Address by Ian Watt to IPAA 04 October 2012 - The Department of ...

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However, the challenges are getting tougher, and they won’t wait for a once-a-decade-or-so review. They include: • the rise of Asia in economic, strategic and political terms; • demographic change, particularly Australia’s ageing population; • a tighter long-term fiscal environment; • environmental sustainability, including resource security and managing our natural and built environments; • new technologies that emerge with almost impossible speed; and • refining and simplifying our Federal system. We also face increasing demands as a result of new technology, the 24 hour media cycle and the instantaneous transmission of information globally. It means we are never ‘off’. And all these challenges are only amplified by increasing citizen expectations. The Blueprint started a formal shift towards greater emphasis on building in continuous improvement into our organisations – and a lot has also been done in that respect by individual agencies – but we need to do more to cement that approach into our DNA and right across the APS. a. Improving leadership and capability With challenges like those mentioned in mind, my priority is to ensure the APS is skilled to meet them, and to ensure it remains the Government’s first choice for policy advice, implementation and program and service delivery. In order to do so, we need to better develop our future leaders, and strengthen our capabilities. We need to become an organisation of higher quality leaders and managers. Further, this is an area where the lead has to be taken by APS leaders. We are working on our capacity and capability. We have commenced the Agency Capability Review Program, which was recommended in the Blueprint. Capability Reviews are independent, high level, forward looking reviews of the strategy, leadership and delivery capability of an agency. We have completed or almost completed eight reviews so far. The review teams work constructively with the agency’s leadership to assist them better understand the organisation’s relative strengths and weaknesses, strengthen their continuous improvement agenda and, overtime improve the organisation’s effectiveness. The reviews do not seek to prescribe a specific way forward for the agency. They are valuable because all parties understand that there is always room for improvement; and because the reviewers bring fresh insights and perspectives to bear. We have also established the Strategic Centre for Leadership, Learning and Development, which provides service-wide talent management and learning and development programs. The Centre has helped us reinvent our leadership development model and revise our approach to leadership, putting greater emphasis on experiential learning. We are also focusing more on talent management, trialling new approaches that stretch our high performers and require them to make a journey of reflection and learning. 6
But there is more we need to do to develop our leadership capacity. We need to continue to attract very good people, be they new entrants, graduates or lateral transfees from business, academia, the community sector and other governments. To do that we need to highlight the intrinsic value and diversity of our work, and to maintain and build our reputation for professionalism. And we need to nurture and grow the skills and experience of people within the APS. Ideally, our future leaders will have diverse experience in policy development, implementation and service delivery and have worked in several different agencies. Many will also have wide experience outside the APS. To help provide them with these experiences, we need to encourage and facilitate employee mobility across the APS, between the Commonwealth and States, and with the non-government sectors, through greater use of secondments and exchanges. We also need to provide opportunities to strengthen individual leadership and management capabilities. After all, everyone in the APS is and should be a leader. What do I mean by that? We rightly expect that, amongst other things, our most senior leaders will define and communicate the strategic priorities, vision and culture of our organisations and manage processes that deal with the most complex issues that we face. Yet everybody has important leadership roles to perform, each in our own context, and we can all model leadership behaviours. Each of us, for example, can think creatively about what we do and seek out and embrace more effective ways of working; build productive relationships within the workplace and with all with whom we deal; call and deal effectively with inappropriate behaviour whenever we observe it; deal carefully with ethical dilemmas, such as making judgements between “equally right” competing claims for support; and live the APS values. These are all examples of elements of leadership which need to be nurtured and honed at all levels of the APS. Accordingly, we need to provide development opportunities across more than just the Senior Executive level. Indeed, having concentrated last year on the SES we are now moving to rework our approach to developing the core skills, including management skills, of the broader APS. And we need to recognise that learning and development is not restricted to formal training programs, as important as they can be in an individual’s development. We need to provide a range of development experiences including on-the-job training, mentoring and coaching. And doing this is neither complex nor time consuming. It can take simple forms, such as taking junior officers along to key meetings; explaining to our staff not just what the decision is, but why it was made, so they gain from our experience; and making time to provide regular, honest and constructive performance feedback – something we should all be doing anyway. 7
Page 1 and 2: Reflections on my First Year as Sec
Page 3 and 4: Indeed, we are sometimes at our bes
Page 5: The 2009 report by KPMG, Benchmarki
Page 9 and 10: The answer is simple. Because it:
Page 11: And amongst the current crop, the c

Address by Ian Watt to IPAA 04 October 2012 - The Department of ...

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