Awakening Leadership among Jaded Civil Servants

by Elmer S Soriano

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. 

Mindsets play strange tricks on us. 

We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see. - Muhammad Yunus 

How does one teach leadership to a young civil servant in an office that has been accustomed to mediocrity for over a decade, where low performance is the norm? What if for years, her municipal office has allowed crimes to go unpunished, or epidemics unaddressed, or malnourished children to go uncared for?

Harvard's Prof.Marshall Ganz teaches a course called Public Narrative: Conflict, Continuity, and Change which tackles this issue from the public narrative perspective. This blog entry attempts to explore the intersection between institutional mandates and leadership narratives.

De jure and de facto policies were discussed previously in this blog. A civil servant may find herself in a low-performing office or team that has performed poorly for over a decade. She may even find herself promoted to a leadership position in an office wherein she herself was guilty of promoting lousy behaviors as a younger employee.

In Figure 1 above, the declared ideal (de jure) policy is represented by the red box. An office or bureau may have performed at a mediocre level, making mediocre performance the implemented or operationalized (de facto) policy. In the yellow box, most of the office personnel benefit from and reinforce low performance, and a change agent within the office would find resistance from her officemates if a significant increase in performance targets is proposed.

A leader should not refer to her peers or the de facto policy, or else she will be misled into thinking that modest incremental change is good leadership, whereas she will just be reinforcing low targets and mistaking that for leadership.

A leader has to look within into his deeper values and expand her leadership to pursue the declared ideals. Of course, she will need to practice Adaptive Leadership within her office to induce change at a pace that her office can handle.