Vietnam Party Chief Urges Accurate Cadre Evaluation, Leadership Innovation

Vietnamese Party General Secretary and President Tô Lâm has underscored the critical need for accurate evaluation of cadres, warning that flawed assessments can hinder the promotion of talented individuals and perpetuate the presence of underperformers within the party structure. Speaking at a meeting with the Central Organization Committee, Lâm highlighted that incorrect evaluations can allow the less competent to remain in their positions while preventing the good from being fully utilized.

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Incorrect evaluations lead to the underutilization of capable individuals, the retention of the incompetent, and the potential for opportunists to deeply embed themselves, rise high, spoil work, damage the organization, and ruin trust.

Lâm articulated that a flawed evaluation system risks enabling opportunistic individuals to rise to positions of influence, potentially causing damage to the organization and eroding public trust. He stressed that the Party must innovate its leadership methods, ensuring that leadership is more accurate, effective, and closely aligned with the needs of the political system and the populace. This innovation, he clarified, does not mean abandoning leadership but rather refining its application to be more precise and impactful.

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We must strongly innovate the Party's leadership methods. Innovating leadership methods makes the Party and each party member more closely attached to the political system and the people.

The General Secretary also called for a shift in the Party's advisory functions, moving from reactive responses to emerging issues to proactive forecasting and preparation for significant challenges related to organizational structure and cadre development. He emphasized that Party resolutions must translate into concrete action plans with clear responsibilities, resources, timelines, and expected outcomes. Lâm identified the capacity for implementation as a major bottleneck across various levels of government, urging a remedy for the prevalent issues of excessive talk, infrequent progress, and unclear results from extensive documentation.

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The capacity for organization and implementation is a major bottleneck at many levels, sectors, and localities, requiring focused solutions. We must overcome the situation of talking a lot but doing little, meeting a lot but changing little, issuing many documents but with unclear final products.

Furthermore, Lâm insisted that all major tasks should be quantifiable by concrete results, eliminating the ambiguity of shared responsibilities where no single individual is held accountable. He also addressed the effective operation of the newly reorganized machinery of government, calling for a thorough review of the functions and structures within the political system. The principle of "one agency can do many things, but one thing should be assigned to only one agency for primary responsibility" was reiterated. He also stressed that decentralization and devolution of power must be accompanied by adequate resources, tools, data, personnel, budgets, and control mechanisms, ensuring that grassroots levels are sufficiently empowered to fulfill their duties.

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The principle is that one agency can do many things, but one thing should be assigned to only one agency for primary responsibility and accountability.