Praising Pay-For-Performance

Alex Parker's report on intelligence community Chief Human Capital Officer Ron Sanders' retirement mostly centers on one key part of his legacy: pay-for-performance for intelligence workers. It's undoubtedly an issue Sanders was passionate about, and he seems confident that an evaluation of the system he set up across the agencies in the Directorate of National Intelligence will receive a good rating and be allowed to continue.

It really does seem to me like we're at a tipping point, where the question of compensation seems more important than any other federal HR issue. There's a consensus around the need for hiring reform. Labor-management partnership is always going to be a partisan issue, which means neither Democrats, nor Republicans, nor unions are likely to act unpredictably on the subject; it's hard to imagine the partnerships either being permanently enshrined or permanently banned. Folks generally agree telework and work-life balance are important issues with real benefits. Compensation and performance management are left as the areas where there is substantial disagreement and clash over what's effective, what's appropriate, and what's feasible--but it's also one of the few areas in my reporting where I see attitudes shifting. I can't say definitively which direction they're moving in, but the conversation is at least dynamic. What the outcome will be is entirely uncertain, and frankly, in these kinds of debates, that seems rare.