Care and Feeding of Your Stakeholders

This is smart. Meetings between high-ranking administration officials (up to and including the president) and the Senior Executive Service tend to get recited back to me as high-water marks, indications that an administration cares, really, truly, cares about federal workers. The point isn't that these meetings are where policy gets made, or alliances get formed, or whatever. In fact, they aren't necessarily consequential at all. But doing briefings on the Obama agenda for new senior executives is a great way of suggesting correlation: you need to know about the agenda because you are important to it.