R&D alongside AD colleagues
Colleagues who do not wish to take up managerial positions must be offered real prospects and career development, making optimal use of their skills.
Concrete alternatives must be offered to colleagues to enable them to progress and not remain stuck at grade AD12. Not everyone wishes to become a manager. It is therefore necessary to open up more opportunities for these colleagues to become senior experts.
Middle management, which is in daily contact with staff, must be enabled to carry out its coordinating tasks and not be reduced to the role of a mere executor by a more intrusive senior management which is too often fascinated by ‘micro-management’.
Despite the promises made in the 2014 reform, non-managerial AD colleagues continue to suffer from a lack of recognition of their skills and are increasingly faced with career barriers and limited mobility opportunities.
All too often, managers within departments who do not have all the necessary technical skills to carry out their tasks are unable to establish effective collaboration with their team members, especially the more experienced ones, and indulge in purely authoritarian approaches by trying to impose their views without any real dialogue.
As in many other organisations, our institution needs to put in place an anticipatory talent identification policy to support the career development of both AD colleagues who are entitled to access management positions and other colleagues with a more specialised profile so that they can pursue their careers and be valued and recognised as experts in their field.
R&D calls for
- reforming nomination procedures to ensure more transparency and fairness in access to management positions (see below);
- setting up a genuine non-managerial career path for specialised profiles allowing for early detection of talent and enhancing the skills of these colleagues, notably through high-level training and temporary secondments to specialised organisations;
- The reform of procedures for the nomination of senior experts.