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Creating Leadership for the Twenty First Century

Part 3 of 4

Expanding Every Public Manager's Repertoire

No technical fix obligates public managers to take seriously the necessity of establishing performance targets. The legislature or the elected chief executive can of course require agency managers at all levels to do so. But they cannot force them to set significant targets that challenge and stretch the agency's employees. The legislature or the chief executive can require every agency manager to jump through the performance-target hoop (just as they can require these managers to jump through the performance-budgeting hoop, or the strategic-planning hoop, or the pay-for-performance hoop).⁵⁵ And these agency managers will perform the requisite hoop jumping. And while they do this, they will subvert the hopes that the elected officials or overhead regulators had when they constructed their new, improved hoop.

Moreover, in requiring strict, inflexible, across-the-board implementation, the legislature or overhead body can actually subvert the strategic purpose of the technical fix. First, because the technical fix is imposed from above, with little explanation, training, or support, it is often implemented badly. Second, the inflexible requirements of the technical fix inhibit the ability of thoughtful managers to use it discerningly and subtly--to adapt the general concept to the unique needs of their agency. Third, this mindless, artless (and thus inevitably flawed) implementation undermines the credibility of the concept itself. "See," the critics and the cynics will observe, "it doesn't work."

The three core tasks of performance management are not all that effective public managers do. Articulating a mission, managing symbols, and setting performance targets are not the three simple steps that will transform the performance of our public service. They are necessary but not sufficient. Indeed, with a professional repertoire of 50,000 moves, public managers obviously need to be able to do a large number and variety of other things. They have to monitor progress, create organizational capacity, reward success, and check to ensure that, as the agency achieves its performance targets, it is also helping to realize its mission.⁵⁶ They have to know how to do these things under a wide variety of circumstances. They need a large leadership repertoire. They have to know how to deal with the goof-off employee, the insufferable legislator, and the harassing journalist. And in the process of deploying their repertoire, they have to understand the underlying theoretical linkages so they can be creative in crafting each move to match the unique circumstances of their organization and its political environment. Abstractly these tasks seem simple. But implementing any of them analytically, discerningly, and subtly is a significant challenge.

Indeed, performance management is not easy. There exist a variety of psychological barriers that keep public managers from doing the various tasks (particularly setting explicit performance targets).⁵⁷ It is not that we lack some understanding of what it takes to drive the performance of public agencies. Rather it is that those strategies require a lot of adaptation, a dollop of creativity, a measure of self-confidence, and a little chutzpah. And there is no technical fix to our administrative or political systems that will make public executives more analytical, more creative, more self- confident, or more daring. Public managers only acquire these qualities as they expand and evolve their own repertoire.

Preparing Public Managers for the Twenty-First Century

Different people are born with different aptitudes, and, by the time they are adults, they have acquired different skills. But through effective teaching, dedicated study, and hard work, any professional can improve his or her skills. Not everyone can hit like Ted Williams, but all baseball players (young and old) can learn to be better hitters--or at least every reasonably dedicated player can. Similarly all dedicated public managers can increase their managerial batting average.

Moreover, in helping every public manager improve his or her own management repertoire, we are trying to do precisely that: We are trying to improve every manager--every cabinet secretary and every frontline supervisor. Our objective is not to create a few public management stars--a few Michael Jordans of public management who soar high above everyone else, winning performance championships in a single bound. Rather our objective is to ratchet up every public manager a notch or two. If we could do that, if we could improve every public manager's repertoire, we would achieve much more than if we created even a dozen superstars.

We need more than a few outstanding public managers; we need to improve every public manager. In its minor league operations, a major league baseball team does not concentrate its teaching on only a few hand-picked potential superstars. It tries to ratchet up the quality of every player in its organization. It knows that only by teaching, coaching, and improving all the players throughout its system--by playing thousands of games, each of which creates its own unique collection of circumstances--can it produce a successful major league team.⁵⁸ Similarly, if we are serious about improving public management, we have to be serious about educating all public managers.

Unfortunately, despite our political rhetoric about making government more businesslike, we have rarely been willing to establish in government the kind of personnel development and training programs that are standard in business (and in baseball). If we truly want better public managers, we will have to do what business does (and what Branch Rickey did when he invented baseball's farm system)⁵⁹--invest in developing our future leaders. A business that seeks to have competent leaders available to manage its divisions in the future recognizes and accepts the environment within which these managers must function and then makes a major investment in helping their managers learn how to be effective in that environment. The public sector needs to do the same. Instead, however, we seek simple, self-executing technical fixes while neglecting the need to enhance the capacity of public managers to lead their agencies.

This is not a heroic search for superstars nor a defeatist acceptance of the suboptimal. It is simply the best way to prepare many people to lead the future public service, to prepare public managers for the demands of leading public agencies. For the twenty-first century the challenge of public management is to produce the results that citizens value.

This does not mean removing the formal administrative constraints and informal political restraints that inhibit better performance. Yes, it might be helpful if some of these were lessened. And indeed we may see a slight swing of the Madisonian-Hamiltonian pendulum from near the Madisonian apogee to something closer (at least) to the perigee. And yes, it would certainly be helpful if someone would discover a clever technical fix that would permit us to fully satisfy both our Madisonian and Hamiltonian desires (though I do not think we should devote many resources to this search).

Until then, however, we ought not to despair. Rather we ought to exploit what we have already learned about how to improve the performance of public agencies. We ought to make sure that public executives have a broad repertoire--that they recognize the potency of (among other things) articulating a mission, managing symbols, and establishing performance targets. We ought to give every public manager the opportunity to expand his or her professional repertoire. If we do, maybe our public service will be able to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Next: Endnotes

Creating Leadership for the Twenty First Century

Expanding Every Public Manager's Repertoire

Preparing Public Managers for the Twenty-First Century

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