The beginning of the end of the Public Service

Out of an initial pool of over 200 applicants, approximately 115 were short listed for an "In basket exercise." Here the candidate was presented with hypothetical scenarios in an organisation and was required how he or she would react. The candidates were marked on management skills based on responses.

Forty-five candidates emerged successful. This was followed by a simulation exercise where leadership competences were judged. Twenty-eight candidates were successful. Hats off to the Service Commission for this new initiative, a Canadian system introduced into our public service. But would this new system of assessment lift the public service from the morass into which it has progressively fallen? Would this new cadre of well paid public officers translate into better service delivery to the general public?

In the Canadian system, public officers, I am sure, are geared from entry into the public service to participate in this type of assessment. Therefore, training in executive assessment would be part and parcel of what they do as public officers.

No such preparation was applied in the Trinidad and Tobago case. This assessment was simply imposed, wholesale, without warning or initiation, onto the public service. The end result is that those who managed to scratch and claw their way to promotion have now been elevated to an elitist group in the public service of Trinidad and Tobago. They now earn double and in some instances triple the amount of money now earned by the public officers at the next lower level.

Whilst the Public Service Commission might think that it has dealt with the leadership problem in the public service, this assessment system might very well mark the beginning of the end of the public service in this country. There can be no leaders without followers. Permanent Secretaries demand that senior officers draft everything under the sun for them, from speeches, to cabinet notes, to responses, which require a technical input, to simple memoranda. Therefore claiming ownership of work not generated from their efforts exists at the highest level. I have no doubt that this perversity would trickle down to the Deputy Permanent Secretaries.

The implementation of Government’s Development Programme depends on the Directorship in Ministries.

Directors who participated in the assessment, but for reason, not in any way related to the absence of leadership competences, were unsuccessful, are quietly going to withdraw. There is now going to be a cadre of unmotivated, disaffected and recalcitrant expertise, out of the public service. It is blatantly obvious for all who have eyes to see, that the disparity in earnings between the top highest levels in the public service and the directorships is just too great. Many administrative officers whose only expertise is shuffling files from one desk to the next, by some fluke, now have the capacity to earn twice as much as senior technical experts in the public service? What then is the reward for technical competence, hard work, commitment and dedication? To add insult to injury, one is now expected to run ones blood to water, use ones hard earned technical expertise and experience to show up this new elitist group as productive and performing. This is not going to happen.

This new assessment is nothing but a source of grief for many in the public service and grieving people cannot perform. So we did not make the cut! Be a good sport!

Not where there is no correlation between effort and reward, not (for some of us) after 30 odd years of hard work, dedication and commitment to the Public Service. So the public will continue to suffer from poor services.

Coupled with the numerous parallel companies the Government is hell-bent on setting up, the public service in this country is descending rapidly into an abyss of no return. The bottom line for the Public Service Commission (in this era of plenty) is that "to whom little is given, little can be expected in return."

M KALLAHAN

Port-of-Spain