Leaders 'R' Us

an you imagine taking a trip to a leadership store and selecting seven managers to solve your customer service problem? That is essentially what happened when Kathy Redman, acting director of special projects at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, sponsored a team of seven leaders in training from the Agriculture Department's Graduate School.

The team was selected from a pool of 150 participants in the Executive Potential Program (EPP). The members, all experienced middle managers at their agencies, joined the training program to review, define and polish their leadership skills through experiential learning assignments. Redman enlisted the EPP team to analyze, evaluate, benchmark and recommend ways of improving customer service at INS.

The cost to INS was negligible. Most of the participants' expenses were covered under their agencies' training budgets. INS only needed to cover travel and supplies for the team.

Teaching Leaders

The USDA Graduate School in Washington offers an array of leadership development programs. EPP Program Director Norman A. Riggins and his staff offer 20 classroom-training days in a 12-month period to help students:

• Design a personalized leadership development plan.
• Complete two full-time developmental assignments of at least 60 days each.
• Shadow a senior executive for three days.
• Interview at least four senior executives.

The program prepares individuals with strong leadership potential for future executive roles within the government. The program encourages participants to seek new experiences through a range of assignments and long-term team projects. The one-year training period makes the program an ideal resource for agencies that need help with problem solving, benchmarking or other managerial projects.

Each EPP class is organized into teams of seven or eight students. An experienced faculty adviser and facilitator is assigned to each team. Our facilitator was Walter Besecker, a senior executive at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The teams can work on projects generated by agencies or create their own projects.

Our team designed its own project-improving front-counter customer service at INS. Our team began with more than 40 proposals and systematically worked its way to one project with the following criteria: "Is the project measurable, researchable, practical, sponsored, funded, divisible into multiple tasks, going to have a high agency impact and interesting?" Among the other projects we considered were:

• Explore whether American Indians could develop their own food distribution systems for school lunch programs on reservations.
• Develop an environmental computer-mapping program of rivers for waste management purposes.

In the Trenches

We began our customer service effort at INS quickly and enthusiastically. This was a chance to hone our leadership skills with others on the team, and to work on a worthwhile project outside of our fields of expertise. The scope of our project was to improve all services for INS clients from the time they enter an office to the time they leave.

We selected 10 sites to visit that would be a representative sample of INS offices nationwide. We benchmarked the sites with other INS offices and with private organizations that offer front-counter services and developed a list of best practices. Team members kept tabs on the project's progress through weekly conference calls. We appointed a new team leader every two months to coordinate activities, giving each member experience in leading a group effort.

After performing studies and interviewing representatives at the INS sites, we discovered that some offices were processing only half of their potential customers on some days. Other offices managed to serve all of their customers daily.

We collected data over a two-week period using survey cards to determine what information clients needed, whether that information was the same at each office, and how long it took clients to get this information. INS employees were willing to share their ideas and time to help our homegrown government consulting team.

The team looked at best practices from the more successful INS offices and brought in some new ideas by benchmarking for best practices at other government and private-sector organizations. The site visits focused on observing and evaluating leadership challenges, organizational change, operational effectiveness, diversity, leadership development and succession management. We looked at organizations that served hundreds of customers a day and processed numerous forms involving payment for services. The organizations we analyzed that had reputations for excellent customer service were: Johns Hopkins University Hospital, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Sweet Success

Through this project, INS obtained a comprehensive look at how to improve front-counter services in areas such as payments, signs, forms acceptance and delivery, customer service and traffic flow. The team also provided a report on which best practices outside INS might be implemented to reduce wait times. The agency now can give its offices a specific blueprint on how to improve services.

In turn, the EPP participants learned how to hone their leadership skills, facilitate group studies, delegate authority, manage multiple tasks, allocate limited resources, become team members, and be more creative and flexible in accomplishing goals.

Perhaps your agency might benefit from an EPP team. To find out about the Executive Potential Program and how to enlist as a potential project, call (202) 314-3580 or e-mail epp@grad.usda.gov. Today, many agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Transportation Safety Board and others, are using EPP students not only to solve large problems, but to plan future projects. Some agencies are even temporarily filling high-level vacancies by giving participants the opportunity to fulfill a 60-day assignment in one of those positions.

Participants in the Executive Potential Program learn through experience to become more flexible and resilient to change while working as members of a team. One of the first things those of us who have participated in the program will consider when dealing with future problems will be a trip to the leadership store to shop for solutions from the next cohort of aspiring federal leaders.