KARACHI, Jan 25: As part of the process of managing change, the State Bank has conducted internal and external stakeholders’ survey, described as an exercise in self-criticism, to get a feedback on the institution and its leadership, in order to lay the foundation of further progress. Now, it is proposed to make it an annual feature.
In the internal survey, the respondents were required to give ratings to the leadership of the governor and the overall change management process. Both internal and external survey, which could be duplicated by other public sector organizations, was carried out to assess the impact of change process on work culture, SBP performance and corporate image and the direction set by the new vision and strategy. The autonomous units like the State Bank need participatory management.
Realizing that the process of change cannot move forward unless there is an overall commitment and ownership of the majority of staff, these surveys were initiated.
The Institute of Business Administration (IBA) carried out the survey on the SBP performance, corporate image and the quality of inter-action with outside stakeholders.
In the internal survey, the SBP staff was advised to fill up survey form without disclosing their identity. The respondents were asked to rate the progress in shared vision and mission of the SBP among the staff, commitment and ownership of the change process, change in culture, core values, attitudes and mindset, central bank’s practice in recruitment, training, promotion and exit, integration of department activities under Business Planning, and team-work and team building etc.
The staff was asked to state whether the SBP has improved its performance, output and image in the last two years. They were asked to state the most important achievement and the most important failure, the biggest hurdle in the change process and the one change that each applicant would like to propose.
Internally, 40 per cent of the staff have rated the overall impact of change process at SBP as very high and high; 48 per cent as average and 12 per cent as low.
Lamenting that “our culture has not changed much” at the third conference on change management recently, the governor, however, expressed satisfaction that “we have made some progress.”
The results show that the perceptions of external stakeholders have definitely changed for the better. Fifty-six per cent of those polled have given an overall rating of good and excellent, 25 per cent termed as fair and 8 per cent as satisfactory and only two per cent look at the performance as unsatisfactory.
“In a knowledge organization such as ours,” says Dr Ishrat Husain, “learning is the most important attribute. We have to learn from our mistakes. We have to learn from our success.”
“An effective team leader should be able to inspire a shared vision,” says Dr Ishrat Husain, adding that “the difficult part of team relationship management is giving and receiving feedback to be self-rectifying”. The style of the team leader gains salience in creating right climate and he is responsible for inducing action and attitude.
Dr Ishrat Husain believes in delegating powers of decision making and empowering the staff. A Corporate Management Team has been set up for “collective and transparent decision-making at the institutional level” in the place of the governor being the “sole autocratic, discretionary decision maker.”
Similar teams have been set up at the executive director’s and director’s levels.
Now, the governor wants to revisit the composition, terms of reference and its working methods and make them more firmly rooted. The objective is to turn these into a real decision-making teams.
A key issue facing State Bank and other public sector organizations is that of existing work culture and the problems relating to culture change, values, attitudes and behaviours and team-work.
Speaking at the National Bank’s official launching of Western Union Transfer Services, Dr Ishrat Husain said banker-bureaucrats have to turn into good professionals.
The governor laments that firstly, not much progress has been made in changing attitudes and mindsets, and in inculcating our core values. Our culture has not changed much.
We have not come out of the bureaucratic culture and not moved to a problem solving culture. In the meanwhile, the applicant or the aggrieved person is still waiting for the SBP to take care of his problem. The first desired quality is core competence, also called working knowledge which is defined as sufficient experience and problem solving ability. “Identify as to what the constraints are and how we can overcome them, Dr Ishrat told the staff. The best of policies become meaningless if the implementation machinery is weak.
On internal working, we do not speak out our true feelings and work in isolated vertically built compartment. Our loyalty is to the department and is aimed at pleasing the immediate boss who is going to write our performance evaluation.
The second issue facing the central bank is absence of team-work and collaborative work. We are all aware that the collective results of a team or collaborative efforts are much superior than that of an individual or decisions taken through a hierarchal chain.
The problems are examined from different perspectives. Thus the solution achieved is more doable and as it is arrived through consensus, has better chance of implementation. The team problem solving is not harmony; it is the constructive integration of diverse perspectives. Team play is about exploiting the diverse talents for organization benefit.