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Government Leader home > news stories
04/17/06
Change Agents: Rare characteristics define top-echelon leaders
By John L. Guerra
Special to Government Leader
There are but a few of them in the ranks of government leaders: Department of Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge was one. So is Pete Rustan, director of advanced systems and technology at the National Reconnaissance Office, as is Louis Andre, chief of staff and chief operating officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
They’re considered top change agents, the term Daniel Forrester, director of government services for Sapient Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., uses in a study to describe the few who have leadership characteristics that enable them to “enact innovative ideas by working within the existing bureaucratic hierarchies and by injecting a sense of passion and purpose that brings along the more risk-averse.” Change agents are imaginative, daring, able to learn from mistakes and skilled at framing a clear, compelling vision of “what ought to be,” in the words of another change agent, Scott Hastings, CIO for DHS' U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator System.
The report, The Government’s New Breed of Change Agents, Leading the War on Terror, available at www.Sapient.com, describes what Forrester learned after about 40 hours of interviews with two dozen of the government’s top leaders. He asked them about what made them tick, how they approached problems, what they did with their mistakes and a host of other approaches they took to problem-solving. The idea, Forrester says, is that the government develops methodology to recognize those with change-agent attributes and recruits them to leadership positions. The government needs leaders who can lead their agencies during the post-9/11 era.
“While leadership is widely taught and valued greatly,” Forrester says, “change agents are these rare people with the DNA to move bureaucracy to a new place. They are extremely important in this interagency problem known as the war on terror.”
What is the DNA makeup of a change agent? They’re self-confident, relationship builders, effective communicators, have a sense of service and are able to “cluster,” gathering other change agents to their cause. The practical role of change agents is to think quickly and morph their missions to meet new challenges brought about by terrorist attacks, changes in security needs and a thousand other possibilities in this uncertain time, Forrester says.
Change agents are vital in the context of interagency effectiveness, Forrester says. The change agent sees his/her agency in a larger context and can see the connections within the matrix of government agencies and organizations. “The change agent at DHS has to think of the Justice Department and other intelligence communities,” Forrester says.
The New Breed of Change Agents doesn’t pretend that these talented leaders operate perfectly in an always-rosy environment. “The problem set [and] the context in which change agents operate, given the nature of that ‘interagency problem’ called the war on terror, is replete with pitfalls, and change agents are comfortable in that setting,” Forrester says. “They have to be.”
Are change agents imaginative and farsighted by nature or can they be trained to fill the bill? “I asked Secretary Ridge, ‘Are change agents made or are they born?’ He thought it was a combination of both,” Forrester says. “It’s a learned behavior; change agents have reference points for success and failure. They’ve been through the school of hard knocks. They can say, ‘We tried this at that agency’ [or] ‘I learned from that mistake not to do this.’ The DNA is there or it’s not, but it’s also what they learned along the road— they were probably mentored by other change agents, too.”
Forrester didn’t ask his interview subjects about pressure on the job, he says, because in the war on terror, change agents often are in the business of saving lives—preventing attacks and responding quickly when disaster strikes. “If you look at the list of people I interviewed, these are people where pressure is table stakes,” he says. “I don’t say that lightly. The place where the change agent finds himself … nothing is more pressure-filled than being in interagency rooms when lives are at stake. The change agents I interviewed never brought up the pressure or lamented it. You don’t show up for those jobs if you can’t handle the pressure.”
Sapient provides a blog on change agents, including comments by the 24 leaders Forrester interviewed for his report, at www.GovernmentChangeAgents.com.
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