Pentagon to civilians: get departmentwide experience

Civilian executives in the Defense Department will need experience across the department to be competitive for high-level jobs, the new deputy undersecretary of defense for civilian personnel policy said Tuesday.

In an interview with Government Executive, Patricia Bradshaw, who took over the job in January, cited an initiative in the works to require joint-duty experience for Senior Executive Service positions as one of her top priorities.

"We have not, as a Department of Defense, in a deliberate way institutionally tried to manage our Senior Executive Service members," Bradshaw said. "We have operated in a very decentralized way."

The effort is similar to one under way in the intelligence sector, and is inspired by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which emphasized joint duty for military service members to create cohesiveness among the Army, Navy and Air Force.

"It is now seriously time to look at a Goldwater-Nichols framework as we think about managing our senior executives," Bradshaw said. "And, oh, by the way, the pipeline that feeds that."

Bradshaw, who returned to the Pentagon after a six-year stint in the private sector, has logged 27 years in the Defense Department. She said this initiative is inspired by her personal experience of moving, after years at the Navy, to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and then back to the Navy.

"My ability to make decisions and think about the good of the Department of Defense as a senior executive in the Department of the Navy would not have happened but for I had time in OSD," Bradshaw said. "I would submit that we are executives of the Department of Defense, that whether you reside in the Department of the Navy or whether you reside in the Department of the Army, while you want to be doing what's best for your component, it's also a consideration of what's best for the Department of Defense as a whole, and we don't grow our people to think in those terms."

Bradshaw said an initiative to formalize the philosophy is under way and has strong interest from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Joint-duty experience will be particularly important to employees seeking very high-level jobs.

"If you aspire to hold a particularly senior job in the SES corps," Bradshaw said, "there are expectations that you have moved around the Department of Defense, perhaps even outside your own functional domain to see what the rest of the world looks like."

Experience across the department does not necessarily mean switching jobs, Bradshaw said. It can also mean sitting on joint-duty task forces or gaining other experiences that cross component lines.

"This is sort of philosophical," Bradshaw said. "If you went to an Army person today out in the field, they would tell you stay in the Army. That's the way we grow our own and promote from within because that's how we do it today. But I would submit to you, particularly as you go up the chain, by the time you're about [a GS-11 or a GS-12], you need to be thinking about 'Maybe I need to go get experience.' "

Before leaving to work as head of human resources at American Management Systems Inc., a Fairfax, Va.-based information technology consulting firm, Bradshaw last served as head of personnel at the Naval Sea Systems Command, where she was heavily involved in the creation of demonstration projects to overhaul the personnel system.

Bradshaw's involvement in personnel changes dates back to her time in a lab that was used as a control group for the famed China Lake pay-for-performance demonstration project. Since then, she has made it a point to never be on the control side of pay-for-performance trials again. In a number of jobs, she worked to extend personnel reforms throughout the Navy, and to make the demonstration projects permanent.

"I sort of took it on as my passion," Bradshaw said. "[I] ended up in various jobs where I could take ownership of looking at [personnel reform] where the Department of Navy needed a chance and not just independent labs."

Bradshaw took part in several failed attempts to convince Congress to extend the reforms across the department. The National Security Personnel System was approved in 2003, when she was in the private sector.

"I've been gone six years and the rest of the heavy lifting got done," Bradshaw said. Although Mary Lacey is the program executive officer for NSPS, Bradshaw will support the system.