Powell tells Kazakhstan officials of ways to remove unwanted staff

Former British Former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell. Photo courtesy of peoples.ru

Jonathan Powell, Former Chief of Staff of ex-PM of Great Britain Tony Blair, gave a lecture in Kazakhstan President’s State Management Academy. The lecture was called Modern trends in personnel management in state service. Great Britain’s experience, Tengrinews.kz reports. The lecture was attended by heads of structural divisions of the Presidential Administration, State Service Agency, executive secretaries of state authorities, heads of oblast administrations and others. The expert told the audience how hard it was to weed out outstaying officials. “When we came to power in 1997, there was a high-ranking official in the Agriculture Ministry who was fully accountable for the outbreak of mad cow disease in the country. Nothing happened when we asked him to resign. We were told that it was impossible to fire him and the best option was to promote him to take him off this position. So we had to promote him and even that was too difficult. In the end, to avoid him, we had to pay him 1 million pound worth of termination fee. It is very difficult to get rid of such unwanted officials,” Powell said about his work in Tony Blair’s team from May 1997 to June 2007. He noted that in such cases it was necessary to convince people that their position was “not the work for life”. By Renat Tashkinbayev

Jonathan Powell, Former Chief of Staff of ex-PM of Great Britain Tony Blair, gave a lecture in Kazakhstan President’s State Management Academy. The lecture was called Modern trends in personnel management in state service. Great Britain’s experience, Tengrinews.kz reports. The lecture was attended by heads of structural divisions of the Presidential Administration, State Service Agency, executive secretaries of state authorities, heads of oblast administrations and others. The expert told the audience how hard it was to weed out outstaying officials. “When we came to power in 1997, there was a high-ranking official in the Agriculture Ministry who was fully accountable for the outbreak of mad cow disease in the country. Nothing happened when we asked him to resign. We were told that it was impossible to fire him and the best option was to promote him to take him off this position. So we had to promote him and even that was too difficult. In the end, to avoid him, we had to pay him 1 million pound worth of termination fee. It is very difficult to get rid of such unwanted officials,” Powell said about his work in Tony Blair’s team from May 1997 to June 2007. He noted that in such cases it was necessary to convince people that their position was “not the work for life”. By Renat Tashkinbayev

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