Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin says Ukraine's diplomatic service will have to adapt its work style to the modern-world challenges, and embrace new style of work based on team work, agility and better communication both inside the team, and to the outside world.
In a video address issued publicly to the ministry staff, Klimkin said the diplomatic service will have to improve on the style of work it has operated under for 50 years.
“We have an aim to create a European diplomatic service,” he said in a five-minute speech released on Youtube.
He said the ministry will have to become result-oriented as opposed to process-oriented. He said all workers of the ministry will have freedom to perform their functions in a creative way that best suits the goal.
“Everyone has to have ideas and the ability to implement them,” Klimkin said.
He said he was setting up a special mechanism for communication with the minister himself and the team in charge of administrative reform.
“Every unit, department and embassy has to feel like a part of the team,” he said. “We cannot take decisions in a day, or two, or three, we cannot continue to exchange diplomatic notes like it was in the 19th century.”
The ministry currently employs 600 people, while 2,000 others are service in embassies and consulates abroad. The common complaint about its work has been unresponsiveness, vast bureaucracy, as well as a lot of dysfunctional staff with little initiative and little powers for decision-making, but plenty capacity to stall.
Klimkin’s predecessor, acting Minister Andriy Deshchytsia, who took the job for three months in March on the wave of EuroMaidan Revolution, took some steps to remove bureaucracy within the ministry and set up better communication. He abolished formal approval of talking points for the ministry spokesman before briefings, and set up a team of core communicators to appear before the media on a regular basis.
Klimkin said he would have a further step forward, and make it a policy for the diplomatic core to use social networks for communicating. He said every diplomat will have to rely heavily on social networks and other types of work with the public, and “not shy away from it.”
“Everyone who feels that they are not able to work under these conditions… must not burden their friends and colleagues,” Klimkin said.
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
