Government Executive - Authors - John Trattner

Appointees urged to listen to career civil servants

John Trattner — Fri, 01 Dec 2000 00:00:00 -0500

There is one certainty here. Political managers can't really run their jobs or get results without the cooperation and help of their senior professionals-whatever they may think of them.

"The assumption of every new political group coming in is that career civil servants are captives of the previous administration," says one observer. "It's easy to believe that only the folks who walked in the door with you care about accomplishing the mission of your administration. But the message to political appointees is that they are not going to get their jobs done if they don't work closely with the senior career people-and that they shouldn't assume they are the enemy within."

Okay, but isn't the government's work force still basically different from those in other sectors? The answer is mixed. In the collective, career government people have much the same profile as any other large group of employees. Skilled, ambitious achievers at one end, less gifted or imaginative stragglers at the other, most of the rest somewhere in the middle. The rules do make it considerably harder to hire, fire, or move them around. There is less mobility, certainly less turnover, in government than many appointed newcomers are accustomed to. A fast-track program is available to talented entrants, and a bonus system operates for senior careerists. But for most other people, merit cuts less ice than it does outside government when it comes to promotions, pay raises, or moves to more desirable jobs. In most cases, that means making the best of the career work force that is in place.

If all your people are extraordinary, getting extraordinary results is a lot easier. But extraordinary people are not bunched together in most organizations. You have to produce extraordinary results with ordinary people. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did it in recent years. That's what the most successful organizations in America do every day. That's the management task.

Talent does exist, however, at every level in federal agencies. These professionals know what's going on, what has to be done, what needs fixing-and they're ready to follow good leadership. The trick is to find them, enlist them, and make a habit of listening to them.

"There was a guy who controlled budget, personnel, space, and computers," says one former political appointee. "He was great-the exemplar of professional executives in the federal service. And the organization came to know that he knew how to push my buttons. If I really had a bad idea and they had to talk me out of it, they'd send him in to do it. He saved me from some gross errors. There were other days when I said 'Nope, we're going to do it this way.' Every once in a while I was right. But it's tricky, because some people who resist and obstruct are doing it for good reason." An ability to hear what career colleagues and subordinates are saying depends on open, not closed, doors.

"My predecessor said to me, 'Be careful in the elevator. Everybody will try to talk to you about stuff. Don't talk to them,' " says a former appointee. "It seemed to me that was exactly the wrong advice-the kind your mother used to give you that was always wrong. When I first came into the agency, people had never even been on the floor where our offices were. They had to use key cards to go up and down the elevators, as if it was an armed camp. I dispensed with the key cards and invited everybody to come on up with their ideas. I said we would take them seriously, that there wouldn't be repercussions for ideas we didn't like. People took me at my word."

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Performance measurement viewed as key to management success

John Trattner — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

In the early 1990s came the first statutory attempts at performance measurement-to some degree with the Chief Financial Officers Act, more extensively with the Government Performance and Results Act. The Results Act, in particular, doesn't merely tell agencies what to do-to plan strategically, set goals, devise measures, and report performance annually-it compels them by force of law. It poses these requirements only in broad outline in a few pages, leaving agencies to fill in the blanks with their own structures, formats, and procedures. And there have been some successes.

"One of the reasons Congress was impressed with our plan was that we put forth a measure that didn't just say we'll work harder at something," says one federal executive. "We will be measured and held accountable for those results. That means everybody really has to sign on to pieces of it."

Still, the executive branch's response so far to the Results Act's requirements gets mixed reviews. The federal executive branch remains huge, its moving parts numerous and tangled, its tasks many, and its time for any one of them in short supply. It's hard to abandon old habits-to switch the focus from process to results. Even the Congress, which created the act, has divided views. Performance and reform enthusiasts on the Hill propelled the act into being, but what it is producing so far has gotten a chillier reception among other legislators, especially appropriators. And inevitably, in various quarters of government at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, lurks concern about the possible use of performance information as a weapon, not a tool. Finally, as suggested by Donald F. Kettl, who directs the LaFollette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, performance first needs to be understood for what it really is. It's usually presented in terms of measurement, he says, when it's really about communication.

The ultimate problem doesn't lie in designing ways to measure performance or proving that they work. It lies in getting people, whether in the executive branch or the Congress, to value the information generated by measurement-and to use it constructively as a fundamental element in managing and governing.

"If you were a CEO or a senior executive in any important private business, you would be using performance numbers to manage your organization on a day-in, day-out basis," says one federal official. "Probably anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of your time would be involved looking at numbers, often on a daily basis."

That's because good-repeat, good-performance measures are management's signals of the results it expects and a highly useful way to drive performance. But in government, most presidential appointees are only marginally involved in managing to such numbers.

"The culture of the senior political levels in the executive branch is total obsession with Congress, the legislative stuff," says one senior manager. "But it's not by any means the whole job. Even getting good laws passed is only the first step towards improving the lives of the folks we are serving. And that involves things happening inside your organization. In government agencies, if they're really doing performance management, senior executives are looking at those numbers, asking for direct reports about what's going on. This is not a staff exercise. It is an executive exercise. The challenge is to move from those little documents, those annual performance plans, to making it part of managing your organization."

Out of all this, we can distill a couple of simple truths for senior appointees. First, no government organization should lack some sort of system that will show how well or badly it is doing what it is funded to do. Second, no political manager in such an organization should ignore the information that system produces. To do so is to invite trouble, perhaps major trouble, that-count on it-will jump up and bite hard where it hurts.

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E-gov revolution transforms federal operations

John Trattner — Wed, 29 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1998 ordered the federal government to put all its services and transactions online by 2003. Responding, the Clinton administration in December 1999 issued a series of presidential executive orders.

In the language of these directives, the aim was to harness IT as "a powerful tool for tackling some of our toughest social challenges as well as fostering economic growth." They assigned a number of general tasks to the federal government as a whole and particular responsibilities to specific agencies. The intended scope of the orders is evident in some of their language-for example, in making public access to government information and services easier:

"Each agency shall permit greater access to its officials by creating a public electronic mail address through which citizens can contact the agency with questions, comments, or concerns....The secretaries of Health and Human Services, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture, the Commissioner of Social Security, and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, working closely with other federal agencies that provide benefit assistance to citizens, shall make a broad range of benefits and services available though private and secure electronic use of the Internet....To the maximum extent possible, departments and agencies to make available online, by December 2000, the forms needed for the top government services used by the public.

"...in government's purchasing functions:

"Promote the use of electronic commerce for faster, cheaper ordering on federal procurements that will result in savings to the taxpayer.

"...and in protecting privacy:

"Agencies shall continue to build good privacy practices into their web sites by posting privacy policies."

To be sure, elements of local, state, and federal government are already doing some of this. The Department of Agriculture used the Internet to get public comments on organic food standards. Though it cost several hundred thousand dollars, this exercise opened up the rule-making process. It drew 400,000 hits on the department's Web site, whose creative design allowed people everywhere to comment, see other comments, and build on the comments without having to come to Washington and plow through all the paperwork.

Again, the director of a large organization within an agency reports that "information technology and especially web technology are extremely powerful ways to reach various constituency groups and get information out. It's really paid off for us."

The undersecretary of Commerce who runs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes IT as "probably the biggest thing affecting us." His agency has about a thousand Web pages--such as weather.gov--where anyone interested can find the latest information on everything from solar flares to global warming. The more NOAA puts on its Web site, he says, the more people are interested in it. For this senior appointee, information technology is "the big growth area of the future. The electronic world is the one that's going to drive us the most."

A former high-level official in the federal procurement community points out that many agencies are putting their requests for bid proposals on the net. An increasing exchange of information between government and vendors is taking place on the net, he adds, and it's a place "where the folks on the front lines-particularly the eighteen-year-olds-are coming up with a lot of interesting ideas." His advice: "Ask your human resources people for the names of the ten, fifteen, or one hundred youngest employees in the organization. Send them all an e-mail, invite them to a brown-bag lunch. The purpose is for them to give you ideas about how you can use the Web better in your agency."

Despite encouraging examples of what's already being achieved, most newly arriving presidential appointees will find their agencies up to their elbows in the job of moving toward those e-government objectives mandated in 1999. It is a tough road to travel, one for which executive branch agencies are not now technically well prepared.

In a speech in March 2000, David Walker, comptroller general of the United States and boss of the General Accounting Office, noted that government "is no longer the primary innovator in the area of information technology" (as it was, for example, in developing the Internet's precursors). "Many current government IT systems are outdated and not integrated," Walker said. "In addition, we have an overload of information and a lack of knowledge. Government faces a number of internal skills gaps as well as a lack of effective contractor oversight."

A major effort has been under way, meanwhile, aimed at drawing an organized, disciplined, across-the-board blueprint to help the federal government achieve the objectives set out by the paperwork reduction legislation and the executive orders that followed. Those mandates created an exceptionally strong framework for this initiative, which began in late 1999 under the auspices of the Council for Excellence in Government and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.

Both organizations recognized that the multi-layered complexity of the transformation to e-government poses formidable questions of scope, scale, philosophy, and technology, to name but a few. They saw clearly that the best answers lay with the public and private players who will drive the change¾business, government, civic groups, and the research community. These groups, they believed, were best equipped to produce the expertly designed, comprehensive, collaborative approach that a task of these dimensions demands. It was abundantly clear that other advantages for government could accrue from an effective move to full electronic capability: for example, a reinvigoration of the federal civil service, fueled by the development of an IT work force of high quality. Many additional potential benefits were visible in a government that could commune directly, instantly, and continuously with individual people, with business, with government at other levels, and with itself.

In November 1999 the Council's Intergovernmental Technology Leadership Consortium and NPR convened a cross-sector symposium of electronic commerce and information technology leaders from government, industry, academic institutions, and the research sector. Examining with experienced eyes the nature of the e-government challenge and how to meet it, they set out four areas--transformation, roles, infrastructure, and information--in which the design should proceed. In March, joined now by the National Science Foundation, the initiative formed four corresponding working groups to set objectives, identify barriers, and shape specific options for the action recommendations, to be offered by the Council publicly in the fall of 2000 to the country's newly elected presidential and congressional leadership.

It's useful to look briefly at what these groups think e-government should look like. It would be citizen-driven and user-friendly, organized according to how people use it, not how agencies manage it. Full e-government would not merely supply information online, but also allow users to complete transactions and interact with their government. It would be accessible to everybody, anywhere, and at any time, and not just to people on the near side of the well-named digital divide. E-government would be designed, created, and maintained through cooperation between the public and private sectors. It would be innovative, encouraging the advance of new technology and applications, and cost effective, secure, and private.

Finally, e-government offers a clear opportunity to close in on two goals that are as elusive as they are crucial. First, to rekindle the interest of young Americans in government and public service by making government completely accessible to them¾expanding their understanding and appreciation of it and making it more meaningful and real. Second, to revitalize American democracy by narrowing the factual and psychological gaps between government and people and engaging millions more of them in the democratic process. To underscore the urgency here, the government blueprint outlined above will include recommendations for top executive leadership that is strongly attuned to these goals and for the selection of cabinet and agency chiefs who are able and ready to lead the charge toward full e-government within their organizations.

No matter which route government follows toward these objectives, agency chief information officers will be among the key figures charged with stewarding the change at the leadership and policy levels, not just at the technical level. Their jobs are examined in detail in another section of this book. But make no mistake: It is agency political leadership that, besides overseeing the problem solving, will have to spearhead the charge, cutting through the barriers of turf and entrenched attitudes and habits to make electronic government the full-fledged reality that the country, its economy, and its people need.

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E-gov revolution transforms federal operations

John Trattner — Wed, 29 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

In government, success means more than just customer service

John Trattner — Tue, 28 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

A World of Quality: The Timeless Passport).

The federal government, too, is paying increasing attention to the customer challenge. Exhorted by presidential orders, aided by polls and surveys, agencies are cranking customer focus and satisfaction into their strategies. The American people, it is often alleged, are government's ultimate customers. No doubt about it, happy customers are a major calibration on an agency's results barometer.

But let's also be realistic. Public agencies face realities not encountered in a corporate setting. First, their customers and the sources of their funding are usually not one and the same. Second, they work under constraints and oversight that don't impede private companies or nonprofits. Third, in government, satisfied customers are not invariably the best measure of results or of what is best for the country.

"We can easily have very happy customers in programs that efficiently put out money and place few demands on recipients," says one senior federal executive. "But that may be the worst possible result for the effectiveness of the resources. A happy customer is not always what the taxpayer should want."

A case in point, cited by the author of that quote, is the disability benefits distributed by the Social Security Administration. It would be nice to support beneficiaries to the limits of what each of them claims is necessary. But that would hardly be practical in a society where many interests compete for the available public resources (and it would violate fiduciary norms for which SSA also has a responsibility). The right result here-the one that best responds to both individual and national interests-is the optimum balance between the requirements of the claimant and of good financial stewardship of a public resource.

Put another way, customers are a key element in seeking the right result, and it's great if what you're doing makes them jump up and down with pleasure. But, for government managers, customer satisfaction is not the sole or final objective. In this democracy, Americans want results from government not only as individual customers of its services, but also as citizens intent on shaping a more peaceful, educated, compassionate, healthy, just, and creative society.

Reprinted with permission from The 2000 Prune Book: How to Succeed in Washington's Top Jobs, Council for Excellence in Government, Brookings Institution Press.

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In today’s government, leadership is all about results

John Trattner — Mon, 27 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Hardly. Such activities are essential; they're what most political managers routinely do. By themselves, they don't amount to strong, productive management. A lot of people in government today recognize that, but it's useful to make the point for each new administration. Leading successfully really means getting something tangible, something visible, for the money and effort invested. In a word, results.

In private business, as is so often repeated, the bottom line--profit or loss--makes it relatively easy to judge results. In government, it's harder. Much that looks like a result really isn't. When public leaders think they've gone the last hard mile, crossed the finish line, they often haven't.

Suppose the Federal Aviation Administration is investing millions to protect the health of air travelers by developing a climate control system for passenger jets that doesn't distribute airborne bacteria around the cabin. It plans the project, puts the job out to bid, spends the funds, convenes a lot of interagency consultation, tells the media about it. But those aren't results, only steps along the way. Not until the prototype is built, tested successfully, and demonstrated to airframe builders and airline executives is any real result in hand. Not until airlines are convinced they should install the new system--or are required to by regulation--has the FAA gone the full route by ensuring that passengers benefit from it.

Or take the actual decision by the Internal Revenue Service to allow electronic filing of tax returns. Announcing the plan, getting the technology designed, hiring the personnel--again, those were just way stations. Certainly, they added up to a lot more than just a visible intention to make the change. But they were not yet a real result. That came when people could actually go on line, send their returns to the IRS, and see them accepted, safe and sound, as advertised.

The first lesson of leading within an agency, then, is to pursue ends, not means. It's not how much money you spend, how many meetings you call, how many policy papers you put out, how many times you testify on Capitol Hill. It is not input, or even output. It is what the professionals like to call desired outcomes. It's results.

"Focus on outcomes, not on input," says one high-ranking federal official. "It's so easy to get caught up in getting the process right and getting the regulations just perfect and anticipating everything that might go wrong, but failing to notice that no real people were touched by what you did."

Part of the problem in going after results is the understandable attraction for political appointees of the world of policymaking. Policy, after all, is what guides most of their work. It seems like the most important aspect of a leadership position. It requires creativity, design skill, the art of negotiating--loftier assets, to some, than the ability to run things, and it seemingly is more likely to earn recognition and prestige. Again, however, policymaking alone doesn't bring results.

"A lot of us come to Washington and want to be engaged in high policy," says one appointee. "If we just get the policy right, everything will be different. I would suggest just the opposite. We spend much more time on policy than is needed, and so little on implementation. In the end you're going to be judged on what actually happens, not on whether there is a new declaration of direction and a nice event at the White House."

Why are better results the executive branch's most critical assignment? It is not just their enormous intrinsic value for the national well-being. It is also because there are increasingly workable ways to measure results--that is, to measure performance. The Government Performance and Results Act, passed in 1993, was only the beginning. Tools to measure are becoming more precise. They are beginning to find more acceptance among the decisionmakers who appropriate money for government programs. That means executive branch managers will be facing ever-strengthening mandates from the Congress to get better results for the resources they use.

Yet the most convincing reason why results matter can be found in national opinion surveys. Just about every poll in sight shows persistent, widespread public disenchantment with government (though not with government's potential). Government today turns large numbers of Americans off. A majority thinks of it, not as our government, but as the government; According to a June 1999 Council for Excellence in Government Hart/Teeter national poll, only one in four believes Washington works for the public interest. But most people continue to believe that it can. They want better results from government. And that, in the end, is probably the most urgent mandate of all.

Reprinted with permission from The 2000 Prune Book: How to Succeed in Washington's Top Jobs, Council for Excellence in Government, Brookings Institution Press.

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