Since James King's confirmation as Office of Personnel Management director in April 1993, the agency has gone through sweeping changes. OPM has cut its workforce almost in half, reduced its management ranks from one supervisor for every eight employees to one supervisor for every 12 employees, and privatized its investigative unit. OPM has eliminated the 10,000-page Federal Personnel Manual and has decentralized many human resources activities that used to be in the agency's exclusive domain.
Human resources management for the federal government as a whole, however, has been slow to change. Civil service reform has yet to gain a strong foothold governmentwide. And just because the Federal Personnel Manual has disappeared, that doesn't mean self-imposed agency restrictions on hiring practices have gone away, too.
In an interview with Government Executive, King, who will leave OPM next month, reflected on his four-year stint at the helm of the government's central human resources agency. He also discussed ways federal executives and managers must adapt their leadership styles to succeed in the future.
After his first year as director of OPM, a reporter asked King how it felt to be a failure since his agency had become smaller and had lost some of its control over federal human resources management. King said that question reflected a traditional view of how to measure an agency head's success or failure.
"We could do a lot more with less if we emphasized the fact that the work we do should serve the public and that we're not organized here to provide jobs for people," King said. "We're here to provide services for our citizens and then try to create the best possible climate for the people who work in the government."
King faced an immediate challenge when he took over at OPM to make the best possible climate at his own agency. An impending downsizing would eventually shrink the agency from 6,200 employees in 1993 to 3,400 in 1996.
"I never thought I'd come to Washington and have a cigar and pass out pink slips to people who were working hard," King said. "Anyone being separated involuntarily was going to suffer pain and what we should do is do our best to ameliorate that pain."
OPM employees were trained to help co-workers who were laid off deal with their feelings of denial and anger and then look for new jobs.
"I didn't want them treated as somehow they had been declared redundant and that they didn't really have a place in the agency or that they had some kind of contagious disease," King said. "We dealt with them as if there'd been a death in a family."
King admitted that downsizing was a shock to the agency, and that OPM has had to retrain its employees and review its work processes to make up for the lost staff. King attributed much of the agency's success in dealing with that shock to technology. By automating telephone services and posting job openings online, OPM has been able to alleviate some of the workload left on employees after layoffs, while still being able to provide services to federal agencies, employees and retirees, King said.
A New Attitude
King introduced the word "customer" to OPM's vocabulary. Executives must practice what they preach if they want their agencies to become customer-focused, he said.
"It's a top down operation. You start to hold people accountable. You talk it up everyday of the week. You live it. You tell your customers that they are customers and what they should expect. If we're not delivering, then I want to know about it," King said. Customers would call King and tell him about problems they were having with OPM. "Our people were reluctant to let go of certain things. It came to my attention and it changed very quickly."
Some things have not changed while King has been at OPM. Civil service reform, in particular, has been an elusive goal for government reinventors. King said he believes an incremental approach to civil service reform will work better than an attempt at systemwide change. Demonstration projects, in which reforms like broad banding and performance-based pay are tested, should be expanded, King said. A demonstration project at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, Calif., begun in 1980, was the first such project to show signs of success.
"I'd like to see 150 to 200 China Lakes across government," King said.
King also sees room for improvement in the way managers evaluate employees.
"We have agencies where 90 percent of the people are rated outstanding," King said. Managers need to be candid with people and help them find jobs that match their skills. "It's very sad, the number of people in leadership positions who are incapable of doing that."
Many of the key reinventing government leaders during Clinton's first administration--John Koskinen, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget; Elaine Kamarck, the vice president's senior advisor on reinventing government; Steve Kelman, the director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and now OPM's King--have left or have announced their intentions to leave the federal government. King does not see this exodus of reinvention leadership as a sign that the movement will die in the second administration. He said a recent meeting of senior executives at OPM proved that to him.
"I looked around the table. There wasn't one loser." King recalled. "I couldn't have said that four years ago. We've processed some real winners."
King will move to Connecticut where he will help Trinity College with a project to revitalize the poor neighborhoods of Hartford. Though he doesn't expect to return to government service, King said he looks back fondly on his years at OPM. Deputy Director Janice Lachance will act as director while the position is vacant.
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