One of the first things she did was to press for change in the faculty hiring system at the college. The system was exasperatingly bureaucratic and labor-intensive, and often eliminated the best candidates.

“I had done lots of hiring in civilian higher education and wanted to do the same kind of thing [at the college] to improve the result,” said McDaniel, now the college’s dean of faculty and academic programs. “And I kept getting, ‘You have to do it this way, you have to do it that way.’ ”

One day, McDaniel overheard someone say, “She just doesn’t understand government,” implying that government processes work a cer

Elizabeth McDaniel (Image: Drake Sorey)

tain way, and McDaniel should just accept it.

Undaunted, McDaniel kept pushing. “I worked with the university lawyers and [human resources department] to establish a fair and legal process for hiring new faculty for the college,” she said.

As a result, the hiring process today is less bureaucratic, faster and generates stronger candidates, according to McDaniel.

Elizabeth McDaniel’s management style personifies the transformational-leadership philosophy she espouses.

“I think to be a leader in government you need to push that envelope and say, ‘Why? Let’s change it, let’s fix it, let’s make it better,’ ” she said. “I think transformation is the word for that. We need leaders to make that happen.” For McDaniel, the IRM program is, at its core, all about developing senior leaders in government who will think outside the box.

“Strategic-leadership development is really the focus of everything we do,” she said. “We’re trying to develop chief executive officers ... and get them to think about being a leader and beyond the boundaries of today, or beyond the boundaries of their organizations, for a larger purpose.”

Officially, the college’s mission is “to prepare leaders to direct the information component of national power by leveraging information and information technology for strategic advantage.”

The college’s pedagogic approach mirrors its emphasis on grooming a new kind of leader in government.

“It’s not just lecture, lecture, lecture,” McDaniel said. “We focus on critical thinking and challenging assumptions. Educate to incite is certainly what it’s about, getting people thinking differently. Leadership is really a way of thinking and a way of being.”

About 3,500 to 4,000 students, from both the Defense Department and civilian agencies, take graduate-level courses each year at the college, on site and online. Graduates can apply nine to 15 graduate credits toward master’s and doctoral degrees at some 27 universities.

To qualify, students must hold bachelor’s degrees or higher and rank at the GS-13 or lieutenant colonel level or above. Managers from private industry who work for agencies on contract also are eligible to attend.

The National Defense University and the IRM college are located at Fort Lesley J. McNair, which is set on a peninsula in southwest Washington that overlooks the Washington Channel and the Anacostia River. McNair has been an Army post for more than 200 years, third only to West Point, N.Y., and Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania in length of service. With its stately neo-Georgian buildings and broad, green lawns, it looks more like a college campus than a military base.

The college draws a spectrum of students—not just CIO types—from across the government. An expanding segment of the student body comes from the acquisition, finance and human capital sectors, reflecting the government’s ongoing management reform efforts. The President’s Management Agenda, for instance, seeks to integrate the roles of IT, acquisition, human capital and finance.

Many students arrive at the college for its 14-week Advanced Management Program without a background in information technology. They might be financial executives, for example.

“We have more and more people coming from the finance areas to take our courses, because finance and chief information officers need to work together much better,” McDaniel said.

In the Information Age, government executives of all stripes, not just those in IT, need to learn how leverage information for the mission of their organization. “It’s about becoming an information leader,” she said.

‘Rigorous and appropriate.’ As dean of faculty and academic programs, McDaniel hires and evaluates faculty members, who report to her through their departments, and works with them to develop courses and programs, “sensing what the [government] community needs, and creating a rigorous and appropriate curriculum that responds to that,” she said.

“My job is to have academic programs that have high quality and keep the students coming back for more,” she said.

While the curriculum is important, the ultimate focus is on creating a learning environment that facilitates leadership development, she said.

“Our mission doesn’t say teach classes, it says prepare leaders,” McDaniel said. “So we are working more closely with Defense and civilian agencies to provide any kind leadership development they need.”

McDaniel recently worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to create a leadership program for its GS-9 to GS-11 managers. “They are not eligible to come to our classes, so we’ve put together a three-day program for them,” she said. “So we’re doing a lot more of those kinds of customized educational activities that can be offered here or in their agencies.”

It’s the pressures of an increasingly uncertain world that are creating the need for a new type of leader in government, McDaniel believes. It is telling that she and her staff are working with the Navy Department to develop a two-day executive preparation program for new CIOs in Iraq.

“The demand for agile, energetic, creative and transformational leadership is more evident today than it was before,” she said.

Being agile is especially critical because the world is changing so fast, she said. Leaders “have to have the capacity to respond to the unanticipated, to respond to positive as well as less positive events, and to be proactive and anticipate.”

McDaniel described this attribute as “sense and respond.” In the private sector, companies like Amazon.com have moved from a “make-and-sell” model to a sense-and-respond approach that lets them quickly adapt to changes in the market and meet demand. The same model can be applied in government, McDaniel said.

“This dynamic, complex and uncertain environment we live in today—the Information Age—requires us to think about new models for doing our business,” she said. E-government is one way government is applying a sense-and-respond technique.

“I think e-gov is an excellent example of how government is trying to respond,” she said. “There are citizens out there who have new expectations and demands for transparent government, more interactive government, easier transactions with government and more efficiency in saving the dollars of citizens.”

A key impediment to more responsive government is the boundary lines drawn around departments and agencies—stovepipes in the current vernacular. Transformational leaders have to learn to work across organizational boundaries. Thus, fostering cross-boundary collaboration is a key theme in the college’s classrooms.

Transcending deep-rooted boundaries in government isn’t a simple matter. “We’ve got the bureaucracy that was built over decades, all with good intentions,” McDaniel said. “Sometimes there are laws forbidding us to do some things, like sharing resources to do cross-boundary things. It doesn’t mean we should give up. There are good reasons why we need to leap over those boundaries, push against them and reinvent [government].”

The federal e-government program, which involves alliances among agencies, “is a good example of trying to make it happen,” she said.

Straight Talk. When McDaniel first got to NDU, which draws students from across the armed services, she was mystified by all the acronyms used in the Defense Department. She wasn’t alone.

“Nobody else knew what they meant either,” she said. “It wasn’t just that I was new. The Army didn’t know what the Air Force was talking about. How effective is communication when you don’t speak the same language? These boundaries are real. So to be effective, we’ve got to figure out how to cross them. Working together to cross boundaries is how we’re going to make change.”

The attempt to sort out issues of great impact on the federal level, such as transcending boundaries, is an aspect of her job that McDaniel finds especially appealing.

It was a stint as a leadership fellow 16 years ago that gave McDaniel a taste for working on issues with a national scope.

After receiving a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Miami in 1978, she spent the next 16 years at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, first as a professor of education and later as associate vice president for academic affairs.

While at Hartford, McDaniel spent a year as an American Council of Education fellow in a leadership development program, interning at the University of Connecticut. It was an experience that opened her eyes to the new horizons.

“Going from being a faculty member to being a leadership fellow gave me a national perspective,” she said. “I got to work on issues with a national impact. It’s hard to go back to the farm after you’ve been to Paree.”

McDaniel went back to Hartford for another five years and then spent three years at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., serving as executive provost and vice president for academic affairs.

In 1998, she landed in Washington as a senior fellow at the American Council on Education, where she developed leadership and online-education programs. A year later, Robert Childs, director of the IRM College, offered her the NDU position. “I wanted to go out and find somebody who was really sharp, could run all of the academic programs and do the things that needed to be done in a growing institution,” Childs said. “She’s brought the sense of freshness and new perspective that is exactly what I had hoped for when I hired her.”

“A lot of people can be great leaders when they come into an organization that’s in turmoil, but she came into a good one and made it even better. That’s really tough to do,” he added.

For her part, McDaniel feels she is right where she belongs, at an academic institution with national influence.

“It’s a big enough job with a big enough view to keep me interested, get engaged and do new things,” she said. “I guess I always look for an opportunity for a large impact, and I’m somebody who has large appetite for change. I’m a builder and an innovator and am rewarded by making a difference.”

Besides that, she said, “I love Washington and love being at the center of everything.”