Managing the Ministry to Achieve Results
Strategic Direction Setting Capability
In the past year the Ministry established the Medium Term Strategy Group (MTSG), which currently has five full-time staff and two on part time contracts. The Group Manager is a member of the Strategic Leadership Team and reports to the Chief Executive, which ensures that the Group as a whole maintains a Ministry-wide perspective. The two primary functions of MTSG are to:
- Deepen the Ministry’s understanding of what drives sustainable economic development, and the points of leverage available to government that have real potential to generate improved performance in the economy; and
- Advise the Strategic Leadership Team and the Chief Executive on the development of strategy to improve growth, the articulation of the associated outcomes and strategic initiatives, and on the processes of translating strategy into action across the Ministry.
Although MTSG has been developing its capability over the past year, it has played the pivotal role in developing and articulating the strategy that is expressed in the Statement of Intent 2003-06. It has informed the thinking about economic growth in the Strategic Leadership Team and the wider Ministry. It has also co-ordinated the planning processes that led to development of the outcome framework and the strategic priorities.
Since the publication of the current statement of intent, MTSG has been working with the Strategic Leadership Team and the branches to help increase the focus of the Ministry’s work programmes on the strategic priorities. It is also working with the Organisational Development and Support Branch to guide the development of capability to manage our resources effectively to achieve our outcomes. This work, and the Group’s ongoing programme of research into economic growth in New Zealand, will continue over the coming year.
Develop our Staff Capability
The capability of our staff is critical to the Ministry’s success. The Ministry has invested significantly in reviewing its people management systems over the past year.
To achieve the outcomes identified in the Ministry’s Statement of Intent requires strong leadership within, across and external to the Ministry. We have put considerable effort into ensuring that we have the strong knowledge, people and organisational leadership required to succeed.
We have put in place key platforms to reinforce and develop a leadership-based culture across the Ministry. These include leadership development, clarity of roles, managing performance, and feedback through a culture climate measure.
The Strategic Leadership Team and all policy managers and third-tier managers in the Business Services and Organisational Development and Support branches have attended a leadership development programme. We have worked through a programme to identify what we expect our managers to be accountable for, along with the requisite authorities.
The process of clarifying roles and leadership accountability has also allowed the Ministry to identify structural and system limitations. As a result, policy directors assumed a broader strategic and support function across their branches and across the Ministry. This will help support the senior management team in giving effect to the outcomes identified in the Statement of Intent. Policy managers will move to a stronger line management function, which will help co-ordinate the delivery of outputs and lift the demands and capability of our senior advisors.
Essential to continually improving our performance is the quality of the Ministry’s performance management. The Ministry reviewed and revised its performance management and reward systems during the year, through a highly interactive process with staff. The result is a process that more clearly engages staff in setting out the expectations of the Ministry and their manager in the level of performance expected during the year. The result is a more transparent system for recognising and rewarding performance.
Another major project during the year was to establish a core set of employment conditions for all managers and staff. The process of developing these core conditions was designed to engage staff in how we work towards achieving the outcomes in the Statement of Intent and the Ministry’s vision and values, and the nature of the relationship required to achieve this. The core conditions now form part of the PSA collective and will be progressively integrated into manager and staff contracts.
We continued to focus on ensuring we remain an attractive employer to people with understanding and experience of business. We have specifically resourced a position focused on policy recruitment. We undertook some significant recruitment drives for policy positions in our Industry and Regional Development and Regulatory and Competition Branches. We also continued our successful graduate recruitment programme.
The Ministry also continued to look for efficiency in our structures, and undertook reviews of our Radio Spectrum Management, Consumer Affairs, Insolvency and Trustee Service, Information Technology, and Crown Minerals groups. While we have employed more people in our policy functions over the last twelve months the overall FTE of the Ministry has fallen due to the ongoing restructuring to fulfil our mandate as an effective Ministry of Economic Development.
To help benchmark and assess our performance against our vision and values, we undertook a culture climate survey. The survey highlighted strong buy-in to the Ministry’s vision, particularly in the areas of excellence and achievement. As a result of the survey the Ministry identified innovation as a key area for development. During the year we reinforced this value through our leadership training, staff communications and performance management. The culture climate survey will be repeated in the next financial year to assess our performance against the values and vision.
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