A Lifelong Student of Civil Service Reform
As Emerging Public Leaders finalizes the Public Service Fellowship of Kenya, one of the key partners has been Dr. Sylvester Odhiambo Obong’o of the Kenya Public Service Commission (PSC). In his position as director of Service Delivery Transformation at the PSC, Dr. Obong’o is working to foster leaders within Kenya’s civil service who are prepared to fill the shoes of civil servants who began their careers after Kenya’s independence and who are retiring. His focus has long been on managing government service delivery for economic development results.
Dr. Obong’o has been a lifelong student of civil service reform, starting his career in Kenya’s Ministry of Finance, working for reform and efficiency across the administrative branch, developing leaders at the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat, learning from the private sector at PricewaterhouseCoopers and collaborating with government employees in more than a dozen other nations including Burundi and the Seychelles.
Because the Kenya civil service internship program already successfully recruits hundreds of entry-level, first-year employees, the Public Service Fellowship of Kenya, facilitated by the PSC, Emerging Public Leaders and Emerging Leaders Foundation — Africa, will focus on civil servants who have been on the job for less than a year. Fellows will receive professional development, mentorship and entry into a pan-African network of other civil service professionals that is supported by Emerging Public Leaders. From Dr. Obong’o’s perspective, this investment will create a strong pipeline of young energetic civil servants and an established process for growing leaders in-house.
The joint work so far to establish the fellowship has focused on building a strong curriculum of skills-building, knowledge creation, advice and counsel. Throughout his award-winning career as a reformer, Dr. Obong’o has realized that management practices are unique to each cadre of civil servants, and perhaps even to each ministry or office. “You can’t transplant practices,” he said in a conversation with Emerging Public Leaders. “You can only transplant good principles.”
Among these principles are service-orientation and self-motivation.
“It is more difficult to work in the public sector than in the private sector,” reflected Dr. Obong’o. “That is one thing for sure, public service is not for the laggard. You have to excel in the public service, you have to be the very best.”
He cautioned future public service fellows that developing this kind of excellence takes time. “This generation are restless, they don’t have the patience to see their career grow,” he said. “Public service is slow to bring fulfillment and they want to move faster.”
Explaining the pace of career growth and showing fellows ways to advance will be key to the orientation work of the first class of Kenya’s Public Service Fellows, expected to be selected early next year. Dr. Obong’o feels that the fellowship is an opportunity to change the culture. “My current challenge is to develop the young people into a culture where hard work pays and ensure that we know that progress is based on merit,” he said.
Dr. Obong’o was recently recognized for his hard work after he led an organizational change project with the Postal Corporation of Kenya. The postal service was deeply in debt, about 1.2 billion KES. Using a rapid results framework to encourage behavioral change and implement significant digitization, Dr. Obong’o managed to reduce this deficit to just 43 million KES in six months. The Postal Corporation of Kenya is expected to invite him back for additional rounds, confident his approach can reduce the corporation’s debt even more.
Part of Dr. Obong’o’s view is that leaders exist everywhere, and we have only to identify and activate them. Given his incredible results at the Postal Corporation of Kenya, we know that he is skilled at finding leaders and creating the conditions where they can make change. We are excited to continue our collaboration with Dr. Obong’o and the Public Service Commission of Kenya as we build the infrastructure for the fellowship and invest in young leadership in the civil service.
