We are
stuck with funding a dysfunctional civil service unless real transformative
leaders emerge.
These are the people who change the way people act by using
narrative intelligence to ensure others are enthusiastically engaged. They get
people to change by getting them to imagine and act out a better future. But
who is responsible for crafting a fit for purpose civil service?
Politicians should admit to a fact of life, they cannot be
transformative leaders. Theirs is the business of compromise, the consensus
agreed to ensure re-election. Characterised by the acquisition and retention of
power, successful politicians are the ones who are elected and re-elected. They
make flexible, generalised campaign promises, to appeal to the broadest
electorate and then renege on them. If a politician tries to persuade people to
do something different, to show transformational leadership, they guarantee
their own demise.
Should we expect politicians to be leaders when we elect
them to preside over the body politic? After all what is a minister other than
the political head of an administrative department? A Taoiseach, a “prime”
minister, who administratively heads the government?
The parable of the boiled frog which remains in the water as
the heat is being turned up to be boiled alive is apt. Are we being boiled
alive to protect bond holders’ wealth base or is it a case of a collectively
hoping a regressive economic cycle will end and people once again feel
confident enough to go out and spend money?
As the citizens of Berlin don’t elect Dublin politicians, their
narrative differs. In Berlin it’s all about getting errant states to pay their
way to protect the might of core EU engine, the German economic model. In
Dublin it’s all about regaining economic sovereignty by agreeing to what Berliner’s
want: Both hope that we will start spending again. Both act as if economic
activity strong enough to pay off borrowings and fund recovery is possible.
Both are unwilling to make the decisions needed to re-craft the euro project.
Economist Constantin Gurdgiev says we owe too far too much
to have any hope of economic recovery. It seems we will be unable to grow fast
enough to fund recovery and fund debt repayments. Translating this to families
means the burden of state and personal debt repayments will stifle recovery and
government’s austerity programme will snuff out ability to repay.
The bigger
picture is one of some nation states who have excess money and those that don’t
have enough. Rebalancing this equation means that as creditor states are as captured
as debtors states, debt settlement will have to be shared equally.
Rarely has business, politics and family collided as they
have in the past three years. We are living with what happens when business is
used by others to achieve their instrumental objectives – wealth and status
within a political economy designed to further these business objectives. But
it seems this is about to change – not because of transformational leadership –
but caused by the social and economic consequence of un-repayable debt.
Government’s muted new insolvency regime indicates a
decision that people are to be allowed to fail and get back on their feet
again. If a measure of an entrepreneurial society is its capacity to forgive
personal failure and allow people to rebuild their lives then it’s a move that
shows some responsiveness to a dilemma posed.
That dilemma is encapsulated by a sovereignty status largely
dictated by external political forces we have no control over but also framed
within our own willingness and capacity to encourage transformational change
where we can.
For that to happen ways have to be found to ensure that not
only is the civil service reformed but that the society and economic model it’s
designed to support is also defined. So far all focus has been on austerity with
little or no thought applied to what will be the outcome of years of
austerity.
A version of this article appeared in the Irish Examiner, Business Section, Monday 7th November 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment