Stable, but adaptable, leadership is key to an agency’s development

Some agency management cultures don’t change much from year to year. Other agencies adapt more nimbly to changes in leadership or resources.

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, the management culture has changed considerably over the years, said Louis Andre, DIA’s chief of staff.

“For the last five years, we’ve been the opposite of change adverse,” Andre said. The agency has learned to “harvest the really great ideas of the Generation X and Y folks,” not resist them. “The way we’ve always done things isn’t the way to always do things.”

DIA did a lot of self-scrutiny and examin

MISSION STATEMENT: Coast Guard Vice Adm. Bob Papp says all Guard members know its core values. (Image: Telfair H. Brown)

ed the best practices of industry. One of the models that turned out to be “less than optimally effective” was a decentralized approach.

“We recognized we did have some culture of warlordism, in some cases, and we moved to build a more centralized model,” Andre said. “Before, we had an uncentralized model, where a thousand flowers bloom.” The agency restructured itself a bit, making some services centralized, and decentralizing others.

DIA’s culture “is a reflection of its values,” Andre said. “And it’s the role of senior leadership to establish and communicate those values. I’ve seen an organization’s culture literally change overnight by senior leadership’s articulation of values.”

But it’s not enough for agencies to communicate their core values. They have to act on them, too.

“If your agency has a core value of being innovative, but every time you bring a new idea to your boss it gets shut down,” that’s not a good alignment, said Mike Sledge, president of Robbins-Gioia LLC of Alexandria, Va.

Stable leadership was also cited by analysts as an indicator of a strong management culture.

“The agencies I’ve most admired have had their leadership in place for many years,” said Tim Barnhart, president of Federal Management Partners Inc. of Alexandria, Va. “Political rotation—civilian and DOD—is something that can get in the way of an agency’s culture.”

Robert Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University’s School of Public Affairs, said that effective leadership was the most important factor cited in the 2005 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government survey, compiled by the Partnership for Public Service and the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation.

“I don’t think enough time, money or energy is spent on supporting the development of those who lead in the federal government,” Tobias said. “The final test [of an agency culture], the ultimate test, is whether or not individuals are willing to give their discretionary energy—the kind of energy I give because I’m engaged.

It’s when someone says, ‘I’ll go the extra thousand yards because I believe in where the agency is going and in my role in getting it there.’ ”

Kathryn Newcomer, director of George Washington University’s School of Public Policy, agreed. The one ingredient that would most likely make an organization fail “is having really, really poor leadership, people who don’t walk the walk,” she said. “Unfortunately, there are too many of those.”

People look to their leaders to carry the flag forward, said David McClure, research director for government IT management at Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn. “But they also like leaders who roll up their sleeves and recognize there’s work to be done.”

Employees tend to prefer highly visible leaders, said Fred Thompson, vice president of the Council for Excellence in Government. “That’s the first issue people have with senior leadership—does anybody ever see them?” The leaders may be the “tip of the spear,” but employees need to know that “the whole spear is important.”

Senior leadership has to translate to employees their role in the agency’s culture, said Coast Guard chief of staff Vice Adm. Bob Papp. “Go up to any of 40,000 Coast Guard military folks, and they’ll be able to tell you our core values: honor, respect, devotion to duty,” he said. “That permeates our culture, going back to Alexander Hamilton, our founder.”

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year, the Coast Guard rescued 33,000 people from the Gulf Coast in a few weeks. Papp attributes this effort to the high value the service places on leadership skills. The 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who did most of the rescues—flying helicopters and driving boats—received leadership training. “It’s not good enough to just be a technician,” Papp said. “You’re also expected to be a leader and carry out missions, sometimes independently.”

The Coast Guard’s leader, Commandant Thad Allen, is famous for keeping it simple.

Allen, a former student of Newcomer at GWU, gave a talk about Katrina at the university last year. He said in the storm’s aftermath, the top issues were “housing, housing and housing,” Newcomer said. He also said he told the Coast Guard “to treat each person as if they are one of your personal family members.”

The Coast Guard has been “a poster child of being more of a performance culture,” Newcomer said. Performance metrics are “kind of like flossing your teeth,” she said. “You don’t get into the habit of doing it, but it’s easy to give it lip service. Then you go to your dentist and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know it’s important.’ ”

MEASUREMENT QUANDARY. Even the Coast Guard occasionally runs aground on measuring performance, Papp said. For example, one of the guard’s tasks is to prevent illegal drugs from coming into the country. “But how do you measure that?” he asked. “Measure how much drugs are selling for on the street? It’s a difficult thing to quantify.”

Likewise, at DIA, staff members struggle with creating accurate performance metrics. “Every analyst is working on a high-priority issue,” Andre said. “What kind of metrics can you come up with for analyzing the insurgency in Iraq?”

About performance metrics, some senior federal executives say “that trying to put numbers on this stuff is ridiculous,” said Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association. “You really need to clarify the goals for the year, rather than say, ‘We’ve got to fit you in some kind of crazy mold here that’s going to drive you nuts and demoralize you.’ ”

Indeed, performance measurement can be a stumbling block for agencies, Tobias said. The lack of measurable performance goals has become an impediment to tools that might otherwise contribute to creating an effective management culture, such as teleworking, he said.

“So long as employees are evaluated based on hard work”—for example, long hours at the office—”as opposed to measurable achievement, managers will rightfully want people within their vision to determine that they’re working hard,” Tobias said. “But if there are measurable outputs, then I, as a manager, don’t have to have them within my eyesight. I can look at the product. So telework is at the intersection of the failure to create measurable output goals.”

Interest in teleworking has increased in the past few years, said Lou Anne Brossman, director of public-sector marketing for Juniper Networks Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., primarily due to greater interest in preparing for emergencies such as bird flu.

For teleworking to succeed, Brossman said, cultural changes have to take place. “We suspect that where the door closes on telework is at midlevel managers. They have a lot of uncertainty and fear,” she said. Juniper surveyed civilian and military employees in June and found that 44 percent were worried that teleworking would hurt their supervision. “They think if they’re not in the office, they can’t have team meetings,” which is not true, given the teleworking tools that are now available, she said.

Brossman said she thinks some of the resistance to teleworking shown by midlevel managers is generational. “They use technology, but they don’t trust it,” she said. “And they don’t trust their co-workers to use it and be productive.” At a teleworking seminar, Brossman said, a woman stood up and said, “I just don’t understand how on Sept. 11, nobody could talk to each other, or how during Hurricane Katrina, nobody could communicate. My 20-year-old daughter can find anybody any time. She’ll go to Myspace.com, or text message them or call them on her cell phone.”

Combined with other tools such as flex-time, telework can help create a place where people like to work, said Dro DerMinassian, director of business transformation with Dynamics Research Corp. of Andover, Mass. “With the gridlock in Washington, D.C., for example, it really adds value and provides more employee loyalty.”

But federal employees have a deeper need than just connecting to the office over digital subscriber lines. They are much less likely to dread Monday mornings if they can connect their work to the organization’s larger mission, analysts say.

At DIA, keeping connected to the mission is “a no-brainer,” Andre said. “Every day we glance at the newspaper and, above the fold, we read about our customers—brave young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan—getting shot and killed. We lost seven DIA employees in the attack on the Pentagon. There’s not a day I don’t drive by the impact site. So you think about that every day. That’s what our mission is about, and our motto, ‘Excellence in defense of the nation,’ reflects that.”

Each Coast Guard employee, whether “pushing paper or driving a boat, knows how his role fits into the whole of Coast Guard’s part of national security,” Papp said.

Some years ago, Bonosaro attended a few NASA shuttle launches. “The esprit de corps among that NASA staff, from the top down to the bus driver, was just tremendous,” she said. Each employee knew that he was the face of NASA.

Lastly, the effective use of rewards and recognition can go a long way in creating a productive agency culture.

Earlier in her career, Bonosaro led a group at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that was developing a program about sex discrimination. “Nobody wanted to get involved in it,” she said. To help motivate her employees in at least a small way, she bought a 25-cent box of gold stars at the drugstore. Whenever employees did something good, she’d send them a note with a little gold star affixed to it.

One day Bonosaro’s director came in, sat down and said, “I’m mad at you. I’ve done this, I’ve done that, and you’ve never given me a gold star.”

“That’s how important recognition is,” Bonosaro said.