 Hello, and welcome to Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. I am Jolene Beset-Joseph. John Quincy Adams, the Sixth President of the United States of America, once said, if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. Now, with that quote in mind, I would like to introduce you to our guest for today, and his name is actually Mr. Clement Wolves-Soulage, and he is the new Director of Information Services at the Government Information Service. Thank you for joining us. Hello, Director. How are you doing? Thank you. Now, Mr. Wolves-Soulage assumed his responsibilities as the Director of Information Services on 31 March 2017 and obtained the mandate of giving strategic direction to GIS and NTN with a view to enhancing public understanding of government programs, policies, and activities. So once again, Mr. Wolves-Soulage, thank you for joining us. It's great to be here. Okay, and can you just start off by telling us a little bit about yourself? For people out there that don't know you as a person, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you actually came along to becoming the Director of Information Services at the Government Information Service. Yes, well, first of all, I welcome the opportunity to be here with you today. As you know, I lived in Germany for 17 years actually, and I lectured business communications, business economics, management, scientific writing at various universities in Germany. I also worked extensively in the private sector doing consultancy work in terms of team building, intercultural competence. I did lots of soft skills, business English courses on behalf of the University of Cambridge. Until now, I've written three books. The first book entitled Management English Intelligence, English for International Management, which of course focuses on the principles of management, the functions of management, finance, market, etc. I also wrote a second book entitled English for International Economics, Market Economy, which explores the intrigues of the global economy. And in this book, I'm looking at the derivatives markets, I'm looking at the financial, complex financial systems, and of course international trade amongst other topics. My third book was launched last year, July, entitled Conscience of Progressive. And in that particular publication, I'm looking at foreign policy. I'm also looking at education matters, health issues, and so on. So the first of books actually were written for sort of the universities where I worked in Germany, and then we used as official textbooks. Okay, wow, that's a lot. Okay, brilliant, okay. Now tell me a little bit about the role of the Director of Information Services here at the GIS, because the people hear a lot about titles, but they don't actually understand what it actually means for people to carry those titles and what the roles are that they have to actually carry out. So tell us a little bit about the role of the director. Right, so the role of the director is to provide basically strategic leadership to the organization, and that is to recommend for implementation, policy directives, policy issues. I'm also responsible for networking, building relationships in the press with agencies, with NGOs as well. I will be working very closely with the government media on messaging and strategy, and this is basically in terms of the collection and dissemination of information. I also serve as an advisor to the government actually in different departments on public relations matters, and of course I'll be working very closely with NEMO in terms of providing public education on various issues relating to disasters and disaster management. Okay, all right, brilliant. Now a lot of people again out there know the government information service as a medium by which they can learn about the government and such like, but what is your vision coming in as the new director for the GIS? Where do you see the GIS actually going in the future? Right, well first of all the role of the GIS is to enhance and promote public understanding of government policies, decisions and activities, and we are in the process of repositioning the brand of the GIS. That is to build a more information society based on three pillars. First, excellent news production, all right, the production of documentaries and of course backstories, and what I call dialogue and interface, the hosting of interviews and panel discussions. Now in effect we here at GIS are pursuing a concept of what we call broader casting as opposed to broadcasting, where we try to move away from the nationalistic approach to reporting and focus in more on of course the region and international issues as well. GIS in the past has not been truly national really. Everything has been orchestrated around castries and gruselay, and now the objective, the broad objective, is to give more coverage to towns and cities, interviewing the leaders and knowing exactly or exposing the society, the country to initiatives, activities going on in the small towns and villages across the island. As a matter of fact very soon we'll have a program called community outreach, where we'll be going out into the various communities, talking to leaders really, and showing the kinds of infrastructural work and development taking place in those communities. Still with reference to this concept of broader casting, will be the staff of the GIS, information officers, information assistants, will immerse themselves in the various ministries, so that they could be close to the stars, do a bit of networking, build closer contact, so that the government does not have to come to the GIS. The GIS will come to the government. So I mentioned Geraldine, the point of repositioning the GIS and building a modern information society. I mean, the information age is upon us really, and it's inexorably so. We have moved away from agricultural-based economies, we've moved away from manufacturing-based economies, now we talk about talent-intensive economies, we talk about service-oriented economies, knowledge-based economies. Primary production, secondary production is no more, we talk about quaternary and quinary, which has a lot to do with the information economy, actually. Capital-intensive industries, liberal-intensive, now have been translated or transformed into information data-centric industries, and most importantly, economists decades ago used to talk about the production factors, land, labor, capital, and entrepreneur. Now, actually, it's land, labor, capital, entrepreneur, and information. So I've always said, actually, the government has five levers with which they could impact the society, influence the economy. One is spending, the other is taxation, regulation, legislation, but the most important is communication. And with this lever, actually, you have the power to build trust in society, you have the power to spread knowledge and information, you actually have the power to create this sustainable change that you wish to have in any society. But most importantly, you can develop policies, social economic policies, based on the feedback that you actually get from your people. Now, I don't want to cut you there because this is very interesting, but it's time for us to just have a quick break, so please stay tuned and join us after this commercial break. Welcome back to Issues and Answers. I am Johnny B. Setjoseph, and once again, I am joined by Mr. Clement Wolf Soulage, who is the Director of Information Services here at the GIS. Again, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. All right, great. Now, we were talking a lot about your vision for the GIS before we went to the break. However, I know that, again, even from a lot of the stuff that you have studied, a lot of the places you have been, you have certain opinions on leadership, executive leadership and such like. Can you tell us a little bit about your philosophy in regards to that? Right. I see actually a leader as a master of post-utology, meaning somebody who harnesses and exploits and the impact of knowledge, of excellence, of results and relationship. But most importantly, I see a leader in terms of qualities being a visionary, having energy, having purpose, being an agent of change, somebody who shows the way forward actually. You find quite often a very effective leader could turn around a very demoralized organization. All right? So basically, leadership is quite different from what we call management in that leadership is a quality. People sometimes confuse us through terms, whereas management is a position. I could just bring in administration into the whole debate as well. And administration being an activity. So there's actual difference. So leaders, and this is based on my deep-seated principles and beliefs. Leaders actually focus on people as opposed to managers who focus on work. So you find leaders having followers as opposed to managers having subordinates, for example. Now, Geraldine, there is a difference between, because you asked about executive leadership. And executive leadership actually would more be in tune with what we call transactional leadership, which is quite different from what we call transformational leadership. Transactional leadership is the manager who allocates the scarce resources, who tries to meet the deadlines, and of course the plans and so on, as opposed to the transformational leader who has impact on the organization, who influences the culture, or transforms, or even perhaps revolutionizes the culture. But executive leadership actually would have a lot to do with transactional leadership, that is getting things done. How often we see meetings for hours, we plan, we strategize, but nothing gets done. It just reminds me of Jack Welch's very famous quotation, just decide on something and execute, execute, execute. Right. So the gist, the essence of management, is in fact execution. Right. Okay. Something I wanted to ask you, although you've kind of partly answered it, within your answer, was that, for instance, very often, and I've heard within society, people complain about staff not being productive and such like, would you say in that case, in your opinion, that has a lot to do with the leadership, that whoever is at the helm and staring the ship as such, would you say that that has an impact on how staff actually does perform? Yes, indeed. Staff performance and effectiveness is a function of good leadership. And of course, the old theorists saw human relations and people welfare as typical metric and guides of good leadership. Right here at GIS, actually, I've embarked on a program of training the staff in the various, specifically soft skills, self-management in terms of time management, interaction, team building, communication, organization, and so on. As a matter of fact, on the first of June, we bring in an expert to do courses on script writing, feature writing. I do believe that the performance of the staff in any organization directly, it's hinged directly on the training of the staff. The productivity and the economy of work actually has a lot to do with the training that the staff receives. Yeah, yeah. So you believe it's directly linked then? Absolutely. Training is fundamental. Yes. And one of my main priorities, I call it strategic priorities, is to embark on a hefty program of training in all the areas, not only the technical skills, but also conceptual and soft skills, human skills. Okay, cool. All right. Now, in that case, there's a lot of young people out there who may see within themselves something of good leadership that they could actually carry on and obtain a position where they could be leaders within society. What would you say to them? What would you say they should do to maybe even bring that side of them out of themselves even more so? What would you say? Which what could they look towards? Is there anything, any advice you could give them in regards to, I don't know, I mean, some training maybe they can get for themselves. Maybe even the way that they, you know, communicate with people, how they get on with people, what would you say to any young person that believes they could be a leader, you know, how they can go forward? Well, first Geraldine, I would say they need to use every opportunity right now to become a leader and to practice leadership. At the school level, actually, it could be, it could be a primary school, secondary school at the club level, at the community level. All right. One of the things I saw was quite prevalent in Germany is the use of mentorship programs, for example. Oh, yeah. People people recognize mentors at universities and schools. Yeah, and they try to follow things that the things that that person does, example, the books that they write and so on, the speeches that they give and so on. So mentorship is a very effective way to to to create this sense of leadership in a person from very early, remain focused on the things that you want to achieve in life really. All right. So so so this this remains a problem. People start off having grown goals and objectives, and somewhere along the line to get distracted, somewhere down the road to get distracted. Develop soft skills, particularly emotional intelligence. Okay. And we know Daniel Goldman wrote a book about leadership and emotional intelligence. And a leader is supposed to be in a position to understand his people, to empathize with his people, to sympathize, to build trust. And all of this is part of the concept of emotional intelligence. All right. So today, there's a lot of focus placed on emotional intelligence as a function of leadership. And finally, I would say acquire the knowledge, acquire as much as you can in terms of knowledge. I spoke of leadership a while ago as being a leader being a master of persitology, you know, somebody who has, who has the ability to harness and exploit knowledge and use knowledge very wisely. And and of course, aspire to excellence. But the key point in terms of aspiring to leadership is to practice it when you have the opportunity to do so. Okay, that's brilliant. I like that. What you said about the mentors and such like, and honestly, also the part about making sure that they practice leadership as much as possible. Because my father always always said to me that it's just not, we're not just talking about just practicing thing, good practice can also make perfect. So I guess the more, the more you practice, the more you're indeed, indeed, you know, endeavor to reach where you're going. Well, Mr. Sulaj, before we actually end today, because it's actually we're going to be rounding off very soon. Is there anything you'd like to add, maybe even in regards to what people out there can look forward to in regards to the GIS? Yes. Well, there's no doubt about it that we're going to have we're going to face structural and financial challenges at the GIS. But I believe with the right strategic leadership, we could turn GIS into a cascade and agent of efficiency and change, really. We have to focus on better organizing the entity and bring out the best in the staff. And on that note, Geraldine, I'll leave you with a very, very famous quotation by GK Galbraith, who once said it's not the the images of ideology that determines the direction of economic society, but proper organization and the use of technology. So at the GIS, actually, we intend to make use of the technology available and to better organize our structures and our systems to provide the kind of service to the public. Okay, brilliant. Well, Mr. Wolfsulaj, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much indeed. And thank everybody out there for tuning in. And I'd just like to say from everybody here at the GIS, please do stay tuned to the National Television Network. Bye bye.