Without a Net

Good employees-those demonstrating mastery of the technical aspects of their jobs-tend to be rewarded with promotions into management. That's true in most organizations, including federal agencies, where responsibility for decisions tends to rise, and to be effective, middle managers need to have at least a basic understanding of the nooks and crannies of their agencies' operations, not just the overall picture.

But across government, employees complain that middle managers, promoted for their skills as employees, remain good employees, but don't become good managers. They're promoted without regard to their leadership skills and are neither trained in nor rewarded for leadership competence once in management positions.

Leadership skills can be improved. In one agency, executives created a career track that allows strong employees with no management aspirations to be promoted and paid more without having to take on management responsibilities. The agency also expanded a management development program to identify potential leaders and cultivate their skills. "Would you send a surgeon into the operating room without a scalpel?" asks Carolyn Kurowski, a leadership consultant at Federal Management Partners in Alexandria, Va. "Supervisors need training to understand the tools of management, but they also need to understand the philosophy of management."

Several agencies have rewritten the job descriptions of managers to emphasize leadership skills, and then evaluated the use of those skills throughout the year. A management analyst adds: "They need to be provided and required to use educational opportunities that address nontechnical skills, and all of this must tie into a development plan that helps them realize that their future is up to them to determine."

It's a lot to ask of middle managers. They must essentially know the jobs of the employees below them and the executives above them. Sadly, executives sometimes make matters worse. "Many [middle managers] aren't allowed to lead," laments Tim Barnhart, Kurowski's colleague. "Top leaders quickly learn that they can count on middle managers, so they tend to use middle managers much like personal staff, rather than leaders of large organizations."

People emulate their superiors, leadership expert Howard Risher says. So executives who expect their middle managers to be leaders must show leadership, repeatedly signaling that managing people matters, through both words and action. "If agency leaders themselves exhibit little interest in people management, that will perpetuate the current set of problems," Risher says.

A former federal executive serves as an example of one who recognized her subordinates' needs-and her role in meeting them. "The Senior Executive Service must take time to work with them and to train them programmatically, fiscally [about the budget process] and politically," says Marilyn Gowing, senior vice president at Aon Consulting. She sent one manager to earn a master's degree through an executive development program and guided two of her managers into executive positions.

Middle managers say they could use some slack in the rules and procedures that bind them. They often must seek approval for the most mundane tasks, getting multiple sign-offs from above for trivial purchases, routine personnel decisions and minor operational choices.

"It's my experience that middle managers are generally very, very good," says Barnhart. "They get chosen because they are the best of the workforce, the most dedicated to the mission, the most productive, the most trusted, the most competent technically. The real problem," he says, "is that so much is expected of them, and they have so many constraints."