Stakeholder-based Monitoring of Leadership Training in Public Administration, 2013. Yiu, L.& Saner, R. in de Vries, M.S. & Bouckaert, G. (eds.) Training for Leadership. Public Administration Today Series. Bruylant. p.201-220
Abstract
Governments have made on-going investments to maintain and improve their civil servants’ mastery of their policy leadership functions. In addition to the remedial aspects of education and training, more proactive activities have been organised in order to upgrade the competence levels
and enlargement of the skill sets of the civil servants to prepare them for redeployment in the multi-tasking job environments of the 21st century.
Despite constant improvements of the instructional process of train ing and despite the establishment of “Standards of Excellence in the Public
Administration Education and Training” (2008) and the development of accreditation schemes at the institution and programme level, results of these efforts in improving training at the in-service training institutions (ISTIs) show limited outcome in terms of institutional performance improvement
(Yiu & Saner, 2009).
Leadership development needs to be embedded within the larger contextual frame of a government’s overall strategy and social contract. A stakeholder-based approach is necessary to increase the relevance of leader ship development programmes. Ownership and engagement of the primary
stakeholders of such training programmes requires additional management and staff time and resources at the ISTIs.
This chapter introduces a quality assurance dimension, which is not sufficiently addressed by the Standards of Excellence for Public Administration and Education (2008). The authors describe the benefits of applying the ISO 10015 Standard for Training. This standard ensures
efficient organisation of the learning process but also shows that successful training requires stakeholder involvement in the training of proper gover nance processes and a close alignment between leadership competence and the country’s development strategy.