Hail Bureaucracy

Let's hear it for the i-dotters, the t-crossers, the sticklers for the rules, the bureaucrats who know their agencies' operations manuals backward and forward.

The past decade has been a tough go for such chapter-and-versers. Reformers inside and outside government have urged managers to cut red tape, reduce regulation and eliminate needless rules. In the place of written procedures, managers have been urged to trust employees, give them room to make mistakes and learn from them, and empower them to use common sense.

Good things come from such streamlining efforts. Federal procurement, for example, is less Byzantine than it once was, enabling government buyers to quickly purchase many day-to-day products and services without weaving through overly proscriptive procedural hurdles. Federal regulators have rewritten some hard-to-understand policies into easier-to-grasp question-and-answer fact sheets.

But real life has shown the limits of happy talk about busting bureaucratic behavior. Command-and-control-a style of management that dot-com-era gurus pooh-poohed-helps guarantee that federal employees and taxpayers receive fair and equitable treatment.

Government is unique in its ability to force people to deal with it, whether to pay taxes or to comply with the law. Constraints on public servants' actions are an important check, to prevent or punish bad apples who try to abuse the government's power of coercion. Federal managers who set rules and constraints are providing a necessary, if unappreciated, public service.

Just as important as setting the rules is enforcing them. Control, it turns out, is a tougher job than command. Time and again, management breakdowns in the federal government stem not from the lack of policies or rules or procedures, but from a failure to follow them. Managers at the Federal Technology Service, according to recent reviews by the General Services Administration's inspector general, have allowed employees to ignore even the streamlined procurement rules that now govern technology purchases. In the recent Iraqi prison scandal, managers either allowed or ordered military prison policies to be disregarded.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander overseeing the Iraqi prisons, took some responsibility for the abuses. But she argued in her defense that she was not solely culpable because she was not aware of the transgressions. "I didn't know anything about this," she told the Post. "The soldiers didn't share it with me."

Rules are not self-enforcing. It is up to managers to clearly define rules, make sure employees understand them, and ensure that employees understand the consequences of breaking them. It is then up to managers to know what is going on in their operations. When rules are broken, the rule breakers are unlikely to inform the boss. But almost always there are people who know that the rules are being broken but who don't say anything out of fear, distrust or confusion. That's where policies and procedures fall short and good management comes in.

An atmosphere of integrity, trust and clarity can't be created by a set of rules on a piece of paper. Managers must create it. They do that partly by being open to employees' ideas and flexible enough to adjust to changing situations, by being the type of manager who has been celebrated in the past decade. But they also create that atmosphere by being the type of manager who has too long been vilified: the command-and-control type, the hard-nosed bureaucrat, the kind who is adamant about the most vital rules and unwavering in their enforcement.