By following practical guidelines from the new field of resiliency psychology, public managers can navigate through rough periods of change and bounce back from setbacks.

By Al Siebert

In today’s world of nonstop change, public managers need a highly resilient workforce. In the past, government managers ran stable, efficient organizations, which operated for decades without much change. Public-sector workers did what their managers told them to do and were evaluated on how well they followed their job descriptions.

Today’s managers must implement deep reorganization and constant change on reduced budgets while trying to meet required objectives. Every branch of government has shifted from needing cooperative, compliant employees, to needing self-motivated, change-proficient, adaptable workers capable of performing in new ways without up-to-date job descriptions. This demand distresses many managers and workers.

When public-sector employees list their challenges and difficulties, most report that they feel pressured to do more work, of better quality, in less time, with fewer people, in new ways, with a reduced budget—while worrying whether their jobs are safe. Some succumb to this pressure, some don’t.

Public managers can make a difference in how well their workers cope by using simple techniques to strengthen their resiliency. Public managers who dwell on trying to overcome employee resistance to change fail because trying to get people to stop doing something is a negative goal. A positive goal is to develop resiliency strengths in workers who are committed to their work and have positive attitudes toward change.

Public-sector managers who work proactively to strengthen workforce resiliency gain many benefits. Resilient workers hold up well under pressure, adapt quickly to change, get the right things done with fewer mistakes, and are sick less often. Resiliency is not an ability one either has or does not have.

Resiliency strengths can be developed, just as proficiency in any sport or activity can be learned and developed. How can managers strengthen workforce resiliency?

• Learn which resiliency strengths to develop in employees.
• Know the factors that support or impair worker resiliency.
• Be a good role model of resiliency.

Resiliency psychology offers the following practical guidelines for strengthening workforce resiliency.

Support Optimum Health and Well-Being

At the most basic level, the people who hold up well under constant pressure live in ways that sustain their health and well-being. Wellness is a way of life. Actively encourage employees to follow widely known practices for living a healthy lifestyle.

Increase Positive Feelings

Laughing, pleasant relationships, enjoyable moments, and feelings of job satisfaction expand a person’s cognitive skills and strengthen resiliency. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, anxiety, and worry constrict a person’s cognitive skills and weaken resiliency. Award-winning research by psychologist Barbara Frederickson has documented a direct connection between positive feelings, resiliency, good health, flourishing, good relationships, and effective work teams.Work teams observed to have a high ratio of positive to negative emotions flourish while work teams with little positive feeling tend to languish.The lowest positive-negative ratio needed for flourishing is 3 to 1, a ratio of 5 to 1 is best.

Managers who threaten workers and intentionally keep them fearful are acting irrationally because negative emotions increase the probability of mistakes, accidents, employee sickness, and having good people quit. Managers who create a positive, appreciative atmosphere that promotes job satisfaction strengthen resilience, increase mental alertness and accuracy, and keep the best employees strongly committed to the organization.

Provide an Emotional Paycheck

Workers become more engaged and committed when they experience emotional satisfaction.Your governmental organization renders a monetary paycheck for each worker, but your job is to provide them with an emotional paycheck. You do this by purposefully arranging for the people under your direct control to experience the following feelings each week:

• My work is important and meaningful.
• I am responsible.
• I am recognized for achievements.
• I have the opportunity for professional growth.
• I am valued and appreciated.
• I have accomplished something.

To impart these feelings requires good emotional intelligence in a manager—an important area of professional growth.

Forest Service

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service has undergone a massive national reorganization. For the first hundred years of its existence, it had a network of regions, forests, and ranger districts that operated autonomously. This structure, created by Gifford Pinchot in 1905, had been designed so that it would not take a district ranger more than one day riding on horseback to reach his forest supervisor’s office.

As the USDA Forest Service entered its second century, the national executive leadership team saw that the old structure was inefficient. The reorganization of the Forest Service established a central service center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which led to layoffs and relocations that disrupted the lives and families of thousands of employees.

The director of the new human capital management division, Roy Roosevelt, understood that a positive outlook within his unit was essential. “I knew it was important for all of us in human resources to respond with positive coping energy to every new challenge,” Roy says. “Whenever a new demand hits us, my response is, ‘The fun never stops!’ I kept stirring up enthusiasm for handling the reorganization really well, urged everyone to support people in the field, and gave them constant praise and appreciation. I want everyone to know that as the Forest Service strives to meet the competitive challenges of today and the future, human resources will play a major role.”

Emphasize Problem-Solving Responses

Resilient people, when faced with difficulty, focus on solving the challenge. The least resilient people become overly emotional, portray themselves as victims, blame others, and dwell on their misfortune.

You increase workforce resiliency by arranging for workshops on effective problem-solving methods. Content should include logical “left brain” methods, creative “right brain” methods, group brainstorming, and how to find simple, practical solutions.

Encourage Self-Motivated Learning

Highly resilient people continuously learn new ways of doing things, seek new experiences, and frequently change how they interact with their circumstances. The least resilient people drift into a “calcified” condition where they try to avoid change and new experiences. Childlike curiosity, playfulness, and self-motivated, self-managed learning lead to advanced resilience skills. We are marvelously blessed with the ability to replace old behaviors by learning new ones at any age.

A problem with traditional training is that it conditions employees to be passive learners who wait to be instructed. In contrast, self-motivated, self-managed learning leads to becoming more skillful, change-proficient, and resilient year after year.This means that traditional training methods are self-defeating when used to try to increase workforce resiliency.

Resilient people are like children who never grow up.They are curious and get excited about learning better ways of doing things. Encourage workers to ask questions. Asking good questions is a far more useful skill in today’s world than knowing answers that someone taught. Habitual curiosity leads quick orientation to new realities and playful curiosity can lead to practical problem-solving—one of the most basic resiliency skills.

A professional growth area for budding managers is learning how to manage with questions. Keep in mind, if you want resilient employees, you can’t continue to manage workers like they were managed in the past.

Adapt to Circumstances

Adapting to new circumstances is the key to survival in all of nature. If you always respond one way and never in the opposite way, you sometimes will be helpless to stop yourself from automatically reacting in a self-defeating manner.

The flexibility found in highly resilient people comes from their complex inner nature. Here is a partial list of counterbalanced personality qualities typically found in people who overcome setbacks to achieve solid career success:

• Creative and analytical
• Serious and playful
• Hard-working and lazy
• Sensitive and tough
• Cautious and trusting
• Unselfish and selfish
• Self-appreciating and self-critical
• Impulsive and thorough
• Optimistic and pessimistic.

Metropolitan Bus System

The new operations manager for a metropolitan bus system studied the budget expenditures and saw that the annual cost for paper towels in the operations budget was over $25,000. “Why is this cost so high?” he wondered.

He spent many days in the bus barns observing the drivers and bus cleaning crews. When the drivers came on duty, he saw each one pick up a new package of paper towels from the supply room on the way to their assigned bus. During their shifts, the drivers would break open a package of towels and clean up messes left by passengers on the handrails and seats. At the end of their shifts, the drivers would leave the partially used packages of towels on the bus. The bus cleaning crews would then remove them and throw them out. When he looked in the dumpsters, the manager saw large stacks of unused paper towels thrown into the trash.

Here was the problem. One package of towels for each driver, every shift, every day, added up to a major expense. He talked about what he’d observed with his boss, the drivers, and the cleaning crews. The solution they decided to implement was to install towel dispensers on each bus and give the cleaning crews responsibility for keeping the dispensers filled. The cost of paper towels dropped immediately, saving the transit system over $6,000 a year.

This manager followed all the steps for rational problem-solving. He identified the problem, was clear about the desired goal, collected information, discussed several solutions with people who had to make a solution work, and measured the results.

By using a problem-solving response to any challenge or difficulty, it becomes a valuable habit. But more than that, when you invite people to put their minds to work and solve problems, they feel more job satisfactions and make sure that their solutions work.

How many of these pairs of counterbalanced qualities describe you? Can you add more?

Counterbalanced personality qualities are signs of advanced emotional intelligence.Your resilience in rapidly changing circumstances comes from having many such pairs of traits, whatever they may be. The longer the list of pairs of counterbalanced, paradoxical traits you recognize in yourself, the more emotionally complex you are, which can increase your chances of successfully handling any situation that develops.

Balance Positivity with Negativity

Managers with positive attitudes typically handicap themselves by having a negative attitude about negative thinking. When managers suppress disagreement and negative thinking during meetings, they create a condition called “groupthink,” in which groups make bad decisions.

Power is derived from being at the choice point between counterbalanced forces. A sign that managers have developed advanced emotional intelligence is that they feel comfortable with and can counterbalance positive thinking with negative thinking. Barbara Clark, former City Treasurer in Portland, Oregon, says, “A negativity specialist will make you think through your plans better, point out flaws, and warn you about what could go wrong. I would thank the Lord when I had a negative thinker in my department!”

Employ a Flexible Style

Do you expect that everyone will respond well to the way that you want to manage, or do you manage people in a way that gets the best responses from each individual? In today’s workplace, a flexible management style gets the best results.

Two of the most well researched personality factors are “external locus of control” and “internal locus of control.” Hundreds of research studies show that people who cope best in difficult situations score high on measures of “internal control” beliefs.They feel personally responsible for how well their lives go, and know that they have some control over events and their responses to events. People who feel helpless and victimized, and blame others, score high on measures of “external control” beliefs.They do not believe that their personal efforts could make anything better. They believe that solutions to their unhappy condition are under the control of other people and external forces.

A fascinating truth about the human mind is that whatever you believe, you will find evidence that supports your belief. Thus it is that “external” and “internal” belief systems are both self-validating.

As a manager, it is nonproductive to try to get employees to change from their way of thinking to your way of thinking. If you adapt how you interact with each worker to get the best results from them, everything will flow much easier for all.

Figure 1 is a visual guideline on how to use a flexible management style that gets the best results from a diverse workforce.You start by observing where each person is on the external- internal dimension. Use the appropriate management mode with them, and then follow up with appreciation.

This management strategy lets you avoid a typical failing in managers: spending most of your time trying to improve the performance of your least productive workers. A much smarter strategy is to tell people who need to be told what to do exactly what you want them to do. Leave your best workers alone to do what they know has to be done.Then devote most of your management time to the middle group who want to learn how to be more effective. It’s a much better experience for all.

Bounce Back Stronger

Resilience means being able to bounce back from setbacks that may seem overwhelming at first. When resilient people have their lives disrupted, they handle their feelings in healthy ways.They allow themselves to feel grief, anger, loss, and confusion when hurt and distressed, but they don’t let it become a permanent state. An unexpected outcome is that they not only heal, but often bounce back stronger than before.

Public-sector managers and employees who function at the highest resilience level are best suited for a world of nonstop change. They adjust quickly to new circumstances and move confidently through chaotic turmoil to reach good outcomes.

Resilient people handle major difficulties more easily than others. They expect to overcome workplace disruptions in ways that work out well, and the struggle to overcome difficulties can develop new strengths. Resilient organizations have stories of how adversities in their past turned out to be valuable experiences.

We live in a constantly changing world. Some people make their lives difficult by resisting or fighting the ongoing changes. Others adapt and flow with them— it’s each person’s choice. Managers who understand the importance of workforce resiliency can help employees (and themselves) navigate through rough periods of change skillfully and easily.

Al Siebert, PhD, is director of The Resiliency Center in Portland, Oregon. He has extensive experience conducting workshops for public-sector groups and is director of the resiliency camp at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Eastern Management Development Center. His book, The Resiliency Advantage, won the Independent Publishers 2006 Best Self- Help Book Award. It includes many stories of public-sector employees as outstanding examples of resiliency. He can be contacted at http://www.resiliencycenter.com.This article is based on his workforce resiliency session at the 2006 Excellence in Government conference. 

References

Frederickson, B. L., and M. Losada.“Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing.” American Psychologist, Vol. 60, No. 7 (2005), pp. 678–686.

Siebert,A. The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change,Thrive under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

Government executives and human capital professionals offer a road map for designing and implementing effective performance management systems. 

By Bill Trahant

What’s the best way for government executives to create high-performance cultures in federal agencies? In March 2007 testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Bob Tobias, Director of Public Sector Executive Education at American University (AU), said it will never happen until you “change the behavior of every employee in government.” And that won’t happen, he said, until you “build robust performance management systems that can objectively evaluate different levels of job performance and guarantee a fully funded reward system.”

Creating such systems is difficult, Tobias told lawmakers.They must be very robust and able to synthesize large amounts of data relating to work standards, job requirements, and other performance specifications. What’s more, designing them is a “time-consuming process that requires the close collaboration of government employees and their managers,” he added.

Government Focus on Performance Management

The design and implementation of performance management systems have become a frequent topic of recent government executive conversation. Agencies are striving to comply with The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) and the Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework (HCAAF), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) road map for transforming government human capital management.

For these reasons, “How to Build Effective Performance Management Systems” was the topic of a briefing for government executives at the National Press Club in Washington,DC, on May 29, 2007.Held under the auspices of AU’s Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation and sponsored by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, the forum brought together government executives from a range of agencies. It dealt with everything from the effective design of performance management systems to the management concerns and organizational and political obstacles that often stand in the way of their deployment in agencies (see box).

Featured speakers included AU’s Tobias;Marta Perez, chief human capital officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and Bill Leidinger, former assistant secretary for management and former chief human capital officer and chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

Cultural Challenges

Tobias noted that cultural impediments have prevented these systems from being easily implemented in government agencies in the past. “Since 1993, when Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, agencies have struggled to identify outcome versus output goals,” he said.

One reason is that agencies and government executives find it hard to reduce achievement of their public mission to clear and measurable objectives.“At the program level,managers find it tough to define measurable program outcomes.And at the supervisory level, supervisors have trouble translating organizational goals into individual employee job requirements and performance expectations.”

At the same time,Tobias said, supervisors and employees have struggled to redefine their working relationships— to put more focus on measurable job results and less on pro forma job evaluations. Still,Tobias asserted that if managers and employees can come together to collaboratively design and implement performance management systems, they have the potential to “totally transform” their long standing traditional relationships in the federal government.

Performance management can also energize employees to perform at higher levels and assume greater job ownership,Tobias noted, because they see how their everyday jobs are connected to the strategic goals and priorities of their organization. He added, “When employees understand the linkage between their efforts and desired agency outcomes, their engagement in their work and productivity increases.” Involving employees in defining job requirements also “enables managers to leverage the natural desire of employees to improve agency goal achievement,” said Tobias.

Today, however, he said most federal agencies don’t do a very good job of identifying output and outcome goals, so “employees feel uncertain about how their individual job efforts (and performance) impact overall organizational goals and performance.” Manager-Employee Dialogue Like Tobias, Perez, a principal architect of HCAAF while at OPM,noted that the key to making performance management work is getting supervisors and employees to work together to define critical job requirements and articulate performance metrics to which both sides can agree.“It’s all about good communication,” she said.

Perez noted that the public sector has traditionally emphasized performance appraisal and not performance planning, coaching, and development. Conversations between managers and employees “traditionally have been about activities—not outcomes,” she said. By contrast, she added,“Performance management involves continuous dialogue between managers that is focused on achieving specific, concrete results. There is shared responsibility and involvement by managers and employees alike.Thus, it becomes a workplace partnership.” Perez is striving to align the work of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) twenty-two component agencies with the overarching strategic goals of DHS as a department. One way is by holding focus groups with managers and employees in all DHS components to articulate work standards and evolving job requirements in key DHS positions and operating areas.

Perez said doing so is critical to building employee engagement with DHS’s strategic mission goals. In an agency like DHS, which is concerned with evolving mission requirements related to national security, Perez said “the need for continuous dialogue” about job requirements, work standards, and results is especially acute, and an activity to which she and other DHS executives give constant attention.

To foster good communication between supervisors and employees,DHS intensively trains managers in goal setting and interpersonal communication—in the classroom and through webcasts and teleconferences. Such training is critical because “managers must be trained on how to do performance evaluations with employees, how to communicate job expectations, and how to effectively engage with employees to define work requirements,” she said.

To be fully operational, performance management must be integrated with “operational planning, goal setting, and decision making,” Perez emphasized.

How, Perez was asked, do organizational discussions about performance at DHS actually get translated into specific job activities and performance metrics? Moreover, how does the department take the work tasks of individual employees and guarantee that they “roll up” to serve the overarching goals of DHS as the guardian of our nation’s security?

Job Linkage to Mission Goals

“Today, we’re trying to have as much dialogue about work expectations and job tasks as we can, to help people understand the linkage of their work with the overall mission goals of DHS,” Perez said. She showed how this works in the department by describing how one strategic DHS priority—safety and terrorism prevention at the nation’s airports—is broken down into specific component objectives, unit and program objectives, and individual and team objectives.

To ensure airport safety, Perez said a key objective of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the DHS component agency charged with protecting the nation’s transportation systems, including airports, is “to deploy layers of security to protect the traveling public and the nation’s transportation system.”To accomplish this objective,TSA has developed specific airport priorities and goals, which include improving the efficiency and effectiveness of airport screening and maintaining an excellent safety record.

These priorities and goals are advanced by airport managers’ taking specific actions such as improving efficiency and quality of airport screening, she said. These actions are then made operational through the daily work tasks that individual airport screeners and security personnel perform at the nation’s airports.

“You can see, from this simple example, a framework of performance management goals and measures that aligns the work of people at all levels of TSA around the strategic organizational goals of DHS,”said Perez. It serves to create a strong organizational line of sight on key departmental priorities and focuses on results. (Frontline TSA personnel, and their immediate supervisors, get evaluated, according to Perez, on metrics such as “wait time” for passengers going through airport security, and the goal is to ensure that“wait time for 80 percent of people going through airport security is 10 minutes or less.”) .

Constant Dialogue

At DHS, Perez emphasized,defining critical work and the standards by which it is evaluated is an ongoing process because ensuring airport security requires constant review and vigilance.“We spend a lot of time in DHS and TSA talking about how to improve the security of airports while, at the same time, creating more efficiency in the way we do business,”said Perez,noting that this is the subject of regular conversations she has with TSA Administrator Kip Hawley and other DHS executives.

Perez said DHS could make airports so secure that nobody would be able to move through them. But “we don’t want to do that.We want people to be able to travel, and to move through our airports as quickly and safely as possible.” Perez told attendees that when agencies clearly define critical work requirements and align them with strategic goals, it supports a strong employee line of sight and focuses jobs on performance. “When you articulate metrics so they reflect program priorities, organizational conversations about performance become clear, and judging individual employee performance becomes easier,” she said.That’s because employees know what is expected of them and on what they will be judged.

Perez noted that for performance management systems to take firm root in agencies, they can’t be seen as a function run by the human resources department. Instead,“agency line managers and executives must clearly own the performance management system” they design and build, so that employees will accept it as a fair and credible tool to objectively evaluate people’s job performance.

Senior Leadership Commitment

Even that, however, isn’t enough to ensure complete success with performance management, said Perez.Top government executives and political appointees must be enthusiastic backers of performance management, she added, and must promote its importance to agency success at every opportunity. “Leaders from the top of the organization down to…first-level supervisors must have continuous conversations about performance with employees. They must communicate a vision to employees of where the organization is going, and the critical role that employees have to play in making completion of that mission a reality.”

Bill Leidinger agreed that an agency’s top leaders must be vigorous champions of performance management, if it is to get real traction inside federal agencies today.But he worried that such top-level leadership support often isn’t there.“That’s one of the biggest concerns I have about performance management in the federal government today. I don’t know where the leadership is to make it work. I mean,‘Where is it?’”

Leidinger noted that for performance management to take hold in federal government culture, leadership support of performance management must be consistent at all levels of government.“The president, cabinet secretaries, and all political appointees have to be involved in driving change right along with employees.They need to roll up their sleeves, and also give employees the tools they need to make it work,” he said.

When it comes to agency transformation, and the importance of top leadership in driving change, Leidinger knows what he’s talking about. As a top ED executive in the early 2000s, he was intimately involved in massively reengineering the talent recruitment process at the department. “That initiative required a lot of hands-on effort by everybody, including top execs,” says Leidinger.“It wasn’t something we did through a few memos and town hall meetings.”

Leidinger said the same kind of commitment is required today to design and implement performance management systems in federal agencies.“To play a leadership role in agency transformation today—and specifically to implement performance management—top government executives and political appointees need to spend time with the people they supervise.They need to manage their organizations by walking around, and by intimately understanding the nature of people’s jobs.”

Four Openers

What does Leidinger suggest to managers and political appointees who want to create strong performance- based cultures in their agencies?

For starters, he said, managers and supervisors must deeply understand the nature of the daily work their subordinates do. “You don’t get that understanding by sitting in an office.You need to walk around and talk to people.You need to ask them what they’re doing, how they do it, and why they do it.You also need to understand the constraints they face, and figure out how you can help them do their jobs better.”

Second, managers need to look for inefficiencies in the organization and for skill gaps in people, Leidinger said.“Again, unless you spend time walking around and talking to people, you won’t know where these weaknesses exist.And you won’t have any idea of how to align people’s work with your agency’s strategic or mission goals.”

Third, government executives must take action when they find impediments to people doing their work effectively, said Leidinger. For example, he says, “If you find skills gaps in employees, you must give people training and coaching to remedy those gaps. If you find people’s work isn’t clearly related to the agency’s goals, you need to look at that, and create better alignment. You can do this in focus groups and through small, intense team meetings. Otherwise, you won’t improve efficiency or productivity.”

Finally, Leidinger said, federal agencies today need to spend more time on careful and systematic workforce analysis.“You need to understand the current demographics of your workforce and the current state of people’s skills in your agency,” he said. “You also need to carefully project your agency requirements and skill needs into the near-term future in order to get a strategic handle on how to align people around critical agency or mission priorities going forward.”

Doing the aforementioned is critical, said Leidinger, if an agency wants to create a performance-based culture and a line of sight to strategic mission goals.

Patience in Process

Under the best circumstances, Leidinger cautioned, aligning employees with mission goals and connecting everyone’s job to specific organizational outcomes doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. “In my opinion, any agency that wants to implement an effective performance management system must commit two to three years to develop,modify, and tweak that system to make it work,” he asserted.

Part of the reason is that agencies need time to delineate job tasks and performance criteria for every employee and to logically link daily employee job tasks to the overarching strategic needs and mission requirements of the agency for which they work. In some cases,making those connections isn’t that hard,he said. In others,he says,“It’s tough to determine how someone who’s processing transactions deep inside the organization personally impacts the outcomes of their agency.You need time [therefore] to make those connections, and to create mutual understandings (between a supervisor and an employee) around job tasks and performance expectations.”

The need to create organization-wide buy-in and train large numbers of managers in performance-based job evaluations are other reasons that implementing successful performance management systems takes time, according to Leidinger. That’s okay, he said, emphasizing that the process of implementing performance management is best thought of as a long term organizational initiative that will have multiple phases, each building on the best practices, successes, and organizational learning of the previous phases.

“You’re not going to create the perfect performance-driven organization overnight,” Leidinger said.“In fact, most studies show that real, sustainable culture change and organizational transformation take five to seven years to achieve.”

Road Map

As part of his presentation, Leidinger laid out a series of recommendations—a road map of sorts—for government executives and political appointees who are designing and building performance management systems for their agencies.

“Think of these things as guidelines in implementing performance management in your organization, and in designing and building a performance management system to support your agency’s strategic mission goals,” he said.

Step 1. Align individual performance expectations with organizational goals.

Agencies must spend time articulating outcome goals that are consistent with the agency mission and set at a level that encourages innovation and improves individual job performance.

Step 2. Clarify roles, responsibilities, and expectations for all employees.

Agencies must involve employees in defining work expectations and delineating different levels of job performance. By doing so,“you create employee buy-in for specific performance standards and build trust that people’s job performance will be evaluated fairly and accurately during annual job reviews.”

Step 3. Create a clear line of sight so that employees at all levels understand how their individual jobs and objectives support achievement of the agency’s overall strategic or departmental objectives.

This not only provides people with a clear view of how their work supports the organization as a whole, noted Leidinger, but improves employee engagement and motivation (as Watson Wyatt human capital research has shown).

Step 4. Use core competencies as the basis for defining the skills and behaviors required of people in specific jobs.

To identify required competencies, an agency must first profile the workforce in detail and analyze skill gaps to discover its in-house competencies and those it must bring into the organization or develop in employees to meet future mission goals. “Top executives have a key role to play in driving such workforce analysis,” he said.

Step 5. Link pay to individual and agency performance.

Doing this right means linking pay, incentive, and reward systems to demonstrated employee performance on the job, Leidinger noted.

Step 6. Make meaningful distinctions in job performance.

Leidinger noted that effective performance management systems are designed partly on the basis of market pricing research. Performance management systems should be able to supply managers with credible pay and reward guidelines that can be used to make objective decisions on employee compensation and rewards.

Step 7. Include safeguards to enhance the credibility and transparency of employee performance reviews.

When such safeguards are built into a system, Leidinger said, agency leaders can assure employees that performance will be evaluated objectively and won’t be influenced by favoritism, office politics, or longevity in a job.

People Factors

Building effective performance management systems is one thing, but using them to drive agency work performance is another, said Leidinger. And that’s where critical people factors come into play. For example, he said, performance management systems can be used to formalize work expectations with employees, but they require that managers monitor employee job performance closely and link individual performance plans to agency goals. At the same time, employees must meet formal work standards that may not have been required before, but which are key to having their work evaluated fairly at review time and to ensuring it supports agency goals.

DHS’s Perez agreed with Leidinger that performance management requires fundamentally new work behaviors and attitudes on the part of managers and employees alike. “Managers must be able to define job and performance expectations with employees,” she said, “and be willing to listen to employees to understand their job challenges, concerns, and point of view.”At the same time, she added,“Employees must understand that their job performance will be based on specific criteria, and that while they’ll have input in shaping those criteria, their job performance will ultimately be judged on a range of factors and measures.”

Conclusions

Performance management can increase the organizational effectiveness of federal agencies by fostering tighter employee alignment with mission goals and by creating a framework for the effective and equitable evaluation of employee job performance. Some cultural issues have prevented such systems from being readily embraced by agencies and government executives in the past, but government executives can,with top-level leadership support and organizational focus, effectively design and implement such systems. Engaging employees in the effective design of performance management systems following the road map above will help government executives and federal human capital professionals in the design and implementation of such systems.

Establishing a strong culture of performance in the federal government is imperative for many reasons, including compliance with PMA and HCAAF and taxpayer expectations of improved government performance. In addition, as Bob Tobias noted in his March 2007 congressional testimony,“When employees understand how their own work impacts agency outcomes, their engagement in their work increases, as does their productivity, satisfaction, and morale on the job.” Clearly, this organizational outcome is as important as improved agency performance or compliance with PMA or HCAAF requirements.

Bill Trahant (William.trahant@watsonwyatt.com) is national leader of Watson Wyatt’s government consulting services practice in Arlington,VA.

by Dan Bevarly and Jeffery G. Ulma

The Digital Age is here.The way we communicate, share, and connect with others has changed drastically in the past decade. Although you may not know some of your neighbors, you might encounter them online in social networks, forums, and— through one or two degrees of separation—a professional network. The private sector has been the bellwether of things to come in the public sector, but municipalities throughout the country are taking action to connect a new generation of citizens—always attached to a mobile phone, Internet connection, or an amalgam of the two—to their government, to spur participation in a way that is more feasible in an overscheduled, digital life style.

The function of a democratic government has not changed much since its inception.The voice of the people is as important as ever in the creation of law and the establishment of policy.However, capturing that voice has become the new challenge.The public forum—in an offline world—doesn’t have the draw of even ten years ago. Society at large has shifted to an online world, and public chief information officers and managers are beginning to use this societal trend to their advantage.


The Groundswell Begins
No longer is a single community meeting in the neighborhood with an “open microphone” enough, and a mandatory public hearing at the end of a process is often viewed with skepticism. Some residents are intimidated by the crowd and don’t express their true opinion or,worse yet, don’t participate at all.

Citizens want—even demand—early, extensive, and convenient access to local government so they can play a part in planning decisions.As the recipients of the feedback, the government staff must decipher hundreds of paper forms, find the best way to sort these numerous comments, and quickly respond to citizen concerns. For these reasons, local governments need modern ways to manage public input.

Community thought leaders at all levels can now seize more opportunities to connect with everyday citizens by leveraging social networking as a tool to foster virtual “town meetings.”Across the nation, governments are opening lines of communication between their offices and the people of their respective states, counties, and municipalities. Using theWeb to empower citizens and publish open calls for civic engagement and public comment, local governments are warming to true constituent engagement, but more can be done to harness the true power of the citizen’s voice. Social networking is no longer an area that the government can ignore.Visionary state and local leaders are adopting these consumer- adopted behaviors at a fast pace, but in ways that make sense at a government or enterprise level.

Many state and local governments are looking at the massive popularity of social networking as a way to encourage citizen involvement. By integrating enterprise social networking into their latest initiatives and implementing media-rich applications designed to meet the structured requirements of government, municipalities are striving to connect with citizens concerning crucial government functions like zoning, issues management, and tourist development.

Two uses of online engagement in the public sector come from the Carolinas. In each, the idea of community remains,while the way in which people convene— and share valuable ideas—shifts to theWeb.

Spartanburg County
Home to more than 250,000 people, Spartanburg County, South Carolina, is no stranger to connecting with its populace concerning important community issues. Although experienced in traditional citizen engagement, the county is faced with key economic development goals to help modernize this segment of rural America and has responded with an innovative digital community.

Since 1987, the Spartanburg County Foundation, a public-private partnership, has published community indicator reports, effectively using citizen comment to raise awareness about the many issues impacting the growth, health, and quality of life of county residents.Traditionally updated every three years, the report has proven a valuable resource to the community: assisting organizations in their planning and encouraging conversation and dialogue among citizens to bring about community change. In fact, the most recent data collected and reviewed— concerning family, health, education, public safety, economics, and environmental issues—have led to the establishment of ten community goals, strategies to achieve them, and sixty indicators to benchmark progress toward each of them.

What began with focus group discussions grew to an imperative to find a better way to inform, connect, and update even larger audiences throughout the county. For this one-stop communication resource, the foundation adopted Neighborhood America’s enterprise social networking solution for its latest Community Indicators project to help foster citizen engagement. By implementing digital communities through a platform rich in features and functionality, coupled with experienced support, Spartanburg was able to avoid a large capital investment, all the while effectively collecting and managing scores of responses from its people.

The foundation has been able to scale its audience, engage citizens, and update them on progress toward achieving the long-term goals set forth in the Community Indicators project. In addition to offering citizens a convenient way to stay informed more frequently, the site encompasses all community members, including the county’s visually impaired. Spartanburg’s achievement in citizen engagement is a model for other counties, attracting community leaders from across the country to learn from its example.This initiative has received national recognition for its community-wide effort to develop a better future for the citizens of Spartanburg County.

Town of Cary
Cary, North Carolina, with a population of 121,000, is located in the heart of the world-famous ResearchTriangle region. Recognized by publications like Money magazine as one of the best places to live inAmerica, the community has a long history of cutting-edge planning and zoning approaches.The citizens in this high-tech location are not afraid of computers:more than 94 percent of the households have access to the Internet.Collecting data, studies, plans, reports, and ordinances from other places, they e-mail officials and staff members regularly to ask questions and express their opinions. Some have even created their ownWeb sites about new development proposals to communicate with each other.

Technology Town
As a result, town government has had to keep pace with digital methods for communicating and offering additional involvement opportunities, includingWebbased public participation. For example, agendas and detailed staff reports for rezoning cases for the town council and planning and zoning board meetings have been available on theWeb for a decade.These include maps, photos, and color renderings of the proposed development. The town also providesWeb pages for special planning projects and publishes monthly reports listing all approved and pending development plans.

Further reflecting its unofficial nickname,Technology Town, Cary has moved to the next stage—“going interactive”—providing online surveys and threaded discussion boards for some of its planning efforts.Although the results have been mixed (and limitations like the selfselection of participants are recognized), the town council is still committed to offering an ever-expanding array of involvement methods for Cary residents.

Neighborhood America
To extend its repertoire, Cary recently acquired Neighborhood America’s Public Comment system.Although thisWeb-based approach was designed for longterm projects, like the preparation of transportation plans, Cary is going to use it in a new way: applying the system to short-term processes like rezoning.

For complex rezoning cases that last about six months, handling the intense flurry of input directed to different people or arriving scattershot at town hall is difficult. Concerns are shared with the staff, council members, and planning and zoning board members. They arrive in a variety of formats (phone calls, letters,walk-in visits, and e-mails). Cary sought a mechanism where it could funnel comments through a single portal on the Web, and Public Comment fit the bill.

This focused social network (or online community) serves as a one-stop communication tool with the planning department for Cary citizens concerned with town zoning.Through citizen feedback to one portal, town officials are able to manage and respond quickly and effectively. These responses are then published on theWeb site to serve as a reference for residents, preventing the repetition of questions that planning department officials have already answered.This streamlined communication results in an increased response rate and enables officials to devote more time to constituents.

As it now readies to test this emerging technology on the first few cases,Cary hopes to use it to better manage information and feedback.The town should also gain insight into participants by asking them questions like where they live in relation to the project or which specific aspect of a development proposal generates the most concern. In the end, Public Comment will give Cary a tool to share information, collect citizen input, provide timely and consistent responses, and facilitate improved decision making.

Web-Based Engagement
Cary is just one example of technology’s facilitating engagement in local communities.Town hall meetings have been enhanced, even replaced, by boundary-spanning, interactive online forums, and press releases and posting campaigns with limited reach have given way to bidirectional,Web-based engagement sessions—all in a concerted push to include the voice of the populace.

The traditional media have latched onto this trend, as well. ABC, CBS, Fox, and other networks have stepped up their user-generated content campaigns to enable viewers to participate in political discussion by submitting video—via mobile phones if they so choose—directly to the news agency.ABC has used this effective avenue to elicit citizen comment for on-air interviews with President Bush and other high-ranking political officials.

Public managers have the tools that reflect timehonored standards of public comment—standards designed to support constructive public dialogue.Yet, at the same time, new technologies now enable governments to collect and manage multiple forms of public feedback, through any type of device, and to organize that feedback in a way that makes it useful and reportable. If these innovations transcend geographical and socioeconomic boundaries, allowing for instant engagement and bidirectional communication in a secure, structuredWebbased environment, then why aren’t these new interactive technologies ubiquitous across the public landscape?

Enterprise Social Networking
The technology that makes citizen engagement possible represents the next wave in data organization and information delivery. Known as enterprise social networking (ESN), this Internet-native software as a service (SaaS) solution is designed to enable governments to manage structured public involvement.The solution provides a complete enterprise content management system that incorporates state-of-the-art management of usergenerated content, that is, all forms of multimedia content created and submitted by citizens. System capabilities are comparable to or exceed those of largescale technology development projects in major corporations and are comparatively affordable for even smaller government offices.

Most important, because the system is delivered in a Web-based SaaS model without the need to install hardware or software, ESN can be quickly launched to meet all project needs.TheWeb delivery makes the ESN easy to use—particularly beneficial to municipal governments since the staffs tend to be small and nontechnical. Small teams can manage large outreach initiatives in real time.These systems can also be very affordable.Many planning offices are able to redirect budgets for traditional community outreach items—mailings, meetings, etc.—and gain efficiency and citizen responsiveness at the same time.

ESN systems enable the public manager to effectively manage all work processes related to community projects—such as press releases, census lists, and other forms of documents and collaboration—all while considering organized feedback from the municipality’s many constituents.These next-generation technologies will enable campaigns to “turn on a dime” with hypersensitive listening to those in touch with public zoning policy and statute issues.

Conclusion
Interactive technology that offers traditional rules of structure is the future. It allows governments to better understand their constituents and invites reasoning. After all, public dialogue helps to build relationships, expectations, and policy over time, rather than at a point in time. Most important, it enables governments to establish long-term relationships with citizens on the basis of clear, accurate, and structured communication. Indeed, this is the future of citizen participation.

How pay for performance has emerged as the new model for federal human resources pay practice and how executives and managers will be challenged to solve its complexities.

 A. C. Hyde

This year’s public Management Fad of the Year proves that a past record of futility does not preclude ultimate triumph. Pay for performance has been proposed, debated, and dismissed for over fifty years in public personnel management. And now, although legal challenges have been filed, pay for performance emerges as the new model for federal human resources pay practice and the cornerstone of federal public management strategy.

But first, a brief aside is in order to restate the premise for this award. For our first issue in the millennium, The Public Manager inaugurated the idea of bestowing a Management Fad of the Year (like Time’s Woman or Man of the Year) on whatever management concept, idea, process, technique, and strategy most dominated the federal public management landscape. Choosing the title “Fad of the Year” was, we explained back then, “…deliberate, hopefully provocative, and not intended as derogatory.”

And with each year’s award, we’ve respectfully repeated the caveat that fads have an impact and are important. As we explained then, “Looking back over the last two decades, one can see a number of ‘dominant’ management concepts—from total quality management and re-engineering to reinvention and downsizing that once commanded the public management headlines. None of these has been relegated to the trash heap. While some have been recycled, modularized, or even redefined, they have become part of our basic management tool kit and our vocabulary.”

And the Nominees Are…

Perhaps it’s the timing or coincidence, but this annual article has come to be more and more influenced by the Academy Awards in making the final selection and bestowing the award. Instead of just launching into the discussion of the merits and prospects for the Management Fad of the Year, it’s become customary to note and say a few words about the other nominees. And since we’ve been at this for five years now, we’re even tempted to suggest that there should be a “lifetime achievement award” to contenders that perennially come up short.

Anyway, this year’s nominees are an interesting group. Supply chain management (SCM) was a new nominee that made quite a splash on the public management landscape, aided by a three-issue double article forum in the Harvard Business Review lauding “truly revolutionary changes” to a core process that is…“accomplished by means of mind-boggling technological innovations, clever new applications of old ideas, seemingly magical mathematics, powerful software, and old-fashioned concrete, steel, and muscle.” SCM also got its own special issue in the California Management Review. Surely SCM will be a contender to deal with in 2005.

Another nominee was network governance. That may not be the right name to give to this rising issue area loosely centered around migrating from hierarchical bureaucratic organizations to more collaborative alliances of public, nonprofit, and private organizations. Much of this growing movement is driven by public policy advocates who have been arguing for a decade that government is out, governance is in. A recent work (reviewed in the last issue of The Public Manager), Goldsmith and Eggers’ Government by Network, uses the subtitle—The New Shape of the Public Sector—to describe the significance of what’s involved here.

The last nominee was one that has come up every year; 2004 was an interesting year for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and results management. It saw a first wave (well, maybe a wavelet) of public management textbooks and academic journal articles that viewed results management as core management as opposed to a legislated reporting requirement or the usual executive mandate. These works and others promise a more serious discussion of what high performance is and what different models exist for performance results measurement. With a little rebranding, one can see results management being recast as “high-performance management.” At a minimum, it should be given our first aforementioned lifetime achievement award to public management.

And the winner is pay for performance—a rather different kind of choice among the nominees. For one thing, pay for performance is only a part of a larger management reform: civil service modernization or pay modernization. However, it’s the most controversial and significant part.

Furthermore, while viewed as a radical change, it is not described as a reform. Indeed the word “reform” seems to have somehow disappeared from the public management vocabulary, as if it had become politically incorrect. Both the influential U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) White Paper on Federal Pay (2002) and the Volcker II Commission Report (2003) omit the word reform in their advocacy of change. OPM’s White Paper is entitled “A Fresh Start for Federal Pay: The Case for Modernization.” Volcker II’s report is entitled Urgent Business for America: Revitalizing the Federal Government for the 21st Century. The word reform does not appear in any of the fourteen recommendations and the recommendation on pay (number eleven) states simply: “More flexible personnel management systems should be developed by operating agencies to meet their special needs.” One would think from these inferences that all that’s involved here is a little loosening up and getting a new wardrobe. Obviously, public managers know that’s not the case.

The Merits of Pay for Performance in Historical Context

Personnel textbooks have ranted about the terrible effects of public-sector pay systems for years. The compensation chapter of the first edition of Personnel Management in Government in 1978 states, “It is very difficult to convince employees that their pay is fairly arrived at when they have before them on a daily basis other more highly paid employees, who serve not as role models that one should strive to emulate, but rather as glaring examples of the inequities of the pay program.”

That was fairly typical of the “personnel bashing” style of many of the behavorialists critiquing public personnel. What we lacked in data to validate our observations, we made up for verbally. But even that assessment was primarily aimed at the dysfunctionality of the classification system and an evaluation system that made grade inflation at Harvard looked tame. For most of the twentieth century, federal agencies evaluated individuals in terms of merit based on a list of behavioral traits. They developed performance appraisal systems tied to behaviorally anchored rating scales that defined basic levels of service from unsatisfactory to outstanding. Almost inevitably, the result was rating inflation in which 90 percent of employees rated were assessed at above satisfactory ratings, drawing the ire of critics who contended that this facet alone invalidated the entire performance appraisal system.

Performance-based pay was touted as the solution. As Table 1, taken from a recent U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) presentation shows, it began with efforts to provide small annual bonuses (incentive awards and quality step increases). The first big reform steps were taken as key parts of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978— establishing larger cash awards and managerial bonuses and later limiting the percentage of employees who could get awards. But within a decade, the pay-for-performance movement had basically faltered. In its 1991 assessment Pay for Performance, the National Research Council concluded that there were fundamental underlying difficulties to resolving tensions “between the potential benefits of pay for performance and the reality of federal personnel and compensation systems.”

Balkanization

But the 1990s saw a major shift in federal management strategy. With the advent of performance results budgeting through GPRA and other new public management approaches being advocated—like performance-based organizations—management strategists were arguing that organizations had to relate organizational outcomes or results measures to individual performance objectives. Rather than try to force through a system-wide reform, the management strategy shifted to individual agencies. When the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service were beset by management crises, part of the solution was to give each agency authority to create its own pay system. As the “Balkanization” of the General Schedule continued into the Bush administration, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense were given authority to create their own personnel and pay systems. Both made pay for performance centerpieces for “modernization.”

Table 1.

Source: Office of Policy Evaluation, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

Pay-for-performance systems based on results make several key assumptions. First, the organization has readily measurable results that can be transferred from organizational levels to managerial levels and ultimately work groups and individuals. Second, managers can and will make both fair and candid assessments of their subordinates. Third, individuals will be motivated by pay levels that differentiate between those who carry the true workload of the organization and those—recently identified by The Wall Street Journal—as employees who are “actively disengaged” at work. The latter concept is perhaps a new way of looking at the attitudes of those who once might be called “poor performers” but are in fact individuals who see a job as time spent on the job as opposed to time spent doing significant work. Here lies the true test of pay for performance: ensuring sufficient variability in pay so outstanding performers get large rewards, average performers get smaller raises (to “maintain buying power”), and poor performers get no increase.

Not every public-sector manager or employee is going to like the new brand of pay-for-performance management. Indeed, the most recent (2000) MSPB survey of federal employees showed the desire for a good performance rating as a distant ninth on the list of fifteen top motivators for performance—being important to only 10 percent of those surveyed. Of course, the survey can’t separate employee disrespect for current inflated appraisal systems from disinterest. More interesting is the third-place rating given to monetary awards, which appealed to 27 percent of those surveyed. There may be more interest in variable pay levels among public-sector employees than suspected. Of course, pay-for-performance advocates will be quick to point out that the system is supposed to be fair but should not please all employees.

Issues for Today and the Future

Clearly, federal agencies will enter into this brave new world of pay for performance/results with some trepidation. To begin with—as a study by the MSPB has noted—past trends in performance appraisal systems (with the active and strong encouragement of federal unions) have been exactly in the opposite direction. From 1995 to 2000, the number of performance appraisal systems that have only two levels (essentially pass-fail) increased from less than 5 percent to nearly 25 percent. Clearly, increased training budgets to prepare managers and the long lead time to implement pay for performance will be needed.

Another complicating factor will be the pressures of “competitive government.” Managers taking charge of agencies or enterprises, who must compete with contractors or even other governmental competitors, are going to push hard for pay-for-performance flexibilities to reward successful results, pay for new innovations, and possibly most important of all, lower compensation levels when failure occurs.

Another issue will be all the intangibles that go into federal public-service work. Beth Asch’s recent review of “The Economic Complexities of Incentive Reforms” (High-Performance Government, Rand, 2005) reminds public managers that if pay for performance is going to work, gains in productivity have to exceed costs of performance measurement. And performance measurement in federal work is not exactly simple. Much of the work activity performed by federal workers is multidimensional, done in teams, subject to multiple employers and multiple objectives, and longer term. Any number of studies by research psychologists testify that linking pay to individual results has negative consequences—undermining teamwork, levels of cooperation, and even relationships among teams within an organization.

Asch looks at one other critical issue that has to be factored in—promotion rates. One aspect is simply the separate impact on promotions in raising pay and attracting and retaining talent. Equally important, however, is the fact that measurement costs for promotion are lower than pay for performance. As she concludes, “What is required in a promotion system is that the supervisor determine who has the best performance, not the exact level of performance of each employee. It may be considerably easier to determine ranking than to determine the precise level of performance.” One shouldn’t forget, of course, that ranking is usually not allowed in pay-for-performance systems.

Perhaps the most important issue for the future will be making the system fair and transparent. What that really means is another issue. Consider Steve Barr’s October 2004 article in The Washington Post:

Fairness counts, especially when it comes to bonuses. An inspector general review found that the Transportation Security Administration [TSA] handed out bonuses last year to 76 percent of its executives but to only 3 percent of its rank-and-file employees. The TSA also gave time off from work as a reward to an additional 7 percent of the “rank-and-file.” The inspector general’s report called the pronounced tilt toward management “a substantial inequity” and recommended that the TSA “provide more equitable treatment for lower graded employees when making performance award decisions.”

Essentially, an inspector general concludes, 75 percent plus for managers and 10 percent for employees is unfair. Would TSA have been criticized if it had given cash awards to 50 percent of its rank-and-file employees? What kind of management team could TSA hope to retain if it awarded only 50 percent of its managers bonuses? What should the percentages be? In discussing this issue with some union leaders, their perspective on fair and transparent emerges something like this. Transparent means a system you can see right through in order to determine how the decisions were made. Employees need to be able to see if they were treated fairly, and shouldn’t we want employees to be able to see what they need to do better to get a reward next time?

Going beyond that focus on the individual, unions also want to be able to see how various classes of employees did. This is not only a concern for the “protected classes” of various civil rights laws, but also the nonprotected classes. For example, did all the money go to a few occupations or grades at the expense of lower-graded minorities? Did a disproportionate share go to political appointees? The new system should be run in a way that there is nothing to hide. If someone is trying to hide any portion of it, the obvious message is that they are embarrassed by it or can’t explain to others what did happen.

Philosophical Challenge

Beyond these issues lies a final, more philosophical challenge to pay for performance. As public management strategists celebrate the final acceptance of the concept, they will devote more time to working the details and detailing the working parts of the new systems. Certainly, public-sector pay can be reshaped as a powerful tool in pushing public management into a new era. But two costs should be kept in mind. Beth Asch would remind us that public-sector work is more complicated and that the cost of performance measurement must be clearly outweighed by some measurable increase in organizational productivity. The second is a simple reminder of the first tension between the potential of pay for performance and the reality of federal personnel systems noted by the National Research Council in its 1991 report—that of the potential impact on the neutral competence of the public service. As political factions in this country become increasingly partisan, “the centrality of the principle of neutral competence in the public service” may be something we regret subjecting to the economic complexities of compensation incentive reforms. They never had a conversation about the expected outcomes of their joint efforts.

Input from stakeholders is essential for quality outcomes and evaluations. Their experiences and expertise can raise issues that should be addressed when developing outcomes. Their input ensures that relevant information is collected to measure outcomes and complete evaluations. In addition, collaboration supports a cycle of continuous learning because stakeholders are encouraged to use feedback from results measurement to guide their work.

Integrate Results Measurement into Program Planning

It is unfortunate that most evaluation planning occurs toward the end of a funding cycle. This adds to the perception that conducting evalu