SHIFT INTO REVERSE
Can The Private Sector
Learn How To Handle Change -- From Government?

By Richard McGowan

          "The Office of Personnel Management has a tough job," according to the Washington Post's Federal Diary columnist Stephen Barr. "It strives to be an impartial leader of the civil service, and it also must be an advocate for a president's policies. Not surprisingly, these dual roles sometimes create confusion or conflict."
          Barr went on to note that OPM will need to steer the government through a wave of retirements, retool the way the government recruits and hires, and fix a compensation system that often fails to reward employees for their skills and contribution. It sounds like Barr could be writing about the private sector as well.
          Before retiring from federal service in the United States,
I was the spokesman for OPM. Prior to that I was the Director of Public Affairs for five other federal agencies. Along the way, I made a few discoveries: the federal workforce contained some of the most dedicated and talented people anywhere; that same workforce was bloated with dead wood.
          For example, I inherited 27 people in the public affairs office of the relatively small U.S. Customs Service and 22 in OPM's public affairs office including the editor and staff of a magazine that hadn't been published for three years. At one time, there were 62 people alone in the public affairs office serving the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. There were at least a thousand other publicists serving throughout the vast department. Way too many media specialists, speech writers and promotion experts. Over the years, the staffs of those offices have been realistically reduced along with the overall size of the federal workforce.
          Today, the private sector is facing cutbacks, layoffs and reorganizations. Perhaps it is time for corporate America to reverse gears and learn from the government how to handle the challenge of change. Afterall, federal employees have been put through the wringer over the years as one administration after another sought the perfect corporate organizational strategy. In modern times, government managers tried to implement Management by Objectives which was suddenly dismissed for Zero-based Budgeting only to return briefly to the MBO concept. Unfortunaltely, they tried to force a one-size-fits-all mentality on individual agencies so none of the management strategies worked.
          At one point, strident Japanese managerial concepts were almost foisted on the federal workforce. It might have been interesting having employees sing the Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fight song before going to work but, thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.
In any event, the feds could, at worse, tell their corporate counterparts what pitfalls to avoid.
          Today, even President Bush is in the act, launching his results-oriented attempt to bring efficiency to the federal bureaucracy. Bush, the first president to hold a master's degree in business, recently unveiled a color-coded scorecard that grades an agencies' performance.

          "Now, with all the new demands on our resources, better management is needed more sorely than ever," Bush declared. "When objective measures reveal that government programs are not succeeding, those programs should be reinvented, redirected or retired."
          Reaching that objective, however, will not be easy in today's political, social, economic and wartime currents. Federal employee unions, the purse string controlling Congress with its myriad committees and vested interest groups pushing social agendas on the federal workforce are obvious roadblocks. And like any organization, the resistance to change within is inevitable.
          Still, it is fascinating to look at the "revolutionary directions” management strategies headed over the past decades. In 1956, it was The Organization Man. In 1970, it was Future Shock. In the 1980s, it was Megatrends. Along the way, we have had Patterns of Organization Change by L.E. Greiner and the six volume Addison-Wesley Series on Organizational Development by Richard Beckhard, Warren G. Bennis and Edgar H. Schein among others.
          But the lasting lesson learned from these erudite works is that strategic planning is relatively worthless unless there is first a strategic vision--- a goal. We can ingest all the theories but little will work in our individual agency, plant or megacorporation unless there is a well-stated goal that is understood and committed to by the employees on every rung. Bluntly put, we were drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Healthy organizations have goal-setting at all levels and a strong commitment by supervisors. In the federal government, agencies should have the autonomy to define their individual goals in conjunction, of course, with overall administration objectives.
          Not since the 1960s has the federal workforce level been so low -- 1.5 million in the executive branch and 2.7 million overall. Most of the decline can be attributed to retirements and contracting out former government functions. But now, the war on terror is more than likely to create a turnaround as more and more federal employees work in airport security or fill the ranks of the new Homeland Security force.
          In any event, it can safely be predicted that both the private and public sectors will survive their current crisis and the challenge of change so long as they remember the lessons of the past and set realistic goals for the future.

Editors note: Richard McGowan also served as a Congressional investigator. Prior to that, he was a White House correspondent for The New York Daily News during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He now lives in Virginia and lectures at universities on the modern presidency.