Back to School

isten up, class. The subject of today's exercise is the ambush television interview. Any volunteers? Great. Come on up. Your assignment is to walk through a dark space, be accosted by bright television camera lights, and face as best you can rapid-fire questioning about an embarrassing incident involving your agency that won't show up on any year-end list of government accomplishments. Good luck and have a great career."

As this scenario unfolded, about 200 pairs of eyes carefully watched every bead of sweat form on the poor volunteer. Under the circumstances, he actually did an admirable job addressing the questions offered by his inquisitor, fending off some of the more combustible queries and ending the interview at an appropriate time, as suggested by instructor Chris Davala, a media coach and speech consultant.

No doubt, many of the 'students' watching this exercise in a media relations class at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in Charlottesville, Va., were offering silent thanks that they weren't the star of this bit of theater. And a few of the middle-aged professionals may have been thinking, 'Gee, I don't remember school being like this.'

School is indeed like this for thousands of government managers each year. FEI, brought into life 30 years ago last month by President Johnson, is one of a number of institutions that are aggressively marketing short (six weeks or less) education programs to help high-level federal managers develop their executive skills. Managers who have attended courses at FEI and other institutions say the programs have tangibly helped their careers beyond being just a ticket they had to punch on their way up the career ladder.

One motivation for agencies to send senior managers back to school is to provide them a means to brush up on the broad executive management competencies that the Office of Personnel Management has listed as vital to organizational success. Many agencies send their employees to programs offered by institutions with long track records, such as FEI, the Brookings Institution, Carnegie-Mellon University, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The Defense Department offers a wide variety of educational programs at its own facilities, such as the National War College in Washington, and the Office of Personnel Management provides training at its Management Development Centers in Shepherdstown, W. Va., and Denver, Colo.

Typically, participants in these programs are asked to go back to school by their bosses as a condition for management advancement. But other factors can also play a role. As FEI instructor Robert Maranto noted in an article on the institution's history, "Since attendance is a mark of status, and is usually on the whole enjoyable, some are selected as a reward for good service in tough jobs. Still others are chosen because, while basically successful, they have notable problems which need attention (e.g. burnout, reluctance to accept organizational change, poor communications skills)."

The programs are designed for members of the Senior Executive Service, senior military officers and other high-level managers in government. To facilitate the learning process, many of the programs do not offer letter grades, and in the spirit of academic freedom, students are encouraged to speak freely in class without fear of being punished for criticizing an agency's position on an issue. Tuition, room and board, and travel expenses, which range from just under $1,000 per class to more than $11,000, are usually covered through agencies' training budgets.

Tossed Salads and Chef's Specials

Even in these tight budgetary times, anecdotal evidence suggests agencies are making executive training a priority. Michael Froman, chief of staff at the Treasury Department, says that at a recent meeting, senior Treasury officials decided "to spend a lot more effort to develop our Senior Executive Service as a core group of managers through education programs."

"We want to build on existing programs to enhance certain synergies and certain experiences our managers have so that they develop into an effective and unified cadre," Froman says. "As a class, they form an important asset for the department and these programs can really help their development."

Diane Disney, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for civilian personnel policy, says the recent wave of Defense downsizing makes training more important than ever. "We are decreasing the size of our department from 1.5 million to 750,000 civil servants," she says. "Our people have to be educated to do more. Narrow specialization will no longer do. We have to broaden our managers' skills to incorporate conceptual and strategic skills."

Responding to increased demand for short-term training programs, Harvard's Kennedy School recently opened a Washington office, which will offer short courses on "Essentials of Decision Making" and "Strategies of Persuasion."

In September, Kennedy School officials also announced they had streamlined their Senior Executive Fellows program on the Harvard campus, designed for people of high potential at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels. The course, which teaches subjects required for SES certification, has been cut from eight weeks to four weeks in length. The 1999 program, which is scheduled for next March 15 through April 9, costs $11,100.

Whatever their length and cost, federal executive training programs usually follow one of two standard recipes. The "tossed salad" approach seeks to mix senior managers from various agencies together and let them learn from each other as well as from their assigned faculty. Such programs provide "a fascinating and rich interagency mix from a number of perspectives," says Terry Newell, faculty coordinator for the Center for Executive Leadership at FEI. "A problem I may have in my agency may not be an insoluble problem in another agency. And you can learn from that."

Other agencies, though, use a "chef's selection" approach, designing customized programs for their employees. "The biggest trend I have seen recently is the extent to which federal agencies and private companies want customized programs," says Nanette Blandin, acting director of Brookings' Center for Public Policy Education. "With tight budgets and with training being highly scrutinized, agencies are saying, 'How can we have the most impact for each training dollar spent? Let's focus on this department or this unit.' "

Once agencies know what they want in the "chef's selection" scheme, they often ask various institutions to bid for the right to provide the program. The struggle to win such bids can be as intense as the competition between some schools to recruit blue-chip football prospects.

Recently, a consortium of Johns Hopkins and Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs wrested from the Kennedy School the right to conduct training sessions for top DoD managers. "We had a screening board that looked at the various proposals," says David O. "Doc" Cooke, DoD's director for administration and management. "The decision was based not so much on cost as it was on what was proposed under the program to meet our objectives. There was a little more emphasis on games and actual role playing [in the winning proposal]."

The Road to Charlottesville

Appropriately, some of the most intriguing executive training programs are offered in Charlottesville, the home of Mr. Jefferson's university. Not only is FEI in town, but Brookings offers a week-long course at the Boar's Head Inn on "Executive Leadership in a Changing Environment." Tuition and housing for the course is $3,500.

"We are trying to get managers to broaden their perspective," says Blandin. Recent courses have featured a range of speakers from Brookings scholars to Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Federal Reserve Board Vice Chair Alice Rivlin.

Brookings also offers courses in Washington on Congress and the national policy-making process. And in several locations around the country, it now presents a weeklong course called "Benchmarking: Innovative Processes in American Business." The class is increasingly popular with government managers who are seeking to "learn from innovative practices in business as they strive to deliver more services with fewer resources," says Blandin.

Meanwhile, FEI's course offerings under its "Leadership for a Democratic Society" program are increasingly focused on personal development. First, says FEI Director Curt Smith, students are given Myers-Briggs personality assessments in an effort to help them understand themselves better. Then they study 360-degree performance evaluations they have gathered from their bosses, peers and subordinates. "We hope that their working hard on the information in the assessments translates into better organizational performance," says Smith.

"We are asking the students to pay attention to themselves as leaders," says Newell. "If you can't change yourself, you can't change your organization."

Students who attend FEI's four-week program, which costs $8,900 to $9,600, are organized into eight-person teams balanced by agency and gender. Attendees can either attend the program four weeks at a time, or attend split two-week sessions. In the first two weeks of the split sessions, participants take courses and develop strategies that are relevant to their self-assessment and 360-degree assessment results. Then they return to their agencies for three months and attempt to implement a plan for change. Afterward, they return to FEI for another two weeks, to reflect upon their experiences and gear up for future challenges back at their departments. One participant said the self-assessment process was "very intense" and helped him to better understand "how I relate to my staff."

FEI's focus on personal development also extends to wellness programs, which emphasize physical exercise and healthy eating. Recess periods are as much a part of the program as the class sessions, and participants are discouraged from using them to make stress-inducing phone calls back to the office.

FEI courses also encourage spirited academic debate about the nature of public service at the turn of the century. "It is disconcerting that a fair number of students are disillusioned and say they wouldn't recommend federal service for their kids," says John Irving, an FEI instructor and former dean of the Seton Hall University law school. But Newell says FEI's follow-up surveys show most participants in the "Leadership for a Democratic Society" program leave with a renewed sense of faith in public service.

"The last thing people do before they walk out the door is to retake their oath of office," he says.

On the Banks of the Charles

Along the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard's Kennedy School strives to give federal executives a broad-based learning experience in its Senior Managers in Government program. The program runs for three weeks in late summer and costs $8,900. "I would characterize the school as standing astride the fast-moving tides of history and literally sticking our toes in the water and making a small contribution in a number of areas," says program director Peter Zimmerman.

"It was the best program I've been to," says Sidney Saucier, associate director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "What made it so great are the caliber of the instructors, who are real-life people sharing their experiences at a high level of government. The case study-based curriculum is very broad. It addressed a lot of issues that we are facing at Marshall, such as privatization and the effects of downsizing. And besides having outstanding instructors and guest speakers, you can couple that with the diversity of the class attendees. They were from all kinds of agencies and 30 were from foreign nations."

Art Bryant, U.S. Forest Service staff director for watershed and air programs, also says the opportunity to interact with a broad cross-section of government executives from around the world was a highlight of the Kennedy School experience.

"Listening to people from France and South Africa about their experiences in privatization gave us insights into the struggles that they had and the strategies they had to employ," he says. "And from the whole experience you come back with a different attitude. You want to be more strategic in the delivery of your programs, more attentive to employees' suggestions and more receptive to trying new ideas and concepts. You have a new sense of energy and enthusiasm, a genuine aspiration to be a better senior executive."

Likewise, foreign students appreciate the opportunity to interact with their American counterparts. "It was good at a high, broad-brush level to better understand how Washington really works--to understand the sort of people and sort of departments you need to informally start off with to understand where the minefields are," says Geoffrey Bailey, a British civil aviation official.

More Competition

Can a government that is constantly beset by domestic and international crises and pressures to get better results with smaller budgets still afford the luxury of high-profile education programs?

"Increasingly in these times of drawdown, it's hard for some managers to say, 'Hey, I can afford to be away for awhile,' " says DoD's Cooke. But, he adds, "not once in these days of declining budgets have the [military] services said, 'We won't support your programs at Harvard and Syracuse.' And when you compare what we do in senior executive programs for managers to what corporations like Mobil and Motorola do, it's not enough."

Brookings' Blandin says there's a growing market for government executive education. "The fact that there's competition [to deliver these programs] is certainly more apparent," she says. "But there's a great big pond out there that we are all in and it seems there's more than enough room for everyone."

Blandin also sees opportunities in the future for "strategic alliances" between the various institutions that serve the federal market. For example, Brookings has allied with George Washington University in Washington to allow government students who take Brookings short courses to get course credit in GWU's Master's in Public Administration program.

"Many SESers are isolated in not knowing what's available out there to help them upgrade their capabilities," says Treasury's Froman. "To the extent that we can continue to use these education programs to help them find the tools to help make them better managers, that's all to the good."

Edward Goldstein is a Washington freelance writer.