The Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, Dr Samuel Ogbuku, has charged newly-promoted Directors of the Commission to make a difference in discharging their duties and taking the Commission to greater heights.
Ogbuku, who gave the charge at the closing session of a two-week course on Leadership and Performance Management for directing staff of the NDDC in Abuja, said that providing quality services to the people of the Niger Delta was a collective responsibility and should be given priority.
According to a press statement signed by Pius Ughakpoteni, Director, Corporate Affairs it the commission, the Managing Director stated that the reason for sending the new Directors for training was to ensure they took the administrative knowledge acquired back to the Commission in order to make a difference for the overall benefit of the region.
He said: “We are supposed to be training and retraining our staff. This is just the beginning. I want the directors to take back the knowledge they have gained to others in the NDDC to appreciate their roles better and understand the expectations.
“We want to do things differently. We want to improve our services. We want to take up challenges. We want to start with the staff first to ensure that they are properly trained and understand their roles.”
Ogbuku urged the directors to ensure they utilised the experiences gathered from the training to improve the administrative processes in NDDC to ensure that things were done differently.
He added: “As new directors, you must understand your roles and boundaries. You also need to understand your strengths and understand when to use them and when not to.
“You need to understand that you are public servants, not civil servants. So, these are some of the things we thought you ought to be equipped with.”
“Over the years, we have seen a situation where the staff of the NDDC seem to act as politicians, but as directors who have been inducted into the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON), I believe that you are not only going to be ambassadors of NDDC, you are also going to be worthy ambassadors of ASCON,” he said.
The NDDC boss stressed that his expectation was to work with directors who understood that they were career civil servants and aspiring to get to their peak as professionals, not those who want to be nepotic or tribalistic.
He noted that directors should be wary of their actions, adding that some of them could mislead their subordinates who look up to them as role models.
In her address, the Director General of ASCON, Mrs. Cecilia Gayya noted that training was essentially an activity designed to make an employee more efficient and productive in performing their functions.
She said that the focus of training was to ensure efficient and effective application of knowledge, skills and attitude for improved performance, noting: “The programme was carefully designed and implemented to provide the needed knowledge, skills and capacity to adequately and promptly discharge their responsibilities and thus, make meaningful contributions towards the attainment of the mission and vision of the NDDC.
“The conscientiousness with which you participated in this programme for the past two weeks is a testimony to your preparedness for the challenges ahead and thus gives us hope that this training will impact positively on your performance, especially as you rise higher in the strategic realm of the management of the Commission.
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