Leadership Quality - The Cause of Civil Service Complacency?

News clips from Star on-line referred:-

Wednesday June 3, 2009

Bureau: Complacent attitude of civil servants is public’s main grouse

TELUK INTAN: Inaction and delayed action. These are ratepayers’ main grouses against government agencies and departments they deal with.

Of the more than 4,550 complaints submitted to the Public Complaints Bureau this year (up to May 15), 26.6% (or 1,212) were on the two issues.

Stating this, PCB complaints director Aziz Ismail said the source of the problem could be traced to the numerous internal issues in the departments or agencies concerned.

He added, however, that the issues were “too sensitive” for public discussion and the bureau could only advise these agencies and departments to put their houses back in order.

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I think the main cause of the complacency is because of the leadership.

The government is normally blamed for not serving the people and the above statistic shows that it's the civil servants, of which our elected representatives are the leaders of the civil services, are largely responsible for the situation.

Being a Minister, it's like a CEO of a corporate, the responsibility is huge. He/she must be competent enough to lead the specific group of the services so that the people will benefit; else, dissatisfaction will occur and the government of the day will suffer badly when in election day.

It's the lack of public performance gauging mechanism during their tenure that contributed to the poor performance of our cabinet.

The problem of leading a highly diversified social community is acknowledged but it's not a good excuse of not performing. People, irregardless of backgrounds, are for excellent services. It's the sincerity of these Ministers and Deputy Ministers that really matters most. Public must be more vocals by providing frequent feedbacks needed for the betterment of the services. The government must, in reciprocal, provide quality services so that the nation becomes more efficient and hence, more profitable and wealthy! A 'wealthy' nation is a country of 'wealthy' people with lots of quality of life.

'1Malaysia, People First, and Performance Now' championed by PM Najib is a good starting point and let's hope that all the government staffs understand the spirit and be ready to have the appropriate mentality to implement the ideal of Malaysian.

The little positive change in the civil service is a large step forward for the entire nation.