Andrew Hampton to lead New Zealand national security agency
Andrew Hampton is to lead New Zealand’s national security agency less than two years after becoming the government’s first ever chief talent officer.
Hampton, whose civil service experience ranges from policy work on Maori issues, to senior roles in justice and education, has been appointed director of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) for a five-year term starting on 26 April.
The GCSB provides information assurance and cyber security to the government and infrastructure organisations; foreign intelligence to government decision-makers, and cooperation and assistance to other New Zealand government agencies.
As its director, Hampton will report directly to the minister responsible for the GCSB – the attorney-general, Christopher Finlayson.
Prime minister John Key, who announced Hampton’s appointment yesterday, said:
“Mr Hampton is a respected senior public servant with experience in senior leadership roles across the public service.
“His leadership skills and public service experience will help strengthen the GCSB and ensure it fulfils its important role in protecting our national security and wellbeing within the constraints of the law.
“His broad experience will also help continue the process of more closely connecting and integrating the security and intelligence agencies with the wider public service.”
Throughout his time as government chief talent officer – which is based at the State Services Commission, Hampton has been leading a major shake-up to government-wide talent management.
He has established a series of career boards, enabling chief executives and senior leaders to collectively identify, develop and deploy talent across agencies; he oversaw the procurement and implementation of a leadership assessment tool named Leadership Insight (LI), which provides senior officials with information about their own capability, potential and development needs, mapping them against the leadership success profile.
“Each individual that goes through it gets a development plan that they and their manager need to work on, and the career boards monitor how people are going against that development plan,” he told Global Government Forum in an exclusive interview.
Currently, 450 officials are going through the process and about 200 have completed it.
Connected to this tool is a new “common information system for the whole of the public service, which will keep information about our leaders – including the information that comes out of Leadership Insight – in one place,” he said.
This Talent Management Information System (TMIS) is also a key for improving diversity and inclusion, Hampton said, “because it will give us much better information about who our up-and-coming leaders are and where they are.”
Click here to read our full interview with Andrew Hampton
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See also:
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Interview: Iain Rennie, state services commissioner, New Zealand
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Interview: Gabriel Makhlouf, Treasury, New Zealand
About Winnie Agbonlahor
Winnie is news editor of Global Government Forum. She previously reported for Civil Service World - the trade magazine for senior UK government officials. Originally from Germany, Winnie first came to the UK in 2006 to study a BA in Journalism & Russian at the University of Sheffield. She is bilingual in English and German, and, after spending an academic year abroad in Russia and reporting for the Moscow Times, Winnie also speaks Russian fluently.
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