HON. MERESEINI VUNIWAQA'S KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE SENIOR OFFICERS LEADERSHIP FORUM

Senior Managers from across government
Facilitators
Ladies and Gentlemen
            
Good afternoon

It’s an honor for me to be here with you this afternoon as you embark on the Senior Officers Leadership Forum. I wish to thank the Civil Service Reform Unit for inviting me to address you and I found that this would be a great opportunity for me to speak to you about the kind of leadership I believe the civil service needs – not only for our performance’s sake, but also for our people’s sake.
 
For the past few years, the CSRMU has been working on building capacity at several levels across the Civil Service. I am told that in August 2018, the CSRMU hosted and facilitated the first Senior Officers Leadership Forum which was developed to strengthen the network between Tier II and III officers  in the Civil Service while breaking down silos to more efficiently work as a team to improve service delivery to the Fijian people.
 
The on-going theme of the Forum is “Building and Maintaining High Performing teams” and high-level strategic leaders have been invited in the past to motivate senior officers like yourselves. I believe at the last forum, Mr. Gareth Baber spoke to the Forum about his experiences and the importance of commitment, communication and learning from mistakes – and may I echo that these three aspects of work life are absolutely essential in leading a team.
 
Leadership to me entails great responsibility. For me personally my starting point has always been an advice that my late mother gave to me…….”before you can be a good leader, you must first aspire to be a great servant.”  I was indeed blessed to have been a civil servant for 13 years of my life.  Even though for most of those 13 years I only had one client - Government – but in reality it was the different Ministries and departments that had to front up to court for civil cases. As a new civil servant in the late 90s I got to see very quickly the pecking order in the civil service and it wasn’t a very nice picture for a young woman like me starting out on a career as a civil servant.  But, I’ll talk about that later.    
 
A servant by definition is one who does work for others.  The worker is the servant and the ‘other’ is the Master. So in your mind, start asking yourself who do you think is the ‘other’?  It’s definitely not us civil servants because our title tells us we are servants. For you in this room, you have a double serving – you are a servant and also a leader.  That’s a double serving of privilege and responsibility to the people that you lead within your organization and to the people that you serve outside of your organization.  The work of a real servant leader is not an 8 to 4.30 job from Monday to Friday.  It is a 24 hour/7 days rotation. 
 
When you hold a certain position and especially a government position, more people than you realize, look up to you. It can be the people who work under you, the people you liaise with outside the organization, the people you serve, people you know in your personal lives and even the people who you may not have met but they read about you, watch you and are learning or aspiring to be in positions that you hold today….including children and youths.  We owe it to those people to lead by example always – 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  It is a daunting task.  That’s why real servants of the people have to be passionate and committed to their jobs, first of all – because without that passion and commitment, our service delivery will continue to fall short of desired standards.  We do this not to be popular, but because we owe it to the people that we serve.  The same people who pay our wages and salaries. 
 
This brings me to the question: What do we look like as civil servants to the people that we serve?  Are we approachable?  Are we accessible? Do we answer our phones always and take time to return missed calls?  How do we see ourselves?  Do we see ourselves as servants or as masters?  How we see ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, will translate into how we present ourselves to those that we serve.  If we see ourselves as servants, we are able to listen, we are humble, we value people, we trust and we care.  And all that will translate itself into how the people that you serve react to you – it will make you accessible and approachable to them.  For that to happen, we need to tell ourselves and believe that in a servant-master relationship where we are the servant, the people that we serve are our masters.  Once we inculcate that belief within us, our behaviours will follow, because servants are never rude to their masters – they are polite, they listen, they show humility and ensure the comfort and wellbeing of their masters at all times.
 
So as civil servants we must do some self-reflection on where we stand in this master-servant relationship: is the standard of our service delivery coloured by the person we are serving?  Does the well-dressed person or the public figure or our friend get a higher standard of service from us than the one who doesn’t fit the bill?  Does the one who speaks English fluently get our attention more than the one who can’t speak English? And if a person who can only speak in sign language were to visit your department today and ask for assistance do you have the capacity within to interpret sign language in order to serve that person?  If not, what are you doing about it as an inclusive leader?  And is your office fully accessible to wheelchairs and those living with disabilities?  We must realise, that 13.7% of our population live with a functional challenge and as civil servants they are also our clients.
Self-reflection is the first and the most crucial place to learn about your own abilities and leadership styles.
 
The 21^st century is known to be synonymous with change. Great leaders need to be able to see the change that is coming before it arrives and be prepared and well-equipped to deal with it when it does.  This sounds more complicated than it actually is. What many of us fail to realize is that inspiration can lie in what surrounds us. In order to anticipate change, you need to be curious.  In understanding the art of anticipation, I encourage you to read widely, converse with people of different backgrounds, be insatiably curious on various topics and not just stick to your field of interest, identify trends that impact you and trends that impact others, and remain observant and vigilant of what is happening in the world. The last thing any leader wants is to be taken by surprise by a change he or she did not see coming and if you are not prepared – remember your team will struggle too. 
 
We all have a group of people we are comfortable with. We tend to turn to this group when we need help or advice, or just a different perspective on issues. What we all need to do now is to grow our network beyond our comfort zone. Engaging and developing relationships with individuals who come from different biological, physical, geographical, political, cultural, socioeconomic backgrounds from us will allow us to grow our cultural intelligence, a necessity given the diverse workforce in 21^st century organizations, especially the civil service of a multiracial, multicultural country like ours. On top of that, conversing and interacting with individuals from different backgrounds can help us develop new solutions and approaches, some of which we would never have thought of ourselves, when dealing with problems, in the future.
 
You must also create a similar network professionally with stakeholders and your counterparts. Working together is working smarter after all.
 
A big part of being a leader is being courageous and thinking outside the box to fulfil the ultimate aim of the organization, as it involves doing things that might be personally uncomfortable for you. Human nature is such that if a method works, we would stick by it. However, the nature of the 21^st century means that what might have worked for you previously, may no longer work today. You ought to be courageous enough to abandon this practice you have adopted and step out of your comfort zone.
 
Another, good example is the Civil Service Reform – so many of us are having to step outside the culture of hiring based on years in service and not firing when performance wasn’t up to par. Now the wave of change solicits that we support merit and demand accountability and demand top notch performance at all times. I’m sure it isn’t as simple as it sounds – but one must have the courage to take those decisions that will benefit the organization and its clientele and leave aside your personal issues – remembering always that we are here to serve the greater good.
 
As an inclusive leader you need to have capacity to identify personal and institutional biases and the courage to remove those biases.  These biases will preclude you from making fair decisions and when your decision isn’t fair – people suffer unnecessarily.  Identify those biases and deal with them.
 
As an inclusive leader, you must also have the courage to admit that you do not have a solution for every issue you are faced with at work.  An inclusive leader is able to accept that even as a leader we do not know everything and this is when we call on the expertise within our team to carry us through as a team – TOGETHER!  This takes humility in leadership which I also believe is very crucial for any good leader.
 
To have a happy team we as inclusive leaders must create a good work environment – I am not talking infrastructural environment.  I am talking about the inter-personal work environment in your office which can impact a great deal, positively or negatively on work outputs. 
 
Do you have personal favourites within your team that you spend more time consulting with compared to others in the team?  Do you call out a bad idea for what it is or do you acknowledge it in an effort to encourage better ones? “Yes…. But have we considered……”.  Do you tell off staff who have strayed in front of their peers?  And for staff who you feel (rightly or wrongly) are challenging your authority – what do you do with them?  Do you discuss the issue with them or do you get back at them indirectly by a bad report or some silent treatment maybe?
 
Being a great leader can be a lonely job.  You have to carry yourself in a way that would ensure that anybody under your command would feel free about discussing any work issue with you.  Whether it’s to do with a work colleague or even about your own leadership style which they might be finding as a challenge.  That kind of environment takes a lot of work to create and once you have it, guard it and protect it very well.  It is based on a mutual trust and understanding that you are both there with the ultimate aim of delivering the best service on behalf of Government to the Fijian people. 
 
It requires us as leaders to put aside our egos and understand the importance of a team member in a great team.  It requires you to be a great listener.  It requires you to see the woods or the forest – not just the trees.  When you read a facebook post naming the management (including you) within your organization and complaining about your individual weaknesses as leaders and you know it’s one of your staff – your initial reaction to that says a lot about what kind of leader you are.  Do you get angry and want to carry out an investigation into who the culprit is?  Or do you analyse the complaints to figure out if there is an underlying issue that needs to be dealt with? 
 
As an inclusive leader we must understand that every individual in a team is unique in the way that they think and in the contributions they bring to the table.  The inclusive leader is able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each team member and is able to capitalize on the strengths whilst encouraging them to turn weaknesses into windows of opportunity.  And with such diversities in perceptions, your job is to stimulate better collaboration between them with the aim of reaching the best outcome.  And when you achieve that great outcome – do not forget that you didn’t do it alone.  Acknowledge your team always!
 
And finally I wish to speak on my personal favorite topic - Gender Smart Leadership.  In 2018, women comprised 54% of civil servants in the Fijian civil service. 54% women to 46% men.  But when we look at senior positions – there were 29% women and 71% men in 2018. 
 
A deeper understanding and appreciation of the differing needs of men and women in the workplace is very important, especially here in the civil service whereby females make up a large portion of our human resources. Without this understanding and acceptance, one is bound to fail to fully utilize the resourcefulness of their female workers and we cannot afford that, can we? With gender sensitization in your individual leadership styles, you will be enabled to better motivate, retain and empower female staff and doing so is very important if you are to progress on the theme “Building and Maintaining High Performing teams”. How do you become a gender smart or gender sensitive leader? Quick answer – be inclusive.  We may be carrying out certain practices within our workplaces which are excluding women from participating.
 
(Example: I used to be a civil servant for 13 years of my life.  For about 7 of those 13 years I was a junior officer and a female in a male-dominated office. Senior management was all male. Grog sessions – all males, talking manly jokes, kept us out. That translated into women being kept out of national projects run by that office where our male counterparts at the same level would be part of that inner circle.  So much so that it was a given that every female officer would only go as far as a certain level in that office and opt out of the service or get a job elsewhere within the civil service cadre.  Gender-enlightened leadership changed that story for me.  Leadership that saw the merits rather than gender.  Inclusive leadership that gave women a seat at the table as an equal. 
 
And if you are in this room, you have the power and the privilege to change that story for the women that you lead.  Yes, some of them may need some help to get to the standard you are looking for but they will never reach that standard if you as a leader do not take the time to give them a little help or direction where needed.  I am always encouraging women leaders to mentor other women in their organisations.  I now wish to challenge the male leaders in this room because there are more of you male leaders than females.  I challenge you to actively mentor or sponsor the women who are in your team to reach their full potential.
 
You know, some staff have so much potential and capacities that get buried within just because they are not being acknowledged or given room to shine within an organisation.  Test them out one by one if you have to – give them some responsibility even if it is just to organize a wellness event.  Let them know that you see them and that you believe they have potential.  I remember the first time my boss gave me the task of doing something for the whole Office – I felt useful and needed! And that was to organize a Christmas party in my first year of work in that office!!  For me it was an achievement and it made me want to do my best in everything I did at work knowing that my boss knew that I existed.
 
 
Conclusion:
I wish to conclude by saying that the civil service is dependent on civil servants.  There can be no civil service without civil servants - and you as managers of those who serve the people of our country have a very important role to play in how well you bring out the ingenuity and skills of your staff. As a nation we have many crucial goals to achieve and we need you to put your best foot forward always.
 
I wish you all the very best in delivering the services that the Fijian government has entrusted you with.
 
Thank you and God bless.