The Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center may not be well known to the public. But for more than a half-million federal employees, NFC is synonymous with payday, as one of the government’s four shared-services payroll processors.

For director Jerry Lohfink, CIO Gil Hawk and others at the New Orleans-based data center, the threat of a hurricane shutting down NFC’s operations was mostly a matter of when, not if. So while most agencies claim to have well-developed disaster recovery plans, Lohfink and his management team devote more than casual attention to practicing for the real thing.

Those drills yielded more than a higher state of preparedness. They helped NFC’s managers zero in on the most critical tasks that must be performed during a crisis—and identify what work could be put aside for later. In essence, they provided a constructive way to stress test an agency’s business processes.

"They provided a constructive way to stress test an agency’s business processes."

Those lessons, Lohfink suggests in this issue, enabled NFC to winnow its list of 100 activities down to 22 critical services. That made responsibilities clearer for NFC’s 1,250 employees and their work inherently more productive. (The exercise is one that government leaders might take to heart—especially at agencies claiming, as a GAO report noted unreassuringly, to provide as many as 500 essential functions.)

NFC’s experience suggests another important byproduct of disaster drills: the opportunity to develop leadership skills. Few things put the distinction between leadership and management into perspective better than a crisis. Lohfink doesn’t say so, but by extrapolation, the NFC case suggests where leadership skills get developed:

Good managers make sure disaster recovery plans are in place and up to date. Good leaders make sure the top operating people have a stake in designing them. Good managers make sure the plans get practiced. Good leaders make sure the lessons from those drills are analyzed and incorporated into newer plans, to be practiced the next time.

Good managers make sure employees follow disaster recovery plans when the time comes to execute them. Good leaders make sure employees are provided for when the plans no longer apply to the situation at hand.

As Katrina barrelled down on New Orleans that fateful weekend, NFC’s staff knew what needed to be done to complete a major payroll processing project and still get out of town to designated backup facilities with 50,000 tapes. Within just two days, the data center had been virtually recreated and was essentially back in business.

NFC didn’t get everything right. Lohfink and his team learned many new lessons from Katrina’s wrath. No one, for instance, foresaw the hardships NFC’s staff would face without permanent places to live for months on end. But the lessons of NFC are worth studying—as much for what they can teach about good leadership as about continuity of operations.