1 June, 2023 Volume 7, Issue 2 CARICAD is pleased to bring to you a repeat of a series of articles on Strategic HRM and Succession Planning. Just before COVID-19 arrived, we had completed a regional survey to find out how many people had succession plans in place and very few did. We therefore recognised that the need for succession planning is even greater than before. This will enable a public service that is resilient, but subject to change. The public service must be in a place where it can thrive in an organic way so that the leadership and technical skills that should be in place, are in place. To this end, we just completed a Succession Planning toolkit which will be available on request. By Rosemund R. Warrington, HR and ODE Specialist, CARICAD T his article recognises the contextualised nature of public sector ransformation in a complex, frequently intransient and change-averse system, and identifies some factors that are necessary in order for public sector organisations to attain resilience status. These include the importance of: citizen centricity, technology, human capital development, systemic transformation and a focus on outcomes. It is widely accepted that change is the one constant in organisational life today. Virtually all organisations are affected whether it is by the forces of nature, globalisation, shifts in the economy, or an ever-changing workforce. In the context of public sector organisations, the management of change has indeed been a constant. Yet, the speed with which governments must respond to the diverse crises is not always swift, partly owing to insufficient resilience to overcome these adverse effects on their own. Public sector organisations in the Caribbean have faced much pressure to change in recent years largely due to vulnerability to natural disasters and environmental change, fiscal austerity measures, limited institutional capacity, and the desire to deliver world class efficiencies through public sector transformation efforts. Transformation initiatives within the public sector, however, have a checkered history of success. The majority of countries in the Caribbean have been classified as having Rosemund R. Warrington, CARICAD’s HR and ODE Specialist high vulnerability (i.e. environmental risks, economic shocks, social risks and limited institutional capacity) and medium resilience (i.e policy-induced measures, good governance, macroeconomic stability, social development market flexibility), the worst case category being Haiti with high vulnerability and low resilience, (Briguglio 2014). There is now a recognition and acceptance that in order to survive, public sector organisations in the Caribbean region can no longer simply respond to changes in their environment, but they must proactively shape their environment to maximise their own effectiveness. The context for this change is based on a number of philosophies guiding the transformation of public sector organisations, including post bureaucracy models. • Continues on Pages 3-5
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