Later, at lunchtime, she talks with them. “These mostly minority women were typists—at [pay] grades 2 or 3—in a typing pool.

“A couple of them could have been my grandmother, and here I was already something like a Grade 7, so I asked, ‘Why are you sitting in this room at grades 2 and 3 when there’s a whole world out here? Why don’t you run on down to personnel and they’ll tell you what else is available’.”

They were aghast. “We can’t do that,” they said.

“They told me they could lose their jobs if their supervisor found out they’d gone to personnel,” Lovelace said. “These ladies were raising families on very small salaries and they were grateful just to have jobs and be able to provide for their families.”

“That was it,” she said. “I decided at that very moment that I was going to get into what then was called the personnel business. Opportunities were being denied to people; what should have been an open system was closed, and I wanted to open it up.”

The next day, she changed her major to personnel management.

Over the next three decades, Gail T. Lovelace changed the technology, structure and even the goals of federal human resources departments.

At the General Services Administration, where Lovelace is chief people officer and chief human capital officer, HR transactions run on the Comprehensive Human Resources Integrated System and the Payroll Accounting and Reporting.

Lovelace is proud of the systems: She directed their development, winning a 2002 Presidential Rank Award for that accomplishment, along with her World-Class Workforce initiative to involve GSA executives in attracting skilled employees to the agency.

“The whole issue of IT has served me well,” she said.

Indeed, the CHRIS project wasn’t her first experience in developing a human resources IT system for GSA.

In 1979, when Lovelace came to GSA, agency was about to be hit by a major reduction in its workforce, referred to as RIF. Coordinating the RIF was Lovelace’s job.

For a people person like Lovelace, it was a brutal assignment. But she threw herself into transitioning workers to new jobs, developing training to give them new skills and providing job counseling.

"I want [CHCOs] at the table when the business decisions are being discussed, for human capital considerations to be an element in strategic business decisions."

In the early 1980s, when GSA decided to use the Defense Department’s Personnel Information Reporting System to develop its own HR system, Lovelace was ready for a new challenge. By the time PIRS was implemented, she said, “I knew that system like the back of my hand.”

By 1996, technological developments had overtaken PIRS, and Lovelace began a search for commercial software to replace the system. “A lot of software vendors were federalizing their HR packages to some extent, but no one was doing it all,” she said. Oracle Corp. came closest. Working with the company, she drove development of new IT components for what would become CHRIS.

The effort was a success. GSA saved millions of dollars in fiscal 2001 due to reduced costs for transaction processing in HR offices, external recruitment and internal competitive staffing.

Between 1993 and 1998, another RIF eliminated 6,000 jobs, nearly a third of GSA’s workforce. Once again, Lovelace initiated measures to soften the blow, engineering a buyout and early retirement program for more than 4,000 employees.

She also captured a $4.7 million federal job-training grant to set up five career-transition centers, winning a Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore in the process.

The RIF and subsequent hiring freeze also won her a new headache: a skills shortage. She set up a National Management Intern Program to train new staff. Her six-month Changemasters program was a crash course in career development for lower-level employees.

Lovelace continued proactively making changes: Web-enabling CHRIS, creating a toll-free benefits line for employees and creating the Online University to let employees take career advancement courses. A branding campaign, “You can do it here,” makes hay of the agency’s more than 300 occupations on staff.

She also instituted recruitment bonuses, teleworking, alternative work schedules, subsidies for transportation and child care, and onsite child-care facilities. Her Fast Track program lets supervisors reward outstanding employees with a check, delivered within a day.

Lovelace’s HR efforts over the years have paid off. After the Office of Personnel Management’s 2004 survey of 150,000 federal workers, GSA ranked among the Top 10 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. Her experience is being put to the test again— GSA recently announced that a significant drop-off in revenues has forced it into a hiring freeze.

Making Waves
It’s almost as though Lovelace can’t help roiling the waters. Speaking at a 1998 HR conference, she drew cheers from the crowd when she said: “The government recognized that money was important and created a chief financial officer. It recognized that IT was important and created a chief information officer. So where’s the chief people officer?”

The story ran in the press and GSA administrator David Barram read it. “He called me and said, ‘OK, let’s talk about this,’” Lovelace said. They did, and on Sept. 11, 1998, Barram named Lovelace the federal government’s first chief people officer.

“Being prepared is important,” she said. “Being lucky is also important. I was lucky in the kind of person the administrator was. Dave Barram always thought out of the box.

“Most people think human capital, human resources—take your pick—just isn’t all that important. But truth is, if you don’t have people, who cares about the IT and everything else? That work just won’t get done.”

In 2001, Stephen Perry succeeded Barram as administrator and, in 2002, Congress passed the Chief Human Capital Officers Act, requiring executive departments and agencies to designate CHCOs.

“I said, ‘OK, Steve, who’s going to be your chief human capital officer?’ And he said, ‘Gail, who else do you think?’” Thus, Lovelace assumed her dual title.

CHCOs across the government are all grappling with the same issues, said Lovelace, a charter member of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. “Our environments are different, and some agencies are challenged in different areas, but that’s where the CHCO Council can make a difference,” she said. “Sharing our knowledge and experience can help all of us to be better at our jobs.”

It’s critical for CHCOs to report to the head of their agency, Lovelace said. “I want us at the table when the business decisions are being discussed, for human capital considerations to be an element in strategic business decisions.”

It’s not a universally supported position. “It’s very much like what happened with CIOs and CFOs,” she said. The only way they got their seats at the leadership table “was through legislation mandating it. That’s why we’re fighting for legislation to do the same for CHCOs.”

But what Lovelace wants perhaps most is for CHCOs to focus on career consulting. The transactional, human resources side must come first, she said. “If you’re not taking care of people’s needs, like getting paid on time, you’re not going to do any consulting. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of need.”

In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory, represented as a pyramid, all but the tip is given to “deficit needs”: air, water, food and sex, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem from others and for oneself. If you don’t have enough, you feel a deficit; if you have enough, the needs cease to be motivating.

At the top of Maslow’s triangle is the need for self-actualization, sought only after one’s deficit needs have been met. Once engaged, this need is likely to strengthen.

“If you look at our business model as being [like Maslow’s] triangle,” Lovelace explained, demonstrating with a five-foot wooden triangle she keeps in her office, “we’re the opposite. Most of our resources are devoted to the transactional part of the job. I want to flip that triangle and spend fewer resources on the transactional and a greater amount on the consulting.”

Making the Grade
When President Bush in August 2001 launched his President’s Management Agenda, naming human capital as one of five areas of federal government management in need of reform, she was delighted.

“I love that human capital is on the PMA,” Lovelace said.

But, for now, it’s something like a love-hate relationship. Despite Lovelace’s efforts, GSA’s human capital rating on the PMA scorecard for two years has remained unblinkingly yellow.

“That is more frustrating than I can ever begin to tell you,” Lovelace said. “We’ve met all the requirements of the PMA in my view, but our graders think we haven’t.”

She added: “People at [the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget] come to us all the time to ask us to help other agencies with their human capital issues. I’m on the management board of another agency and helped to design its pay-for-performance program. [In 2004] GSA was the first agency that OPM certified for a performance-based pay system for the Senior Executive Service.

“Every new idea we have is held up to our business model and if it doesn’t help us get closer to achieving our business goals, we take it off the table. If you look at our strategic human capital plan, we are focused on all aspects of human capital planning, and we are implementing many of those plans.”

It’s suggested that she’ll nail the elusive green after the agency finishes merging its Federal Supply Service and Federal Technology Service.

“It’s not a merging,” she said. “It’s a reorganization into a new entity—we’re creating a new organization. But I definitely think that doing that work will help tremendously in getting the green.”

Reporting to Congress in April 2003 on human capital best practices, GAO strategic issues director Christopher Mihn singled out GSA and GSA’s chief people officer. “[Her] vision is for GSA’s [chief people officer] to become a partner in GSA’s business success.”

Lovelace agreed but, typically, reached further. “GSA’s role is to help make other agencies more effective in achieving their goals. Those goals are always changing, always evolving, so GSA is always changing as well,” she said.

“I love it here because I’m never bored, because there’s always something new,” she said. “I need that.”