Monday, January 20, 2014

DoPT document recommends books on integrity, competence, emotional abilities to govt officers

“High Performance with High Integrity” is a book authored by Ben W Heineman Jr and published by Harvard Business School Publishing. A recent Government of India document has recommended this and many other books to enhance competency of Indian bureaucrats. After each chapter of the document called…"Competency-based Human Resource Management for the Indian Civil Service, Implementation Tool-kit”, a number of reference books are being recommended for officers and other government employees. After a sub-head called “Do you want to know more”, books are being recommended. The document is an outcome of a joint effort of government’s personnel department, DoPT and United Nations organization, UNDP.
The recommended books include “Integrity Works: Strategies for Becoming a Trusted, Respected and Admired Leader” (2005) by Dana Telford and Adrian Gostick, A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success (1999) by Robert C. Solomon, “Competency Management in the Public Sector” (2005) by Horton, Hondeghem and Farnham,  “Relating emotional abilities to social functioning: A comparison of self-report and performance measures of emotional intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology” (2006) by Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, Salovey and “Ten classic assessment center errors: Challenges to selection validity. Public Personnel Management” (2003) by Caldwell, Thornton and Gruys, to name a few.
The document goes into the details of the definition of competency and how it can be explained in the context of an iceberg model. Knowledge and skills are visible parts above the waterline if competency is treated as an iceberg. But, like an iceberg where most of the ice lies below the waterline, the factors below the waterline are significant drivers of higher performance. For example, the social role relates to how we project ourselves in our roles, the document explains. Some doctors, for example, may project the image of expert by focusing on how much they know about some specialty or how much skill they have at some specific function. Others may project the image of a helper by focusing on what they can do for others. “How we choose to project ourselves to others influences where we put emphasis while performing our roles,” it adds.
Like social role, the other components of competency including traits, motives, self-image etc. lie below the waterline of the iceberg model.
Read 
ENTIRE DOCUMENT

1 comment:

  1. Excellent initiative. A strategic ace in the long term for qualitative improvement.

    ReplyDelete