September 11, 2024

CS-LDL: “The Civil Service Leaders Develop Leaders” is an agile, customisable capability building programme developed for the civil service eco-system, specifically designed to inspire and to support individual civil service officers accelerate their mindset-shift, and functional and leadership capabilities; in a way that works within their complex and unique eco-system. 

This initiative started with an abundance of compassion we feel for the civil services in the developing countries. The civil services shoulder a taxingly challenging responsibility to bring in prosperity for the country and well-being for the people.  Yet the civil services are usually the most under-rewarded industry in the world.  This makes building a civil service of high capability and growth culture, a hugely challenging business.

The CS-LDL model was developed, owing to my 25 years of experience developing agile psychology solutions for industries, consumers, and businesses, to highlight an “agile leaders develop leaders’ model” which is designed to accelerate the capability transformation of the civil services.

CS-LDL integrates agile personal development approaches (such as facilitation, coaching, mentoring) into the mainstream employee growth mechanisms, systematically linked to performance and long-term impact aspirations.

CS-LDL blends and balances agility, sensitivity, and objectivity, making capability building “scaling-up” doable in a large organisation such as the civil service. It uses public marketing strategies to influence and inspire the civil service officers to participate in the programme; making growth culture widely adopted in the agencies.

It has been tested in a civil service setting in Malaysia where the first phase implementation shows accelerated capability building in the participating civil service officers – mindset shift, functional knowledge and skills, and personal effectiveness.

The programme is effective for all ranks of civil service officers, from entry level officers to the highest ranks, with adaptation and customisation done to different job ranks and departments.

This first phase implementation showed accelerated capability building, mindset shift, improvement in functional knowledge and skills, and personal effectiveness; in the participating civil service officers.

We look forward to support many more civil services to benefit from our “The Civil Service Leaders Develop Leaders” model.

CS-LDL: “The Civil Service Leaders Develop Leaders” is a finalist for the Association of Business Psychology Award 2024.

Article written by Mai S Ishak, Industrial Psychologist, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS).