Commitment: Together, We Make Things Happen

I found it very striking to espouse your theme focus for this year.  The word commitment has reminded me of several ideas some married men had told me.  Few months before my civil wedding, I became too curious and inquiring that I asked a lot of questions to these married men of how they look at commitment in marriage.  Consequently, I got a good list of terrifying answers.

One friend told me that the secret of a long marriage is to take time to go to a restaurant twice a week, a little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing.  He goes Tuesdays and his wife goes Fridays.

Another friend also shared his piece to me.  He said that most women hope men will change after marriage but we don’t; and we men hope women won’t change, but they do.

Then I whispered to myself, “I think men who have a pierced ear and pierced tongue are better prepared for marriage for they already have experienced pains.

Opppss… don’t misinterpret me.  I love being married.  It’s so great to find that one special person you love to be with for the rest of your life.  It is also great to find that one very special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

What I am trying to say here is that ‘commitment’ is a concept that has more to do with making any vocation works than just plainly being tied together.  Just like in marriage, in any organization, commitment is important because our future as employees and the future of our organization are tied together.  But where do you go from there?  How do you make things happen?

My mentor told me that the first thing an individual should have is to believe in the possibility that this new way is possible.  One has to see it as if it has already happened and is part of one’s life.  Again, will it be easy to attain?  I should say, probably not.  I have found from my own experience that in anything I have ever wanted, commitment is not just a word.  It is an action and action is always the hardest thing to do, because you need to do something.  You have to move yourself out of a comfort zone to a place that isn’t very comfortable at all.

When I was looking for possible scholarships for my master’s degree, I had to sweat myself with a ton of requirements and a set of heavy-sledding screenings against hundreds of other participants.  It is not just a matter of saying I want it, but it should be ‘ I must do it’.   It is always not as easy as a pie to get thru a lot of obstacles as it is not always easy to develop commitment to be used as a tool to overcome these challenges in life.

When I was studying for two years in Tokyo, I had chances of visiting Hiroshima for three times.  The first one when my host family invited me to visit them again, the second one happened after the march eleven 2011 huge earthquake and radiation threats in Tokyo that I had to fly to Hiroshima to escape from it, and finally the third time when I was qualified to join a study mission of some of the well-known businesses that have made Hiroshima economically strong. We know that Hiroshima’s largest industry is the manufacturing industry with core industries being the production of Mazda cars.  We were fortunate to visit the Mazda Museum and its factory.  Being Hiroshima’s dominant company which accounts for more or less 35% of the prefecture’s GDP, I was motivated to know how they keep their employees well motivated and committed.  And so I asked the representative of this said company.  The answer was simple, according to her, to remain in flow, the company sees to it that they increase the complexity of the activities of their employees by developing new skills to meet new challenges.  That is why, Mazda never stops producing new designs of cars and in fact, we have seen the ‘futuristic’ cars they intend to release sooner soon.

Since I am working in a public sector, this has given me a deep thinking about how this successful private company’s best practices be applied in a government agency such as in a local government unit.  During the 1980s, finding qualified employees in the public sector was difficult because the base pay was very low.  But making them committed once hired proved even more difficult. We knew that public employees were considered just another input into the production of goods and services. What perhaps changed this way of thinking about employees was research referred to us by some scholars such as Perry and Hondeghem.  Their study found employees tend to be the most significant resource such as in the Philippine Bureaucracy where in personnel, according to the former CS secretary Sto. Tomas, is an important resource and thus, the needs and motivation of public employees should become the primary focus of any government institution like a local government unit. Moreover, their studies have been supplemented by several empirical studies making these influencing ideas more and more important.  Yet, despite growing evidence in the existence of public service motivation and its effects on employee performance, I am still convinced that we still have little understanding of what that means for management practices.  Thus, one major component of my research in Japan is to find out the best means on how to bridge the gap between our theoretical understanding of how to ‘manage’ employees so that they will remain committed and motivated.

The Philippine experience over the past decade has shown that local governments throughout the country have to meet the challenges of a decentralized set up. Brillantes (2001) confirms that to a certain extent, many of the local government units (LGUs) in the country have been placed in a situation where they have adopted innovative and creative ways to meet the challenges of good local governance. “This understanding implies that local government has to start from identifying the needs of the community and use its resources and powers to respond and meet those needs” (Legaspi, 2001, p. 5). Given its powers and authority, have local governments in the Philippines been empowered in accordance to the spirit of local autonomy? “In other words, the exercise ofLGU’s enabling role would depend on its capacity to respond to the challenges, demands and interests of the community” (Legaspi, 2001, p. 5). But have local governments creatively used their powers to bring about good governance at the local level? In the words of Legaspi (2001, p.5), “It is in deciding which options to take as well as in seeking alternative ways of responding to and meeting the various demands and needs of the community that a local government is seen as an enabling authority”.

In the face of these long-term trends and their associated consequences, the importance to call for a renaissance of the public service commitments in the Local Government Units prompted me to conduct a study related on making employees productive and committed. It calls for a recommitment of the LGU personnel to values allied or connected with government service, among them a sense of duty to advance the welfare of the public interests. The calls for a revitalization of public service motivation presuppose an efficient and timely delivery of public service. Certainly, using personnel motivation in public service as the most important steering mechanism for bureaucratic behavior should be perceived as highly essential in crafting commitment in achieving superior performance.

4 years ago, I learned from my Professor at the Asian Institute of Management about in getting things done.  I was taking up Project Planning Development and Management Course that time and he mentioned one day that supervisors or managers, heads of agencies- all are engaged in getting things done with, and thru, people.  Each must be skilled at the four basic tasks that make any group or organization run efficiently and effectively: Planning, organizing, controlling and motivating.  Of these, motivating is the most sensitive and vital. Why? As it is interdependent on each of the other functions.  Planning for example is the setting of goals and objectives, and the development of the map that shows how these goals and objectives are to be accomplished.  Organizing is the effective integration of resources-people, capital and equipment – in order to accomplish established goals.  Controlling is evaluating results and adjusting actions that have caused outcomes that deviate from expectations.  Motivating determines the level of performance of people, which, in turn, influences how effectively the group or organizational goals will be met.  In other words, failure to motivate people to be committed to the overall goal of the organization causes dissension/rebellion in the workplace, which is reflected in collective resistance, adversarialism, a deep lingering dissatisfaction/ melancholy and other chronic problems.

This expresses an understanding that leadership behavior is an indispensable needed instrument to keep employees committed and motivated in their work admitting the interpretation that supervisor behavior is capable of emphasizing the specific features of the works to be done during goal setting. This interpretation underscores the value of leadership behavior accounting for distinctive motives and incentives in the workplace. Leaders and agency supervisors must then recognize that their roles are very much significant in creating the conditions under which employees can be productive. The question to pose now is what these leaders do to encourage their employees to be committed to be more productive?  “ In a word, everything!” It is therefore a matter of understanding and believing that leaders have the prime responsibility to create the opportunity for employees to perform better. Without a doubt, leadership behavior of supervisors considerably influences the motivation of the employees. From a more positive perspective, rather than just demanding that employees work harder, leaders and agency managers can provide the technology that enables employees to work ‘smarter’.

Studies on transformational leadership behavior point out that quality performance can be attained by the expansion and inspiration of individual goals (Bass et al., 1987). Thus, we can say then that transformational leadership as an important factor for personnel to become productive has positive relations to perceived performance and employee’s job satisfaction. In the light of path-goal theory (House, 1996), it is the leader’s responsibility to align worker and organizational goals and then ensure that employee’s path to goal attainment is clear and vivid.  This is the anology of marriage that I was telling you earlier on.  As employees, we are tied with our organizational goals. However, employees must also be given reasonable expectations which include not so much of the clarity of goal statements, but the feasibility of the goal at all. Leadership therefore helps illuminate the courses to accomplish individual and organizational business aims and objectives.

Being curious on how a flourishing private company acknowledges the concept of leadership in its international undertaking, Mr. Arthur Arana, CFO & Site Office Manager of Maersk Global Service Centres Philippines clearly admitted that in their company, leaders are taught how to coach to guide and empower their employees. He further added, “The job description given to the employees once hired only contains the operational duties of an employee but it does not specify how to solve problems and thus, coaching and mentoring do the trick.15” This only shows that coaching indeed is an effective approach for managers to use in performance management. It can be used to motivate people, to help them develop themselves and to grow their self-responsibility.  That’s commitment.

According to Arana “Coaching only has one major agendum and that is to improve job performance by increasing employees’ capability to managing their own performance”. Apparently, this gives us a concrete feature of coaching as an important additional ingredient of trust in transformational leadership as this helps employees grow and develop and thereby enhance overall productivity of the agency.

Marikina has also an exceptional experience to tell. During the time of Mayor Bayani Fernando who was also the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Chairman, he set an unconventional political leadership style by not terminating anyone in the LGU when he assumed the office. He was convinced that the existing personnel already had the ideas on how to run the LGU and all they needed to perform well is to give them the appropriate guidance. His program comprehensively covered the LGU concerns from governance, livelihood, trade and industry, public works, urban planning and design, finance, sports, entertainment and leisure (Javier, 2002). Hi s planning officer, Mr. Aguilar mentioned that Mayor Fernando quickly got the support from the employees who believe that his leadership is void of selfish political agenda. Employees had realized that his leadership does not reward political loyalty and does not embrace patronage. This is the greatest influence on employee performance which involves fairness with which employees feel they are being treated as they really matter. Bayani was full of enthusiasm and vigor to reach his goal of making sure that not only the LGU personnel but all residents of Marikina should know where the city is going and of what each individual had to undertake as part of this collective project. “He cajoled the LGU personnel with his idea of governance as being the creation of innovative ideas”.  As an important turnout, each employee has been motivated to be innovative and resourceful to improve the LGU’s performance. Local officials have been motivated also to craft policies and resolutions supporting the development agenda. In addition, the rank and file, especially the casual personnel were deployed to a flexible implementation of projects by ‘administration’ from their offices intended to implement or manage a particular program (Javier, 2002). Undoubtedly, all these changes brought about by the vision of the Local Chief Executive had all led to the attainment of making the LGU and its bureaucracy professionally responsive that gives appropriate and timely services to its constituents. “In fact, we just did not develop discipline in the institution but we gradually built self- esteem among ourselves as employees of the LGU. We develop this feeling that we are like a government institution that is ran in a corporate manner.” Aguilar explained.

This is where and when commitment as a strategy had been used as a tool for each employee to be motivated to think creatively and be consciously aware of organizational performance. No doubt, Marikina had garnered a total of 54 national and international awards because of its exemplary performance in local governance as of 1999.

Rewards are definitely important motivators too in building up commitment among employees, and a total reward system includes both monetary and nonmonetary compensation (Schuler & Jackson, 1996). “Here too the idea is to motivate employees by giving them a stake in the success of the organization” (Halachmi & Krogt, 1998, p. 578) be it monetary or nonmonetary incentives. Therefore, be it monetary or nonmonetary, rewards (money, praise, recognition, plaque) remain to be an article of faith for many supervisors and managers to promote superior performance. But again, this is not a simple matter. Supervisors and managers should be innovative and resourceful not just to identify what kinds of rewards to be given but how the approach or system has to be formulated to clearly channel enthusiasm for public sector employees to perform better.

Rewards, therefore, provide employees with both financial and nonmonetary incentives to work harder. One example of nonmonetary rewards is by providing employees a wholesome work environment. This offers something more than economic incentives. This means that supervisors or managers are able to resourcefully provide a work environment that is rewarding, reducing employee’s anxieties, encouraging more participation in the policy-making and decision-making activities, and highly promoting team- building approaches.

Going back to the management strategy of mazda in providing appropriate trainings to their employees, I come into a vivid conclusion that to achieve and maintain the survival and success of any organization, its managers have not only to acquire appropriate people to resource it. Managers also need to train and develop their employees (Beardwell and Holden, 1994) where education is the major contributor thru which individual and organizational growth can thru time achieve its fullest potential. As education directly and continuously affects the formation of knowledge and abilities, it is also believed to affect character and culture, aspirations and achievements (Harrison, 1992). The importance of training and development is therefore very much obvious given the mounting complexity of the work environment vis-à-vis the rapid change in organizations and advancement in technology. In this sense, employees have to be processed like raw materials to enable them to perform the tasks of their job adequately, to fit into their work-group, and into the organization as a whole (Beardwell and Holden, 1994). Training and development therefore helps to ensure that the workforce possesses the knowledge and skills it needs to effect the will of the clients effectively. For this reason, not only must employees go thru an initial period of learning how to conduct their work, as they did in the past, but they must perform that work under constantly varying conditions requiring continual additional training and re-skilling (Van Wart, 2003). Perhaps James O’Toole, a leading quality of work life theorist, has said it best: “Most workers have an innate desire to grow...Apparently being able to satisfy the desire to grow and to learn on the job enhances worker self-esteem, satisfaction, loyalty, motivation, and occasionally, productivity” (Shaftritz et al., 2001, p. 305). This confirms then that training is part of a significant human resource management process that advances commitment and maintains individuals within an organization.

Indeed, there is a variety of arguments that have been displayed in a voluminous literature featuring the significance of personnel motivation in effecting commitment to attain more improved performance. As a government employee, I am motivated by commitment to a public program because of personal identification with the program which is participation in the formulation of good public policies. My research on public service motivations confirms that one of the major challenges met by most government agencies in achieving sound governance has been the management of organizational change where the involvement of the personnel and getting their full support and commitment got the lion’s share in the reform efforts. Yet, public administration and management scholars and practitioners have to hit the books and discover not just how to get personnel’s compliance but how to win their enthusiastic commitment in the process of the reform. This is very much salient for the organization to successfully complete its intentions in its reform development agenda.

This I believe has the same story to tell in a private organization.  Commitment as I said is action. To achieve it, it requires planning and action in what I call ‘baby steps’. Take each piece, one at a time and complete it. Move on to the next one. Soon you will have mastered many of the tasks you found so hard to do initially. Do not forget to congratulate yourself and your comrades/ colleagues on your movement. Be strong! Don't listen to those who want to impede your progress. Do it for you and for your organization!

So the next time you want to do something different in your life and in your organization, take the plunge! Be bold, make a commitment, take action, keep doing something everyday to move your dream forward into reality. Anyone can do this, anywhere, anytime. Everything is possible with commitment.  Together, we make things happen.