BIG CHANGE LIGHT TOUCH

Government Leader home > June 2005 issue

June 2005; Vol. 1 No. 2

BIG CHANGE, LIGHT TOUCH

By STEPHEN BARR

Mary Lacey takes an inclusive approach to coaching DOD employees on the department’s new personnel system.

The Senate is holding its first hearing on a proposed regulation that will create the National Security Personnel System, an ambitious effort to change how civil-service employees of the Defense Department are paid, promoted and disciplined. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), who chaired the February hearing, looks past the witness table and spots Mary E. Lacey in the audience.

“I understand you’re a 31-year employee of the department, so it’s nice to know you’re sticking around,” Voinovich says to Lacey. “Thank you for all the time you’ve invested in this system. I commend you for your dedication to this important job.” She smiles, acknowledging Voinovich’s salute.



This is not about control. This is about shaping chaos. —Mary Lacey

Mary Lacey is a hands-on, common-sense career employee of the Navy. Personnel policy is not her usual gig. She is an engineer—one who knows a lot about explosives.

Still, in an interview, she appears confident that she brings the right kind of experience to her assignment—an appreciation of front-line work performed at Defense labs and military bases around the country.

“As a line manager, you learn it is all about the people,” she says. “It is the line that gets things done.”

Lacey was named program executive officer for the new personnel system, called NSPS, in May 2004. The changes—scheduled for a multiyear phase in, starting this summer—will replace the mostly automatic General Schedule pay raises with a pay-for-performance system that the Bush administration claims will allow Defense managers to better reward their star employees.

Other NSPS changes cut off unions at their knees, prohibiting them from negotiating over such issues as how work is assigned or technology is used. And other changes are aimed at speeding up the disciplinary process used to fire or penalize problem workers.

Before her selection as the NSPS chief, Lacey served as technical director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, at the Washington Navy Yard. She was in charge of about 17,000 employees, including 11,000 who were in a “demonstration project,” testing performancebased management strategies.

It took three to five years for the warfare center’s employees to accept the changes, Lacey said. Training on the new system turned out to be crucial in terms of employee satisfaction ratings and improving skills of supervisors, she said.

Now, Lacey’s challenge is to steer new workplace rules across the many commands that make up Defense, where 746,000 civil-service employees work.

That means “flexible rigidity”—imposing uniform rules where needed, such as pay bands for occupations, while providing local bases with some leeway, such as internal policies for setting salaries within the bands.

“This is not about control,” she says. “This is about shaping chaos.”

“It is not going to be successful if I do it to them. They have to do it for themselves. I have to coach them through—getting comfortable, helping them see the light, understanding how it works in their organization. ... They’ve got to take ownership of it. If I police them through it, I fail. I have to advise them through it.”

Her management experience in the field is helping her sort through the complexities of the NSPS, she says.

“I’ve always had a bias toward being inclusive. ... My predisposition is to be inclusive and to involve folks that have different opinions, keep an open mind. It is helping me a lot here.”

Leading the creation of NSPS also means “you need to be comfortable with uncertainty,” she says. “If you let uncertainty paralyze you, you couldn’t do this job.”

Most Defense civil-service employees seem to be taking a wait-and-see stance on the personnel overhaul. Labor leaders have denounced NSPS, claiming it is part of an effort by the Bush White House to bust unions. Pentagon leaders say that is not their intention.

Lacey, for her part, believes that union-management partnerships are a key ingredient of successful organizations. “In the long run, we’ve got to move back together,” she says.



	STEPHEN BARR

Stephen Barr writes the Federal Diary column for The Washington Post. He also hosts an online discussion, “Federal Diary Live,” each week at www.washingtonpost.com.