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UN Performance Problems UN Management Accountability Struggles Where is the Rule of Law? Inadequate UN Oversight Recent Developments
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The successful
Secretariat initiative to "free the managers", which has already been
discussed, was neither the first word on the subject nor the last. Even in the days of UN "red tape",
UN managers could always pretty much do what they wanted -- the red tape
processes just slowed them down, sometimes. But Secretary-General Annan has
and is continuing to find increase managerial freedom in a whole range of
areas. In the process, IO
Watch finds far less emphasis on accountability actions to ensure that UN
managers fulfill their management and programme responsibilities, and are
firmly sanctioned when they fail.
For
five decades the feeble UN personnel office (since 1986 grandly renamed
the Office of Human Resources Management); the total absence of
performance management systems; and the disorderly structure of UN funds,
offices, and programmes inevitably led ambitious UN senior officials to
build their own little kingdoms. Development
expert Hernando de Soto has observed that "The rich of the West were
winners in a competitive system, the rich of the developing world won a
competition for political favors."
In the highly politicized UN with its built-in impunity -- see the
last subsection on Piercing the cloak of UN impunity
under Where is the Rule of Law? -- this competition for political
favors and advantages has always been ubiquitous and rather
obsessive.
The quote from Mr. de Soto was
contained in "A survey of the new rich", The Economist, June 16,
2001, p. 4.
The
UN "baronial system" was first analysed in detail by Theodor Meron in
1975, and it has been referred to frequently ever since. Although the UN Charter emphasizes
an independent international civil service and merit principles, the
combination of insistent Member States and a weak personnel office quickly
led to recruitment by nationality, "national preserves", government
selection of "their" candidates,
and a reduction of staffing safeguards. Especially as the UN added many
new units, the powers of senior officials over personnel and jurisdictions
increased, while those of the Secretary-General declined. These powers
also spread from Under- and Assistant-Secretary-Generals down into the
senior director (D-2) level (considered to be the most influential
managers of daily operations), and then came to include D-1 directors as
well. Theodor Meron, The United
Nations Secretariat: The rules and the practice, Lexington, D.C.
Heath, Lexington, Mass., USA, and Toronto, 1977, pp.
83-101.
A
veteran of the UN system provided an elegant, sharp, and succinct summary
of this very damaging managerial climate (for the World Health
Organization, but fully applicable to the UN) in a British newspaper
article in 1993: "
all United Nations
agencies specializ[e] in the production of pious verbiage, which
skillfully combines highmindedness with the self-interest of its staff
for the fact is that
agencies
are inherently
corrupt and corrupting, regardless of who directs
them.
This is not to say
that [they do] no good work at all,
or that [they do]
not have sincere and competent staff in
lower echelons. But at
higher levels
politicking and jockeying for position overwhelm any lingering concern for
[the agency's mission]. [The agency] hires not by competence but by allocation of jobs
among member nations. This
not only amounts to positive discrimination in favour of the incompetent
but ensures that political skills matter more than technical
capacity." Anthony Daniels, the Sunday
Telegraph (UK), 25 April 1993.
[ Note: the last sentence of
this 1993 assessment was largely repeated by the "Brahimi report" of 2001
on UN peacekeeping, and other recent sources, so little seems to have
changed.]
UN
leaders often refer piously to UN staff as the "most precious asset" for
fulfilling the Organization's "noble aims". But in practice the barons -- usually very presentable and
well-spoken (in several languages) men (rarely women) -- can build and aggressively defend
their own little empires as they wish, and in practice may or may not
advance the UN's actual interests and performance. However,
the worst among them are far more selfish, disruptive, and unchecked. They
bring no management expertise, record of achievement, ideas and
enthusiasm, or human resources skills to their leadership posts. Instead, they hide behind the
achievements of their many excellent subordinates, and punish or ignore the vast
majority of lower-level staff (particularly those in finance, personnel,
and general administration) who just "keep their heads down" and do their
best. These
disruptive barons do allow good subordinate UN managers to perform (so
long as it does not infringe on their own interests). But they also ensure that
"troublemakers" who object to their dysfunctional operations are
disciplined or disposed of
(the barons themselves are exempt). Meanwhile, the barons and their
time-server cronies continue on, whether aggressively advancing their own
personal agendas or merely and serenely enjoying their VIP comfort,
(relative) prestige, and perquisites as leading officials of "world
government". As
urgent UN field operations, and jobs and funds, have expanded so
tremendously over the past two decades, the disruptive barons and their
cronies have strengthened
their presence in far-flung UN offices and operations worldwide. Hence, and in clear conflict with
the recent choice and performance of some very good UN managers, the
abusive baronial behavior with impunity has moved down the hierarchy to
lower levels and thus is now available to hundreds of senior
officials. Two decades ago, a
staff member added a very important insight on the basic flaws of the UN
internal justice system, which are still in effect, and have regularly
been a favorite tactic of the Administration to evade accountability and
serious treatment of appeals by staff against the prevailing managerial
impunity. "A complaining staff member is
immediately classified as a 'personnel case', presumably because he or she
has had the temerity to intervene.
If the complaint has to do with management direction, all
hands in OPS [Personnel]
and its affiliates close ranks to gather material to fashion
as strong a personnel case as possible, and no recognition whatsoever is
made of the key management issue.
.OPS has scant choice but to
bypass the administrative implications of the case and propel it rapidly
to the quasi-legal restraints of the Joint Appeals Board where it can be
confined. The
upshot is that a staff member must sue to force a management director to
do his administrative duty. The guilty persons can get away
with this kind of irresponsible performance more readily in the
bureaucratic system of the UN than in any foreign office, however
small. There is no really
effective vertical responsibility upwards within the UN table of
organization, nor effective direction downward
" Donald
Dunham, "Management by personnel action", Secretariat News (New
York), November 30, 1984, p. 11.
[emphasis added]
UN staff (and
expert outsiders and even some parts of the media) have long specifically
objected to this abusive and dysfunctional management system. In the 1980s
staff representatives urged top UN officials to reform the defective
UN managerial culture, to no
avail. A decade later, in 1992, an outside survey concluded that people
chosen as UN managers were "the most unprepared" that the experts had ever
seen.
Shirley Hazzard, "Breaking Faith: II", The New
Yorker, October 2, 1989, pp. 85-86, and Joint Inspection Unit, "Management in the United
Nations: Work in progress",
UN document A/50/507 of 16 August 1996, Chapter III, "Who
are the managers?", paras. 103-124.
UN
staff queried in a worldwide survey in 1995 identified bad managers and
systems as the Achilles heel of UN operations. The Secretariat itself was
forced to admit the grave management culture deficiencies during the
1993-1995 period, as already discussed in the preceding subsection on
1993 Management Accountability
Attempt .
Continuing staff efforts to encourage the Secretariat to actually
implement the General Assembly's 1993 management accountability reforms,
as in the past, have fallen on deaf ears. "Picture of UN staff: A worldwide
survey", organized by UN staff for UN staff, Geneva, 25 September
1995, pp. 3, 5, 10, 13-14.
Most
pointedly, the fundamental problem was highlighted in a 1995 article: "In considering [a
major UN staff-management dispute]
a critical question has been avoided:
what is the rationale for increasing the vulnerability of staff to unfair
and/or arbitrary judgements by administrators ? The pat
answer to that
-- it will allow
"managers to manage" -- is unconvincing because the most serious problem
affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of the UN Secretariat has been
bad management.
The Secretariat reforms
proposed by the Secretary-General would
remove a range of checks and balances
built into the international civil service for the very obvious reason
that in in a multicultural, multinational context, justice must not only
be done but be seen to be done. While the
integrity of the [staff performance] rebuttal process might seem an arcane
matter to outsiders, it is the only recourse for a staff member victimized
by a bad manager. To weaken it would be to reduce the
integrity of the entire structure
The United Nations will clearly [face] wrenching changes in the period ahead, and it would be both unfair and counterproductive to do away now with the only means staff have to hold managers accountable." "Staff-management
spat with possible serious impact reflects a joyless 50th anniversary," International Documents Review, 16 October 1995, p. 2. [emphasis added]
In 2001, when Secretary-General Annan was re-elected
for a second term, one editorial emphasized that he "must continu[e] to
curb patronage and wasteful spending elsewhere in the UN bureaucracy." A
former senior official praising Mr. Annan nevertheless warned that "Decisive
action should not continue to be postponed in regaining the motivation and
professional quality of the United Nations in its earlier years." And another
admirer
stated bluntly that "The personnel system is still a disaster,
which he must now tackle resolutely." "Kofi Annan's
record", The New York Times, 27 March 2001, Enrique ter
Horst,
"A Re-elected Secretary-General can give the world the facts", International Herald Tribune, 6 July 2001, and William
Shawcross,
"Another five years at the UN helm for Annan, of course", International Herald Tribune, 27 June 2001. Thus the baronial "international civil servants"
continue to find their unexamined life very comfortable, thank you. With
ritual but regular backing from their diplomatic missions and colleagues,
they continue to delay and block the General Assembly's attempted
management accountability systems and mechanisms that would take away
their impunity. Before going on to discuss a set of recent
Secretariat changes which have encouraged and facilitated still further
management impunity, however, at least some attention must be given to an
assessment of the UN's bad managers as a group. In its 1995 report on UN management reform progress,
the JIU analyzed three categories of the UN's vaguely-defined "programme
managers," responsible for the UN's 24 programmes, 246 subprogrammes, and
many
additional, varied UN field programmes and extra-budgetary
activities. A
first group of good managers were those who entered the UN with good
experience and training, or are just "natural managers." A second
group, the largest, was unprepared managers. A 1993
independent analysis of the UN managerial situation cited the very high
frequency with which untrained people were placed in managerial positions
in the secretariat. A number of those interviewed were
"entirely unfamiliar" with modern management experience. The study
found widespread support for changing this situation. But it
observed that UN management training must be accompanied by changes in
incentives, systems and procedures [such as the management accountability
system] to be effective. Chapter VI, "Who
are the managers?", in Joint Inspection Unit, "Management in the United
Nations: Work in progress", UN document A/50/507, 1995, paras. 103-109.
In addition to the
dynamic, accountable UN modern managers and the unprepared ones was a
third group -- bad managers. The 1993 UN consultant study which
surveyed the UN management culture had noted the serious problems in the
Secretariat (confirmed by other analyses), arising from: "(a) a United Nations 'board of directors with 185
members and sensitive, competing and even conflicting views
(b) an organizational culture that increasingly values control over
facilitation, "process" over outcomes, hierarchy over collaboration, and
personal power over collective purpose, all in a highly sensitive
multicultural context;
(c) complex and cumbersome managerial systems [that]
nevertheless
permit abuses of authority;
(d)
the perception that management and administration are of lesser
worth than "substantive" work;
(e) the very broad span of control
[at top levels] and the often
poor communication
throughout the Organization;
(f) a general confusion about the [UN's] goals and objectives;
(g) a lack of the clearly understood standards and measurements
required to establish accountability for
performance;
(h)
valuing staff rights over the needs of the Organization, leading to
[cumbersome] rules and processes that subvert managers' ability to
lead;
(i) bending hiring and promotion rules to allow personal and
political objectives to supercede those of the [UN];
(j) [complex and cumbersome] financial and budgetary procedures
that
[often lead to] untimely and almost-useless work; and
(k) controlling offices [concentrating on preventing failure rather
than] encouraging success or improving systems
" Joint Inspection
Unit, "Management in the United Nations: Work in progress", UN document
A/50/507, 1995, para. 113.
The JIU report of 1995 concluded that these factors
illustrated the climate of disorder and indiscipline that led to too
many bad UN managers. Far from leading effectively, such
managers had exploited the poor managerial climate. They
operated in a dictatorial and sovereign style, insisting on their right to
delegate all assignments with no personal involvement; interpreted the
rules as they saw fit; often treated staff distantly, capriciously and
abusively; and relied on backstage maneuvering to circumvent the
cumbersome controls. All this activity was undertaken with
little interest in results or the fulfillment of UN objectives. The JIU concluded
that perhaps the situation was now beginning to change, but also cited two
telling examples that suggested not: "
the Inspector
does know of a comparatively relatively recent situation in which a
professional staff member complained to a senior administrative assistant
about their new Director's almost total lack of involvement in 'his'
unit's work, and she responded, with earnest disbelief, 'But Directors are
not supposed to do any work. ' The current [top UN
manager] recently observed that he could not forget the 'tremendous burst
of applause' at a 1995 meeting he had with staff in Geneva when a staff
member denounced the low quality of management. He cited this
incident as a 'defining moment' in his relationship with the [UN], and
recognized the right of staff to good leadership and his obligation to
give it to them." Joint Inspection
Unit, "Management in the United Nations: Work in progress", UN document
A/50/507, 1995, paras. 114-117.
As many assessments have noted over the years, smooth
human relations and teamwork are difficult enough in the UN, where both
managers and staff come from very many, and often very different, cultures
and behaviour patterns, and must learn how to work together. In addition,
as UN staff become scattered in smaller and smaller units in difficult and
distant field locations around the world, an abusive manager has even
fewer checks and balances on the way he treats his staff. The "bad manager" problem is an even greater problem,
as many of these people arrive (and eventually leave) the UN Secretariat
with little or no management skills. In particular, many of them have an
extremely autocratic set of habits from their diplomatic or national
administrative service, which are very "off-putting" and demoralizing to
UN staff, especially the younger ones who have grown up with ideas and
aspirations of dynamism, creativity, "empowerment," and participative,
teamwork relationships. The management literature increasingly recognizes
"toxic managers", who can be found in three types: -- "enforcers" who are usually subservient "number
twos" but insist aggressively on hierarchy and certainty in service of
their leaders; --"street fighters," who dominate through rewards and
punishments for loyalty to their "gang" and seek to win at any cost;
and -- "bullies," who are angry at the world and jealous
of those who outperform them, and who control by denigrating others and
with angry outbursts. The consequences of these behaviour
patterns can be grave: "Toxic
leaders
can drive an organization into decline, and more and more time is spent
infighting and dealing with aberrations
rather than
work. Organizations
spiral downward through several stages
Employees silently notice the
detrimental changes
Left unabated, [their]
feelings harden
Factions
begin to develop within the organization around those who support the
toxic leaders and those who oppose them.
The factions
engage in covert game playing, but eventually ties emerge into open
warfare. Attacks become overt
as toxic leaders become vindictive
as
deterioration continues, parties develop a siege mentality
All employees
are battle worn and scarred
Those that can leave. Those with no
options to exit reduce their commitment to work
productivity, already
suffering from the infighting and mismanagement, plummet[s]. How do you
cope?
Strategies individuals use
[and]
Restorative strategies
[vary
for the organization.] As with physical health, the more
advanced the organizational decline, the more extreme the strategy
required to combat it successfully. The good news is that with effort, both
employee and organizational health and morale can be restored." Marcia Lynn Whicker, "Minimizing the damage of a toxic leader: Toxic leaders can make a work place worse," PA Times J(USA), January 1997, p. 10-11, from the author's book Toxic leaders: When organizations go bad, Quorum, Westport CN (USA), 1996.
A
very recent reflection on all the sordid things going on among "leaders"
in the economic and political realms reflects on the pathologies
involved: "Whenever gang
members mow each other down during shootouts, we [hear]
endless
speculation about the root causes of their behavior
Watching disgraced
corporate executives
I [now] find myself asking
"What led these men
to do the despicable things they did? How could they show
such wanton disregard for the well-being of so many? In Without Conscience, renowned criminologist Dr.
Robert Hare identified the key emotional traits of psychopaths, including
: the inability to feel remorse, a grossly inflated view of oneself, a
pronounced indifference to the suffering of others, and a pattern of
deceitful behaviour. In fact, the CEO's
lust for excess
exposed a brutal disregard in the boardroom for the fate
of those in the office cubicles or on the factory floor. The mad stampede of
greed
[required] an unholy alliance
Both political parties have
[through campaign contributions] a richly vested interest in corporate
corruption. The defenders of
the system of excess and fraud
blithely sidestep the inconvenient fact
that the democratic social contract depends upon the vast majority of
citizens trusting that the
game is not rigged like some shady ring-toss
booth on a carnival midway." Arianna Huffington, Pigs at the trough: How corporate greed and political corruption are undermining America, Crown, New York, 2003, pp. 6-10. In fact, after many books and articles praising
organizational leaders worldwide during the go-go 1990s, attention to bad
managers and what to do about them is now becoming a serious new
management topic, as shown by three recent books. -- The first explores the complex issues of why we
accept toxic leaders -- those who harm us and our organizations -- and how
followers can understand the ties that bind and more easily unseat
them.
Jean Lipman-Blumen,
The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses
and corrupt politicians--and how we can survive them, Oxford University, New York,
2004.
-- The second book explores how good leaders go wrong
- mostly because they become reckless, identify so completely with the
organization that they treat it like a personal fiefdom, are obsessed with
image, punish critical feedback, and refuse to face reality when making
decisions. Sydney Finkelstein,
Why smart executives fail: and what you
can learn from their mistakes, Portfolio (Penguin Putnam), New York,
2003. -- The third book finds that management writers have
stressed the attributes of good leaders, while excluding the bad apples,
and presents seven categories of human weakness into which most bad
leaders can be placed: incompetent, rigid, intemperate,
callous, corrupt, insular, and evil. Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It
Matters, Harvard Business School,
Boston, 2004.
But do all these ugly matters of bad managers, their
"toxic" impact, and their greed and evasions have anything to do with the
dignity, virtue, and performance of "the world organization"?
Absolutely. As discussed above, there are indeed
nasty and disruptive managers scattered around the UN Secretariat and
field programmes worldwide. Perhaps there are fewer of them now, but
because the UN only pays lip service to management accountability and does
not enforce it, those who are still on the loose are free to mismanage
their programmes and demoralize and ruin the careers of many UN staff, as
unchecked members of "the old boys club" (even though they may be
relatively young or, now, women.) Many of these abuses have been detailed for the
record in the dossiers and experience of struggling appellants in the UNs
so-called 'administration of justice system." They provide hope for an
eventual cleansing of the mess if and when that "system" is reformed in
the future, as discussed in detail in the section on Where is the Rule of Law? .
In addition, this archive presents a set of the tactics that UN
bad-manager games actually employ against their subordinates, in the
subsequent subsection on Staff Self-defense .
Hopefully, this information can help UN staff who are or may be subject to
the whims of such managers. In fact, the concluding major section of this
archive, on Recent Developments ,
contains a list of a dozen Other Major Problems , not
least the multi-billion dollar scandals in the UN-administered Iraq
oil-for-food programme of 2004, and -- under The UN, Alone and
UNaccountable --an uncomfortable but valid
comparison of the UN as perhaps the international-organization version of
Enron. This material then serves as a prologue to ways out of the sorry
situation, as presented in Answers: A Starting Point
. To begin with, however, SEVEN areas must be cited in which
the UN has only continued to aggressively expand the powers and impunity
of its managers in recent years. The most incredible of these is
the one listed last and discussed in the most detail. It is the
efforts of the Secretariat and the supposedly-independent OIOS to turn UN managers,
already justly criticized because of the abusive and poorly-performing
members of their group, into self-evaluators of their own collective
performance, but, equally damaging, into amateur and abusive investigators of (even)
criminal and other misconduct on the part of their helpless
subordinates. FIRST,
in earlier years the UN staff Panels on Discrimination
and Other Grievances, established in 1977, had carried out important
conciliation functions. A 1985 report stated with pride that
they managed to resolve disputes informally and at an early stage in some
80 percent of the cases. They also -- quite unusually for the UN internal
justice system -- attempted to provide regular, published annual reports
at various duty stations on their activities, patterns of cases, and
solutions achieved. Another Secretary-General's report in
1995 emphasized their importance to move swiftly to provide early
reconciliation and resolution of disputes and thereby preserve staff
morale.
"Establishment of
panels on discrimination and other grievances," UN document ST/AI/308/
Rev. 1 of 25 November 1983, [Reports, for
example] "Report on the work of the Panels on Discrimination and Other
Grievances (Geneva)," UN document ST/IC/88/64 of 7
December 1988, and "Reform of the
internal system of justice in the UN Secretariat: Report of the
Secretary-General", A/C.5/50/2 of 27 September
1995.
But the panels clearly fell apart during the late
1990s.
The Secretary-General's 2000 report bluntly stated that they had
become under-utilized, because of their volunteer members' inexperience,
and because "their findings are often not substantiated by evidence and managers thus resist
cooperating with them." "Human resources
management reform: Report of the Secretary-General", A/55/253, 1 August 2000, Annex V, para. 3.
[emphasis added] [As in other areas, UN
managers, who have no more legal expertise than the panels or other staff,
were thus given an official invitation to simply reject the cases out of
hand, and no one, the Secretary-General included, seemed to object to such
cavalier treatment. Instead, the managers can now even
create their own "findings", with no one to seriously assess their
validity. ] SECOND, as highlighted under OHR (Mis)-management in
the Inadequate UN Oversight
section, "rebuttal panels" had traditionally provided UN staff with a
chance to contest performance ratings that they disagreed with, and to
actually reverse negative decisions. Managers complained that the rebuttal
process tied up much of their time, but in fact a detailed JIU report
analysis in 1994 showed that it was not abused and often worked in favor
of the staff.
Joint
Inspection Unit, "Toward a new system of performance appraisal in the
United Nations Secretariat: Requirements for successful implementation",
UN document
A/49/219, 1994. It appears, however, and the Secretariat provides no
information or examination to disprove the case, that in the "happy-talk"
of a new Performance Appraisal System and after many years of failure with
previous performance ratings systems, staff cannot, or are at least
strongly discouraged from, contesting their performance ratings. This of
course would be another major victory for UN managers but another
devastating loss for UN staff, whose careers would be left at the mercy of
their managers in the essential career element of their personal
performance ratings. This very serious matter is discussed
further in the subsection on Staff performance ratings
. THIRD,
Mr. Paschke, as head of the OIOS, had early on
proclaimed his faith that managers could develop and apply their own
performance and monitoring systems. But this was naοve. Just as in
the pre-OIOS days, the Office belatedly discovered in 1998 that: "The quality of departmental submissions received by
OIOS for the 1996-1997 programme performance period clearly indicates
that, in many departments and offices, there is still inadequate commitment to
oversight, and, consequently no coordination or managerial
mechanism that collects and analyses on a routine basis information on the
progress made and results achieved under the various activities and
programmes.
Many departments still do not have either a senior planning and
coordination function
or a unit to provide coordinated feedback on the success and shortfalls in
programme implementation. [Progress
requires that programme managers recognize]
such systems as basic management tools for improving efficiency and
effectiveness of implementation." "Report of the
Secretary-General on the activities of the OIOS", UN document A/53/428, 23 September 1998, Preface, para. 184 .
[emphasis added.]
This attitude was confirmed by the US General
Accounting Office in 2004, when it reported that: "In 2002, the
[OIOS] found that program
managers and department and office heads were not complying with U.N.
regulations.
nearly half of program managers were not regularly monitoring and
evaluating program performance. In addition, program managers were not
held accountable for meeting program objectives because U.N.
regulations prevent linking program effectiveness and impact with program
managers' performance. U.N. officials told us that a more
mature program monitoring and evaluation system is needed before program
managers can be held responsible for program performance. We found that there
were a variety of problems
Most programs do not have comprehensive
monitoring and evaluation plans
overall, evaluation findings were not
used
The Secretary-General
tasked the
OIOS to develop a strategy to systematically
evaluate and monitor programme results and to introduce information
systems needed
and expects to have a complete system by
2006." U. S. General
Accounting Office, United Nations: Reforms
progressing, but comprehensive assessments needed to measure impact,
GAO 04-339, February 2004, pp.
19-23 [22-23].
[emphasis added.] FOURTH,
the internal administration of justice system has been found to have many
fundamental judicial weaknesses (as discussed in detail in several
subsections under Where is the Rule of Law?
.
Although the need for decisive major changes is now finally being
recognized by the General Assembly and others, it may take years to haggle
over such reforms and then (perhaps) implement them. Regarding managerial impunity, however, one of the Secretary-General's reform reports in 1998
observed casually and with no explanation that: "
the current appeals process requires that the
[OHRM] defend the decisions of managers before the appellate bodies. Changing the
existing process to one where managers are required to defend their
own decisions with the support of the [OHRM] will serve as a strong
mechanism for accountability." "Human resources
management reform: Report of the Secretary-General", A/53/414 of 13 October 1998, para. 30.
Actually, in 1984 a staff member had explained
just how this "managerial protection" system originated,
in a minor decision that has negatively affected the very core of the
internal justice process ever since: "An agonizing reappraisal [of manipulations by the
Personnel office to help managers evade their
responsibilities] might go back to the beginning of the UN
operation before the default of management responsibility began in
earnest.
Whenever staff members complained against a director the latter
would have to appear with them (or send a representative) before the Joint
Appeals Board.
Then along the line an ingenious
administrative officer manoevred the procedure so that all managers [in
all] units would be represented by OPS [Personnel] itself. OPS then
became both prosecutor -- it assumes an adversary position
automatically and no longer seeks an even-handed solution -- as well as judge. It holds the power of veto over JAB
decisions.
The restitution of the original procedure would help but not solve
the problem entirely." Tools of
its trade should be revamped for OPS and it should return to its
legitimate function of dealing solely with personnel problems on a
forthright even-handed basis." Donald Dunham, "Management by personnel action", Secretariat News (New York), November 30, 1984, pp. 11-12. [In addition and
not least, of course, this new procedure also freed meddling managers from
any annoying accountability for, or involvement in, the troubles they had
caused, and from any fear of being sanctioned. They could go
right back to their usual managerial behaviour against new staff targets
undisturbed.] [emphasis added]
In one of his 2000 reform reports, Mr. Annan
acknowledged that the UN was legally obligated "to have just and effective
internal processes to deal with grievances and appeals by staff, and with
disciplinary cases" and this was indispensable to "maintaining staff
morale, as well as enforcing accountability." However, in
another report he acknowledged many flaws in those processes, stating
that: "
the highly
formalized nature [of the system in place] leads to protracted and lengthy
proceedings that are in the interest of neither justice nor of the staff
or management.
At present, the decision makers whose administrative decisions are
being questioned are very rarely directly involved in defending the
cases.
This has resulted in the perception that the system "shields managers from being
held accountable for their decisions." "Accountability and
responsibility: Report of the Secretary-General, UN document A/55/270 of
3 August 2000, para. 39, "Human resources
management reform: Report of the Secretary-General," UN document A/55/253
of 1 August 2000, para. 51, and
Annex
V.
[Note: the report
did not bother to attempt to rebut this perception.]
The Secretary-General also stated that henceforth
managers would be "required to present the factual basis of their
decisions with the support of the Administrative Law Office of [OHRM] on
points of law."
This reform would indeed be helpful, although the
above language still indicates that important and expert legal help will
be extended to managers but not to staff. Meanwhile, it seems that UN managers in
general carry on blissfully and largely uninvolved, unnamed, and invisible
as they hide somewhere behind "the Secretary-General" and the behemoth
known as "the Administration." "Human resources
management reform: Report of the Secretary-General", A/55/253 of 1 August 2000, Annex V, para. 9.
The most important element of managerial impunity, of
course, is that even if a staff appellant is ultimately awarded damages
(even sometimes in six figure amounts) by the UNAT, the manager who caused
this decision is never sanctioned or made to repay the monetary loss to
the organization. As discussed in the subsequent
subsections on the UN administration of justice system, some faint
attention is now finally being given to -- perhaps someday -- making
managers pay in such cases, and thus to truly be held accountable. FIFTH,
as discussed in the subsection on OHR (Mis-)management , the
preceding "free the managers" campaign left the General Assembly with only
the OHRM to rely on to ensure that UN staff rules and regulations, and
relevant Assembly resolutions, are enforced. In a bizarre testimonial to
general mistrust of the OHRM's ability to enforce the rules, in 1997 the
Assembly had had to state that it "Deplores the high
number of exceptions to the established procedures for the recruitment,
placement, and promotion of staff, in particular in the Office of Human Resources
Management." "Human resources management", General Assembly resolution 51/226 of 25 April 1997, Part I, paras. 2-4, Part II, para. 4. [emphasis added.]
Recently, OHRM's mandated "enforcer" role seems to be
being crimped even more as Secretary-General Annan continues to expand
managers' roles. In 2002, pressured by the General Assembly, Mr. Annan
presented his plan for "a comprehensive and integrated
monitoring capacity" in OHRM. However, the plan was very tentative
and still "under construction,"
as part of the "phased approach" to the combined new reforms, and included
a statement that OHRM's role and responsibilities "need
to be reviewed
and redefined" (see the quote of 9 September 2002
following.) The General Assembly dutifully endorsed this "more
robust" capacity, and urged its further development. Yet OHRM
still seems mostly interested, like OIOS, in "consultation" activities
with the Secretariat managers that it is expected to oversee. The report
did state, although rather weakly, that the "enforcer" OHRM will eventually use
the new processes to make "recommendations" to managers to help ensure
compliance and to identify remedial action where "lapses have
occurred." "Monitoring
capacity in the [OHRM}: Report of the Secretary-General," UN document
A/57/276 of 17 September 2002, pp. 8-11.
SIXTH,
and as the above indicates, Secretary-General Annan launched another wave
of reforms in 2002, to expand managers' freedoms even further. The new
measures seek to enable the UN: "to attract,
develop, and retain staff of the highest quality [but also to] continue to
improve accountability and responsibility in
human resource management,
as well as monitoring mechanisms." "Human resources
management reform: Report of the Secretary-General," UN document A/57/293
of 8 August 2002, paras. 2-12. In his accompanying "agenda for further change," Mr.
Annan stated that: "Improving the
quality of management was a priority of my first term. I have put
great emphasis on establishing clear lines of responsibility and ensuring
that managers are held accountable
I am confident that [our] new system of recruitment,
by giving managers primary responsibility for staff selection, will lead
to a new level of accountability and empowerment.
I intend to
adopt additional measures to cut unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. At present,
the Organization recruits highly qualified individuals, for management
functions -- yet its procedures do not allow them to manage a budget,
procure what they need for everyday activities or authorize travel for
their staff.
As decision-making
authority is devolved to programme managers, the roles and responsibilities of the central service
provider, the Department of Management [which contains OHRM]
will need
to be reviewed. Action 32.
In order to continue efforts to improve management: (a) a thorough
review will be conducted of delegated authority in order to increase the
capacity and flexibility of managers to manage
(b) The roles and
responsibilities of [DAM}
will be redefined in order to support the
increased delegation of authority; (c) Training of
managers will be strengthened across the Organization
" "Strengthening of the United Nations: An agenda for further change: Report of the Secretary-General," UN document A/57/387 of 9 September 2002, paras. 188-190. [emphasis added.] As discussed in the subsection on OHR (Mis-)Management , the
General Assembly in 2003 once again placed a strong emphasis on
highlighting results and accountability in the follow-up process for Mr.
Annan's new initiatives. It began by requesting that he ensure
than UN staff members "adhere fully" to the approved UN code of conduct,
concerning the integrity and independence of the international civil
service, and then requested the Secretary-General to: "4.
report to
the General Assembly [in 2004] in a comprehensive manner on the
achievements of the human resources management reform, when sufficient
information will be available on the experiences of the Secretariat with
implementation
; 5.
conduct a
study [by the OIOS] on the impact of
[the reforms], in particular on the
improvement of recruitment, placement, promotion and training, including
an assessment of the role of the central review bodies and mobility
; 6.
ensure that all future
reports on the implementation of [these]
reforms focus on the results of
such measures; 10.
ensure the accountability of
programme managers in the staff selection process, in close
collaboration with the [OHRM], and to report thereon [in 2004
];" "Human resources
management," General Assembly resolution 57/305 of 1 May 2003, Sections I and II.
[emphasis added.]
The Assembly, Secretariat staff representatives, an
OIOS report, and a US General Accounting Office report of 2004, have all
expressed concerns about the new managerial freedoms to make staffing
decisions.
They are also concerned about a grand, new, global staff mobility
scheme which is very complex and presents obvious possibilities for
managerial abuses, also as discussed under Mobility in the subsection
on OHR (Mis-)Management . IO Watch finds that Mr. Annan's human resource
initiatives have thus moved rapidly forward, without a careful assessment
of results and indeed without having firmly established and ensured the
results of his earlier 1997 reforms (or the now-forgotten 1993 management
accountability reforms). |
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