Speeches
Address by Head, Civil Service Leo Yip at the Administrative Service Dinner
26 March 2024
ADDRESS BY HEAD, CIVIL SERVICE LEO YIP AT THE ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE DINNER ON 26 MARCH 2024 AT MARINA BAY SANDS EXPO AND CONVENTION CENTRE
Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean,
Ministers,
Chairman and Members of the Public Service Commission,
Colleagues and Friends,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Celebrations
Tonight, we gather to congratulate 25 officers appointed to the Administrative Service and 62 colleagues who have been promoted.
Let me also add my tribute to my former Permanent Secretary colleagues – Ravi Menon, who retired in January, and Chan Lai Fung and Loh Khum Yean, who retired last October. Having worked closely together for so many years, I am very grateful to the three of them for their counsel, partnership, and camaraderie. Let us extend our thanks to Ravi, Lai Fung and Khum Yean for their many decades of significant contributions and send our very best wishes to them and their families!
Adapting to change
Tonight, I want to speak about a familiar topic, change. Let me set the context by citing this quote from Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister: “The pace of change has never been this fast; yet it will never be this slow again.”
Indeed, many big changes are happening, bringing disruption and challenges, but also new opportunities. We can cite many examples, one for each of the first four letters of the alphabet – Artificial Intelligence, Big Power Contestation, Climate Change, Demographic Transitions, … and the list goes on from there.
Many of these changes are complex, like the transitions we need to make to decarbonise our society, our energy mix, and our economy, all at the same time. But if we can turn these changes into opportunities, we can create a new sustainable and competitive economy for Singaporeans.
Our own society is changing too. The Forward Singapore exercise led by Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong is a response to this, to strengthen our social compact, by broadening opportunities for Singaporeans, as well as providing support and assurance through every phase of life.
Consequently, we in the Public Service must continually reinvent our thinking and the way we work. We will need to perform new areas of work such as in sustainability and develop new capabilities such as in digitalisation and international work. We need to be more in tune with the ground as new challenges emerge, and needs and aspirations evolve. We also need to pay closer attention to execution and policy implementation because issues have become more complex.
Let me talk about how our Administrative Service is changing; how the way we develop leaders is changing; but yet how we must stay anchored on the role we play within the Public Service, and the way we work with the Political Leadership.
How the Administrative Service is changing
In response to these changes, Administrative Officers (AOs) will need to do new work, build new skills, and have more varied experiences and stronger ground exposure.
For instance, we must better engage our partners in the private and people sectors, as well as internationally, because challenges are now more multifaceted, cross-border and interconnected. As AOs, you must build the competencies to do so.
This is why we have deployed more AOs to frontline and operational roles, as well as to jobs that deal with international work.
We have also started to give more of our AOs a stint in the private sector to broaden their perspectives and experience. The number of AOs currently posted to the private sector has doubled since 2019. The stock of AOs with private sector experience has also doubled over that period.
At the same time, more AOs, around a third last year, are making additional contributions in areas beyond their job roles, including volunteering their time and effort in people and non-profit organisations.
Technology is another area of rapid change, and we need new skills to better harness and deploy advanced technologies. This year, we are starting a training programme for all Permanent Secretaries (PSes), which will later be extended to other senior leaders, to strengthen our digital tech competencies in order to make better tech decisions.
Individually, we must all be open to doing new work, developing new competencies, gaining new experiences, and being exposed to new perspectives.
How our Leadership Development is Changing
Beyond the work we do, the Administrative Service is also a leadership service. Officers are absorbed into our service, to be developed to lead. Those who do not grow into leadership over time, will be better off contributing in other schemes of service somewhere else in the Public Service.
As the demands on our Public Service grow, so have the demands on leadership in the service. We have thus in recent years strengthened the way we develop our leaders.
We have developed our own leadership competency framework. This framework is tailored to the needs of our Public Service. It sets out the competencies we expect in strategy, engagement, political sensitivity, and nurturing staff, and also competencies in interagency work and driving Whole-of-Government outcomes. This reflects the emphasis and expectations we have of our leaders.
It is also important that our leaders have regular and comprehensive feedback, not just from those they work for, but also from those they lead and work with. We have therefore deployed 360-degree feedback exercises for all of our leaders, from middle managers right through to the PSes.
Since 2020, we have conducted two rounds of these 360-degree feedback exercises for PSes, Deputy Secretaries, and Chief Executives. I have found the 360 results very instructive. They reveal feedback on our leaders that were not evident before, and they give a fuller all-rounded view of our leaders. We take these 360 findings seriously, and expect all leaders to follow up on them.
We have also conducted two rounds of Public Service wide Employee Engagement Surveys since 2020. Together with the 360-degree findings of an agency’s leadership team, we now have a rich and diverse dataset, updated every two to three years, on leadership effectiveness not just of individual leaders, but also leadership teams. If data is the new gold in this digital age, all of us as leaders will do well to mine this gold.
Leadership effectiveness is critical. It can make or break an organisation. It can lead a team to greater heights of achievement or take it to the depths of despair. Poor leaders in our Public Service hinder our ability to serve the public well.
All of you here would either already be a leader or are being developed to lead. The Service will continue to invest in your leadership development. My call to all of us is to take these leadership development efforts seriously. Have the humility to accept feedback on your individual leadership, even if they make you uncomfortable. Dedicate yourself to developing and applying your leadership competencies. Tap on the mentors in our newly established leadership exchange network for support. As a leader, just as you want to be proud of your team, lead them in such a way that they will be proud of you as their leader. Individually, let us all work hard on our leadership effectiveness.
Thinking and Operating Whole of Government
While we seek to make changes to respond to the shifts around us, one aspect of the Administrative Service that is unchanging is that AOs are regularly rotated to work across different agencies, in different sectors. As a result, we develop a broad perspective and are therefore well positioned to appreciate and apply a One Public Service or Whole-of-Government approach.
If there is another name that we coin for the Administrative Service, I would suggest Whole-of-Government Service, but that makes all of us Whole-of-Government officers, or WOGOs which suggests that this idea won’t go.
But it is with this Whole-of-Government mindset that we must develop the competencies to organise and align other Public Service colleagues to work together. As AOs, we must demonstrate and exemplify both the thinking and action of working as One Public Service.
Working Closely with Political Leadership
Another unchanging aspect of the Administrative Service is that AOs work very closely with our political leaders. We support the political leadership in various ways. I will just cite three.
First, we support our Ministers in taking the long view. This is a strength of our Government — that we deal with today’s challenges but at the same time plan and build the future for Singapore. This is how we have built up our economy, our education system, a strong Singapore Armed Forces and HomeTeam, and so on. This is also how we have built up and stewarded our reserves. This is how we have ensured fiscal sustainability over the years. This focus on the long term is a mindset, but it must be translated into processes and action. In each of our agencies, we must keep a focus on the long term, have planning processes to make sense of what lies ahead, and then envision what is possible, exciting, and worth building, and how to get there. We must then take these ideas and action plans to our Ministers.
Second, we provide honest advice to our Ministers. This is where we must speak truth to power but, I would add, also bring power to truth. By this I mean share the power of your conviction behind the ideas and advice that you present to your Ministers. It must be the conviction in your advice, as much as the persuasiveness of your argument, that helps our decision makers to discern the right choices.
Third, it must also be with conviction that we implement the political decisions that have been made, and the policy choices that have been selected by our Ministers. This is how our system works — when the time for debate is over, the time for action starts. And when a policy is worth implementing, it is worth implementing well. Policy is implementation. But I would add, implementation is conviction. And we can have this conviction because we work so closely with our Ministers and understand the reasons for those policy choices.
Conclusion – Our System of Governance
Let me conclude. I receive regular visits from foreign counterparts who come to understand how we do things. Very often, I am asked to explain how to replicate the successes that Singapore has enjoyed.
I point to the principles that have underpinned our progress — meritocracy, rule of law, racial and religious harmony, clean and good Government, competent Civil Service, focus on the long term, and so on. Many of the things that I have covered this evening.
But I would say to them, there is no one killer app, because all of these have to work together within a system, one that is suited for their context, just as our system is suited for our context. In our own context, this system of governance is what has delivered good governance for Singapore, producing progress, improving lives, and enabling hopes and dreams of our people.
We all work within this system of governance. This starts from our leaders demonstrating the right values and setting the right tone from the top, such as in the fight against corruption. Through our efforts in the Public Service, and in support of the political leadership, we make this system work. But we are also here to work to improve it. We do this by building new capabilities, developing ourselves and our teams, rethinking our policies and our work in a Whole-of-Government fashion, and always keeping a long-term orientation while holding true to our convictions and values, in our ideas and in our implementation.
In time to come, we will make a political leadership transition. It is the responsibility of the Public Service and the responsibility of the Administrative Service to continue to give our fullest support to the political leadership and their priorities for Singapore. This is how our system works. And this is how we must continue to help our system of Government succeed, for the good of Singapore and Singaporeans.