By Rosemund Warrington Leadership is a critical component of good public governance, which is a major theme in CARICAD’s Charter for Caribbean Public Services. The Charter has a number of core principles and elements but in order for those to be embedded in the culture of the public service, they must be embraced by public officials throughout the system. In this regard leadership” is at the core of public sector transformation. Leadership development is neither new nor is it exclusive to the public sector but in recent times the modern leadership movement has been growing rapidly and so too has interest in this topic across the Caribbean. Training programmes offered by a vast range of providers in the Caribbean are numerous and organisations are beginning to feel unsure about where the focus of leadership development should be. These programmes promise miracles with the implied message that their modules will help participants attain greatness as leaders. What is most worrying however is the almost unnatural disassociation of leadership from the organisation’s needs and environment. Most of these programmes assume that there is no problem with regard to the locus of leadership; the focus is on the “individual”. Indeed, what is being sold remains a focus on individual skills without an equivalent emphasis on the challenges that will have to be Word Cloud graphic generated for this article by CARICAD, 2017. overcome in the prevailing environment. Some Leadership gurus have shared concern that these leadership development programmes have produced not only an understanding of leadership that is disconnected from the purpose it really should be meant to pursue, but that they have also created an industry that perpetuates fundamental errors in perspective and practice that should no longer be disregarded and swept under the carpet. The following analogy describes this environment brilliantly: “… manage the fishtank, not the fish. The fishtank is the organisation, and the fish are all those who have to swim and survive in it. They have to be able to see what they think is needed, and navigate its unclear and unsafe waters. These ‘fish’ include the managers and all leaders, who may get so used to the leadership culture (‘the way leadership is round here’) and their familiar environment that they lose sight of its shortcomings and what it is like for others to swim in. They develop personal survival skills that generally pit them against others. Hunt or be hunted. In this traditional model, perceived performance gaps are ‘solved’ by training. Fish are removed from their problematic environment from time to time, given some attention to smarten them up and make them smile, and then returned. But their workplace is still murky, often downright toxic – fear-ridden, unsupportive and bureaucratic. Once returned to the dirty ‘fishtank’ and its daily pressures the people revert to type.” In the midst of these realities, it is incumbent on us to stop to ponder what precisely leadership in public sector organisations is intended to achieve, and what is CARICAD’s role in ensuring that it materialises in the context of our Charter. The Charter promotes a blend of the Transformational and the Systemic approach to Leadership, as illustrated in the Charter Implementation Guide (Section 4.3.2 – Leadership): The Transformational approach represents a good fit for the six Pillars of effective public sector transformation promulgated in the Conceptual Framework and this Implementation Guide i.e. Governance, Standards, Capacity, Accountability, Openness and Legislation. 4
5 Publizr Home