District of Columbia
Society of Certified Public Managers
Improving Public Service by Improving Public Managers

We love to fire leaders. In business, it’s good for the stock. According to Burson-Marsteller, stock price appreciation of S&P 500 companies averages 1.5 percent on the announcement of a new CEO. And when the board fires the CEO, a company’s stock price increases 3 percent. Is it any wonder that leadership tenure has fallen to less than five years? Not only does Wall Street welcome new leaders, it rejoices!

Our reverence for firing leaders does not only apply to business leaders. It extends to coaches, sitcom characters and, on occasion, teachers (with the exception of those with tenure). When things aren’t working, we fire the leader. It’s human nature.

This phenomenon surely extends to government leaders as well, both elected officials and professional administrators. The question is: Why do we rejoice? It’s simple, really. New leaders, by virtue of their mere novelty, are signs of hope. Could this leader be our savior? This then begs a second question: Why wait to be fired to send messages of hope? I believe it is because we do not know how. We, as leaders, do not often talk about hope or consider it a competitive advantage. The irony, however, is that government leaders are dealers in hope.

When people look to leaders, they are looking for reasons to believe–in the organization, in the future and, fundamentally, in you, the leader. Learning to use hope to your advantage could be the single greatest skill you can master.
Hope Dealer a New Kind of Government Leader

When the Presidential Personnel Office in January appointed Jeff Pon to be chief human capital officer at the Energy Department, Pon had mixed feelings about displacing the career executive in the position, Claudia Cross.

“I knew and respected Claudia as possibly the best human capital officer in the government,” he said. “But I came here because I knew she and I would be a great partnership in getting stuff done.”

Cross, now deputy CHCO, had known for months that a new CHCO likely would be named. And holding down both jobs, CHCO and human resources director, “was enormously demanding,” she said, but “it was with the expected mixed feelings that I received the news.

“However, Jeff and I had worked on some critical issues while he was at the Office of Personnel Management, and I was pleased to hear that someone who shares my passion and values would be coming to DOE. Jeff and I both approach this relationship as a partnership [that lets us] each focus on our own perspective.”

Pon and Cross appear to have forged an ideal working relationship at Energy. And it would seem on the surface that that many other political appointees and career executives across the government have similarly synchronous relationships.
Delicate Balance

Young Americans by the thousands followed President Kennedy’s inaugural advice in the 1960s and asked themselves what they could do for their country. Service in the federal government seemed like the perfect way to heed the president’s rallying call. Stoked by passionate rhetoric of service to humankind, idealistic twenty-somethings signed on for federal employment in droves.

Back then, federal service did not conjure up Dilbertesque visions of office workers tapping on keyboards in windowless pods or swimming in bureaucratic red tape. On the contrary, federal workers were at the helm of some of the century’s most exciting and important work, waging war on poverty and landing on the moon.

Now the baby boomers are getting ready to retire. Born between 1946 and 1964, the oldest of the generation turn 60 this year, and the federal government will be losing huge labor and knowledge resources.

That’s why everybody in government these days seems to be talking about succession planning and finding ways to develop new leaders.
Succession Planning, Government Leader

Anyone who has worked in government knows it’s not easy to get city, county and local agencies to agree on anything. Patricia Curtis has made a career of it.

Curtis, director of management information systems for Leon County, Fla., has spent the past 13 years building bridges across agency and jurisdictional lines previously deemed impassable, as she oversees the county’s IT department in Tallahassee.

She’s brought together cities and counties, public defenders and prosecutors, and sheriffs and police by taking the time and devoting the attention needed to smooth over old rifts while giving all her clients what they need.

Government Leader: Managing for Results - 13 June 06

Reform initiatives have swept through governments in the United States and overseas, again and again bringing news about efforts to reinvent, transform, or reform government agencies (Barzelay 2001; Kettl 2000; Light 1997; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000; Stillman 1999). Some academic theories and popular stereotypes depict large organizations, and especially government bureaucracies, as change resistant. This view conflicts with the reality that organizations, including government agencies, change frequently. Authors report evidence that various forms of organizational change in the public sector succeed frequently, that career civil servants often lead them, and that they succeed as often as change efforts in private business firms (e.g., Borins 1998; Doig and Hargrove 1990; Golembiewski 1985; Holzer and Callahan 1998; Robertson and Seneviratne 1995).

This evidence notwithstanding, recurrent change in government has not induced a high volume of articles in public administration journals that explicitly address the topic of organizational change. There are prominent exceptions to this observation (e.g., Bryson and Anderson 2000; Chackerian and Mavima 2000; Mani 1995; Robertson and Seneviratne 1995; Wise 2002). In addition, many journal articles address topics relating to organizational change, such as the adoption and implementation of “reinventing government” and New Public Management reforms (e.g., Berman and Wang 2000; Brudney and Wright 2002; Grizzle and Pettijohn 2002; Hood and Peters 2004; Julnes and Holzer 2001; Thompson and Fulla 2001). Articles reporting research and theory with titles containing “organizational change” and with that theme as a specific focal topic, however, appear with much less regularity in public administration journals than in the journals of research on general management and organization theory.
Managing Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector (PAR)

In recent years, a commitment to increased accountability and improved performance has become essential in both governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations. To help managers and executives in their ongoing quest for greater accountability and improved performance, Theodore H. Poister offers a comprehensive resource for designing and implementing effective performance measurement systems at the agency level. The ideas, tools, and processes in this vital resource will help organizations develop measurement systems to support such results-oriented management approaches as strategic management, results-based budgeting, performance management, process improvement, performance contracting, and employee incentive systems. Using this book as a guide, public and nonprofit organizations can accurately measure outputs, efficiency, productivity, effectiveness, service quality, and customer satisfaction, and use the resulting data to strengthen decision-making and improve agency and program performance.

Measuring Performance in Public and Nonprofit Organizations shows how to identify outcomes and other performance criteria to be measured, tie measures to goals and objectives, define and evaluate the worth of desired performance measures, and analyze, process, report, and utilize the data. This important resource also shows how to tailor performance measurement systems to support particular management and decision-making processes. Specific applications of performance measurement include strategic planning and management, budgeting, performance management, process improvement, and comparative benchmarking. In addition, the book identifies common methodological and managerial problems that often confront managers in developing such systems, and presents a number of targeted strategies for the successful implementation of measurement systems in public and nonprofit organizations.
Measuring Performance in Public and Nonprofit Organizations

We have business and we have government. For too many intents and purposes, we have nothing in between. This distinction has framed the great social debate for more than a century: capitalism versus socialism, markets versus controls, individualism versus collectivism, privatization versus nationalization, “free enterprise” versus “democracy of the proletariat.” The debate features no cooperatives, no NGOs, no not-for-profits, no volunteer organizations, not because they don’t exist–clearly they are present in large numbers–but because they have been forced aside by this simplistic divide.

In a sense, this is a problem of labeling. The sector that is neither business nor government is invisible because it is not clearly labeled. It is instead confounded by a plethora of inadequate labels. The two most common, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and not-for-profits, are negative, about what these organizations are not. And these labels are ambiguous as well, since government is also not-for-profit, while business is also nongovernmental. We need to understand this sector by what it is. Another label is the voluntary sector, but in many of these organizations, the only volunteers are the members of the Board of Directors.

We have, of course, the label “third sector.” But that sounds third rate. We can instead call this the social sector, in contrast to the political and economic sectors, which helps somewhat, but only as a starting point. And now, of course, “civil society” is gaining currency, perhaps because, as a label, it has no serious competitors. The term has some historical significance, but is hardly enlightening. What does it mean to the general population? Why civil? In contrast to uncivil? If this sector is to come into greater prominence, as it must, then it will require a label that engages rather than excludes the population at large.

This article proposes some labels for this sector, and then develops a framework by which to identify the basic kinds of organizations found in it.

The Invisible World of Association — Henry Mintzberg and colleagues

We live in a shared-power world in which virtually every major public problem spills beyond the boundaries of any one organization or sector. Perhaps the most daunting challenge for leaders around the world today is thus how to bring people together from different backgrounds and different sectors (government, business, nonprofits, philanthropy, media, and communities) to tackle complex public problems. Specifically, the challenge is for leaders to bring together diverse groups to create public value and achieve the common good through creating self-sustaining cross-sector regimes of  mutual gain. A regime of mutual gain is a particular type of policy regime (or policy system), defined as a set of implicit and explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which people’s expectations converge in a given policy area; regimes of mutual gain achieve widespread lasting benefits at reasonable cost and tap people’s deepest interests in, and desires for, a better world. This paper explores the sources of public value (and failure) sector by sector and offers guidance on how leaders might go about creating cross-sector regimes of mutual gain. Minnesota’s Vital Aging Network is used as an example. Important research and practice challenges are noted.
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs: Publications

Disciplines such as political science, organizational psychology and sociology are becoming so specialized that, for scholars and lay persons alike, the study of leadership is now highly fractionated. Studies of US presidents in political science seldom make reference to the psychological literature of chief executive officers. Studies of school principals appear without attention to the impact of cultural dynamics seen in cultural anthropology.

Management and administrative staffs responsible for supervisory and executive development need to scan 20 to 30 journals across many disciplines to keep current in the study of leadership.

This journal brings together a focus on leadership for scholars, consultants, practicing managers, executives and administrators, as well as those numerous university faculty members across the world who teach leadership as a college course. It provides timely publication of leadership research and applications and has a global reach. It also focuses on yearly reviews of a broad range of leadership topics on a rotating basis and emphasizes cutting edge areas through special issues.

The Leadership Quarterly

According to the literature—although much of it is impressionistic and anecdotal—the two major municipal government structures (i.e., council-manager and mayor-council) may no longer be adequate to describe current governance. Indeed, these structures have been evolving into hybrid forms. Using data from the latest national Municipal Form of Government Survey conducted by the International City/County Management Association, the authors identify a typology of seven different subcategories of the two major structures to delineate the administrative and policy-making processes in American cities. The following forms are noted: council-manager, council-manager with at-large mayor, council-manager with an empowered mayor, strong mayor-council with an appointed chief administrative officer (CAO), strong mayor-council without CAO, weak mayor-council with CAO, and weak mayor-council without CAO. However, many mayor-council communities—with and without appointed CAOs—do not fit within these subcategories as a result of the inconsistency between the reported authority of the elected executive in budget preparation, appointment of department heads, and the veto power. If these hybrid forms continue to emerge, the practical and theoretical relevance of the two broad forms of government categories may become a thing of the past.
Carl Vinson Institute of Government - State and Local Government Review - Abstract