Making Paper Airplanes Fly
Leadership training is an important aspect of career development for young professionals in both the private and public sectors. While this training is memorable for many, the leadership story of retired Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) executive Mike Cook offers one valuable lesson that carried over throughout his very successful career.
As a fairly new and young branch chief in a federal agency tasked with developing the infrastructure for issuing municipal wastewater permits under the 1972 Clean Water Act, Mike was sent to a management training course. His experience during an exercise framed his leadership style and provided the single most important leadership insight he gained from training during his career.
During this one exercise, he and his co-students were split up into several groups and each group was given the instructions to build paper airplanes. His group worked diligently over the next hour or so to build as many paper airplanes as they could. When the time allotted was up they felt pretty good about their efforts, as the team had built 8 airplanes. Most of the other groups built a similar number of airplanes.
The next part of the exercise had the instructors test each airplane against the instructions (ie. specifications). To everyone’s surprise, only one airplane out of the 40 met the specifications. Mike took away a single lesson from this – “The leader’s job is to ensure the goal is achieved.”
And indeed, Mike followed this approach in 1974 when his branch was tasked with the goal of developing and implementing a permitting system for regulating municipal and industrial point sources of pollution as required by the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). With his goal clear – issue permits to all (several hundred thousand) municipal and industrial dischargers – Mike and his staff worked to define permitting parameters, resolve complex policy issues, develop boilerplate language for permits, make regulatory interpretations for secondary water treatment, and establish relationships with Regional and State permitting offices. By the end of 1974, the Agency and states had issued permits to 90% of all municipal dischargers.
During this time, Mike developed a results-based and open leadership style. In order to achieve his permit project goal, he capitalized on the high interest of EPA’s senior leaders, including EPA’s Deputy Administrator (DA), who was briefed every two weeks on the progress of the project. This visibility and importance of the effort encouraged a “let’s get this done attitude” within Mike’s sphere of influence. At times, the DA also became actively involved in the project by using the position’s ‘bully pulpit’ to encourage regional action or to take other high level management action.
The leadership approach of his office director also played a significant role in how Mike managed his own staff during the project and how he approached future leadership roles. His director encouraged open communications, provided well-deserved recognition of individual and group efforts, built strategic partnerships with stakeholders, did not ‘second guess’ nor micromanage workgroup recommendations, and followed the strategic plan that was established. The office director issued regular memos that outlined both the good work and accomplishments on the project while also acknowledging the challenges that Mike and his team faced. Learning from a role model, Mike adopted many of these leadership practices and was grateful for the leadership lessons learned.
Mike also noted that an organizational construct must sometimes be adjusted to support the mission. A good example of this was how his direct supervisor at the division level allowed direct access to the office director when needed for time-critical decisions and actions. This “little” empowerment played a key role in ensuring project success. By streamlining the management decision chain, Mike’s branch had the flexibility to take work and decisions directly the top as needed (while keeping his boss informed). While this did leave some colleagues a bit disgruntled, it helped move efforts forward in a timely manner.
Recognizing the necessity to establish relationships with key stakeholders, Mike also actively sought the involvement of other EPA offices, regional offices, and state agencies. In particular, he needed to demonstrate to other stakeholders that his office and branch did, indeed, have the lead role in developing and implementing the permitting process and that “we knew what we were doing and that we were going to get it done.”
Mike attributes some of the success to the nature and culture of the agency at that time. In 1973, the EPA was only two years old and filled with an exited staff ready to “protect human health and the environment.” The staff across the entire agency set about to, as Mike puts it, “make things happen.” He did not need to spend much effort motivating his staff – it was part of the culture. Mike even incorporated his commitment to the environment into his daily commute by riding his bike to work every day, something he did during his entire EPA career. While getting wastewater permits issued by 1974 was only one of the many early successes of the agency, it was a big step forward for the EPA and the nation’s environment.
Mike’s work on this project was the beginning of a lifelong career with the EPA where he led many environmental protection efforts and influenced the leadership style of many current EPA staff and managers. He retired from EPA in 2006 with 41 years of federal service with 28 years as a senior executive at EPA. Although Mike was not successful with the paper airplanes in a leadership exercise as a young leader, he learned his lesson and eventually made those “airplanes” soar!
Mike Cook's Thoughts for Future Federal Leaders:
- “Think and operate as if you expect to be the Office Director or higher at some point in the future.”
- “Think and operate as one who will maintain the public trust.”
- “Think and operate as if you expect the make the organization as strong and as successful as it can be.”
- “Think broadly and understand change.”
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