New Improved SES

or its 20th anniversary this year, the Senior Executive Service is being scrubbed, from its size and pay levels right down to its mobility requirements. The Office of Personnel Management is hoping to shine up the corps for the 21st century by making fusty top bureaucrats gleam with the luster of private sector leaders.

Unfortunately for OPM, executives may not be ready for bath time.

"There's no justification for any of the changes," says G. Jerry Shaw, Senior Executives Association general counsel. "They say they're carrying out the Civil Service Reform Act and they want people who are really executives in the SES. I don't know what the hell they're talking about."

OPM's ideas too closely mimic the private sector's view of executives, says Roslyn Kleeman, distinguished executive in residence at George Washington University's public administration department and former director of workforce future issues for the General Accounting Office. "I'd hoped we would develop our own ideas about the kinds of skills needed for government executives," she says.

In April, OPM released a draft of its proposal for improving the SES. It would raise pay, enforce mobility, lengthen probation, reconsider guaranteed placement provisions, alter short-term assignments, change the presidential rank awards and create a three-year contract for executives. Even more significantly, it would create a Senior Civil Service, splitting the current executive service in half.

Though it's unlikely OPM's changes will become law this year, the proposal has kicked off a crackling debate about the state of the SES and has garnered executives more attention than they've had in years. The Senior Executives Association has called an SES summit for this fall. Vice President Al Gore specially recognized executives during Public Service Recognition Week in May, and OPM's proposal still is circulating for comment.

The debate over how best to develop government's leaders has raged for many years and probably won't be answered definitively during this round of discussion. In the meantime, executive retirements, the portable Federal Employees Retirement System and other developments beyond any of the players' control could force deeper and more lasting change to the executive corps than anyone is now proposing.

Leaders, Not Managers

Last September, OPM updated the SES core qualifications to emphasize the leadership talents prized in slim, trim business organizations rather than the technical and managerial skills more common to federal hierarchies.

"Executives will be expected to do more than exhibit strategic vision. They must direct change," said OPM Director Janice Lachance when she announced the new qualifications. "They must lead people, not just manage human resources. In addition to developing and evaluating programs, they must show results. While understanding that government is not business, they must demonstrate acumen for the business of government."

To ensure government's executives are true leaders, OPM officials want to split the 7,700-member executive corps into two halves of a new Senior Civil Service. A new Senior Professional Corps would include engineers, attorneys, scientists and other high-level specialists. Such jobs "do not demand the full range of executive qualifications," says Joyce Edwards, OPM's assistant director for executive policy and services. The 3,500 to 4,000 executives whose jobs do involve leading large organizations, making big decisions and setting strategic goals would be placed in a new Senior Executive Corps. OPM is working with SES stakeholders to figure out exactly how to divvy up current executives.

"The proposal to reduce the size of the executive corps is frightening to some and insulting to others," says Ron Sanders, formerly Defense Department civilian personnel director and now director of the Center for Excellence in Municipal Management. "Some folks would bristle at the notion that they aren't true executives. [For example,] technical directors at DoD centers manage billions of dollars and lots of people. They may look like they just do science and research, but if you closely examine their jobs, they are executives in every sense.

"In a government that employs 1.5 million people, there are more than 4,000 executive jobs," Sanders adds. "We need to do some job sampling and see exactly what the numbers look like."

OPM also proposes to ease short-term appointments to executive posts, increase the top cadre's mobility, raise pay and toughen performance requirements. In short, Edwards says, OPM wants the SES to become a high-risk, high-reward corps, "where executives have performance expectations spelled out, success is rewarded and there are serious consequences for non-success."

Carping Political Appointees

Shaw contends that OPM's burning interest in changing the SES was fueled not by a pressing need, but by President's Management Council members' carping about problems with career executives. Created by a 1993 presidential memorandum, the PMC includes the chief operating officers of 18 agencies, the Office of Management and Budget's deputy director for management, the OPM director, the GSA administrator and other representatives. It is charged with improving government management and reforming financial, personnel, budgeting and procurement systems.

"Political appointees on the PMC are frustrated," Shaw says. "They sit around at meetings and commiserate about how hard it is to get rid of career senior executives. It's like the way military officers complain about civilians: 'You can't give them orders; they question them or say they have to check with their civilian bosses first.' These politicals are all mergers and acquisitions specialists and they want people to just go and do what they tell them to do."

Chris Sale, Small Business Administration chief operating officer and a member of the PMC's working group on SES issues, paints the council's involvement with a less sinister brush. "There was a nice convergence of issues," she says. "Several new PMC members were trying to understand the system, saying, 'This is what I've done or not done to manage SESers.' People who have been around longer wanted to foster people coming up and put in a mechanism to produce more rounded and more capable people."

Shaw says the zeal to create well-rounded, generalist executives simply betrays ignorance of how government works on the part of OPM, the PMC and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government-another SES reform booster. "Generalist managers are a wonderful breed," he says. "They can buy and sell and get people to do stuff. But I don't think in government that's what you do.

"Most government agencies enforce laws," Shaw says. "Most managers grow up within agencies because they first have to be well-versed in the laws those agencies enforce. To bring in managers who don't know anything about those laws but can be innovative sounds nice, but it just won't work."

Smoothing Moves

One key focus of OPM's SES reform proposal is mobility. "The expectation was that the SES would be a corps selected for broad executive qualifications and a broad perspective of government and who would be able to freely move to different agencies and programs," Edwards says. "Some of those things have not materialized."

Virtually everyone who has thought or written about the SES agrees that the Civil Service Reform Act vision of executive mobility hasn't been realized. In Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability (Brookings Institution, 1995) author Paul Light found that fewer than 3 percent of executives a year move among government departments and most never leave their home agencies. Furthermore, what mobility there is often occurs for the wrong reasons, says Sanders. "Mobility has been used in a negative way, rarely as a developmental tool. At the beginning of an administration, when a new political appointee comes into the agency, most mobility is moving career executives out."

Even executives who have made moves say it isn't easy. Robert Franco, the Agriculture Department's associate deputy director for civil rights, is now on detail to OPM's office of executive resources. "It's a challenge for someone who wants to move. It's almost like job-hunting. I sought it out myself," says Franco. "I was a senior executive at USDA managing the discrimination complaint process. I didn't just seek out a new opportunity and ask. I knew the agency would say, 'We need you here.' I worked out trades so complaint-processing people went to USDA. I had to make the effort."

"The message has to go to top management that they have to consider mobility," says Franco. "But also, executives have to get off their butts and seek out these opportunities."

Sale, who has worked at SBA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Veterans Affairs Department since becoming a senior executive, seconds Franco's observation. "I probably have more experience moving than most people, and I've moved of my own volition," she says. "It would be helpful if there was an institutional incentive for the agencies and not just the individuals" to encourage mobility.

Risky Business

OPM's proposal suggests prodding executives to move by limiting presidential rank awards to those who can demonstrate their mobility and reserving SES pay levels above ES-5 for mobile executives. The agency also wants to focus on the results of mobility, rather than the requirements.

"We're trying to move the discussion away from something being done to the executive to something necessary to round out executives, give them a broader perspective, provide for fresh leadership in agencies and develop executives," says Edwards. "We want to redefine it, stimulate it, make it appealing." OPM's proposal would expand the definition of mobility beyond geographic moves or those between agencies to movement among programs within an agency and temporary assignments.

But not everyone agrees mobility is necessary or even desirable for all executives. "I think it's a red herring. It doesn't matter in the general scheme of things," says Mimi Browning, Army information management director and a senior executive for 10 years. "If you have a good person, you want to keep them there for a while." It's not an uncommon sentiment. "We all have prayed to the god of technical competence," Franco says. "We hire experts in program areas, so we want to keep them in the program area."

"For the most part, you have to grow your executives in your own agency or recruit people from the private sector who know what you're doing," adds Shaw.

This tendency has given rise to the suspicion among some hiring officials that the only reason an executive might want to move out of an agency is because he or she is a washout. "Everybody [in government] who's willing to move is seen as not worth a damn," Shaw says. In consequence, even fewer executives move.

When agencies do encourage executive mobility, they risk losing top people. Those who move also find it risky. "It's a risk to both," Franco says. "They might lose me, [but] I'm out of the loop. I don't see my boss every day. There is nervousness about that."

Shaw and Browning also contend that the financial and personal costs of mobility have grown in the last 20 years. "People say, 'The government is going to pay me a ratty salary and not pay my moving expenses, the heck with that,' " says Browning. "For one-parent families or two-working-spouse families it's very difficult," Shaw notes.

"SEA has always believed in mobility between agencies, but it's got to be voluntary," he adds. "To entice people to be mobile, you recruit them. You say, 'You're a star. We need you to do this.' You pay them a 20 percent recruitment and retention bonus and people would go."

Tryout Troubles

Edwards acknowledges that agencies are reluctant to bring on executives from outside who aren't subject-matter specialists. To counter that reality, OPM is proposing nonreimbursable tryouts so agencies can test executives from other agencies and send them home if they don't work out. Currently the receiving agency must pay an executive's salary during such a tryout detail.

Similarly, OPM wants to alter the rules governing short-term executive assignments to make them easier to use for longer periods. The current SES limited and emergency term appointments would be combined into a single, noncompetitive three-year term appointment with OPM-authorized extensions of up to two more years. In addition, OPM would create a five-year competitive term appointment based on certification by a qualifications review board with renewal or termination at the end of the term. People on these five-year appointments could be noncompetitively appointed to the career service at the end of the five years.

"It's an attempt to update the system to reflect today's environment," says Sanders. "Agencies will have more temporary needs at a high level for a short time."

Sale says her experience shows the change is needed. "Term appointments ease the dilemma between specialists and maintaining the executive requirements of the SES. They give the flexibility to bring people in from the outside and also give us the ability to test someone out," she says. "I used them that way at INS by moving a GS-15 to an SES job for three years. They aren't a substitute for SES candidate development programs, but we haven't run one of those in a while."

Impure Motives

Some experts are concerned that creating new forms of executive appointments could open a door through which political appointees would flood.

"These appointments make it easier to politicize the career corps," Sanders says. "At the IRS right now there is one version [of new appointments]. They want to hire 40 super-SESers at high pay. If they come in on their merits as technical experts or world-class leaders, OK. But why not ensure that by running them through a qualifications review board? If we create 40 jobs at IRS at $172,000 a year, the next IRS commissioner, or the next, may not have as pure motives in hiring them as does the current commissioner."

Creating new forms of term appointments also could further reduce the number of posts open to career executives, Shaw argues.

"I can see that these people are going to be in the Senior Executive Corps, and that means top-level senior executive positions that are now 90 percent career are going to be filled by noncareer people," says Shaw. He's also troubled by OPM's proposal to change the current criteria for reserving some executive posts for careerists.

The floor on career-reserved positions was set at 3,571 on Oct. 12, 1979, when the Civil Service Reform Act took effect. Since then, "positions were established as career-reserved based on [maintaining] the floor rather than the criteria: to ensure impartiality or the public's confidence of impartiality of government," Edwards says. Now, OPM wants to re-examine the criteria. Shaw finds that threatening.

"At IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and Customs, for example, most positions are career-reserved, in other words they must be people the public will accept are nonpartisan," he says. "When you take the floor away, that means you could fill such a function with politicals. Politicals are to make policy and give guidance, not to infiltrate into the integrity and law enforcement role of government-the primary role of most agencies."

Political Creep

While Edwards is adamant that OPM is not trying to increase the number of political appointees in the SES, "political creep" has been a concern of many SES observers for a long time. They say political appointees have gradually usurped many of the positions originally intended for career executives. In Thickening Government, Light reports that the number of appointees grew from 451 in 1960 to 2,393 in 1992, a 403 percent increase.

"Career officials, it is said, are less accountable: either passively slow to respond to changing political will or actively engaged in blocking policies with which they disagree," write the authors of Civil Service Reform: Building a Government That Works (Brookings Institution, 1997), among them Sanders. "Elected officials have found it impossible to resist the temptation to push political appointees ever deeper into executive branch agencies to increase their leverage."

As far back as 1989, the National Commission on Public Service-the Volcker commission-decried the deeper penetration of politicals into agencies, noting it isolates career executives from sharing experiences, ideas and impartial observations and paralyzes agencies because the appointment process is so slow.

In Managing Succession and Developing Leadership: Growing the Next Generation of Public Service Leaders, published last August, the National Academy of Public Administration reported that the proliferation of politicals reduces opportunities for career executives to gain experience through varied assignments. It also prevents career line managers from controlling leadership development by linking it with appraisals, rewards and promotions, the academy found.

Raising Risk and Rewards

At the crux of the SES debate is an argument about the best method for developing leaders. While OPM favors a market model, relying on incentives for individuals and agencies to use the new core qualifications and encourage mobility, others favor more deliberate management of the executive corps.

"The PMC members say they want [corporate use of the SES]. But now there is no mechanism to function that way," Sale says. "It will only work with deliberate care and attention and with some sort of oversight body. The military spends a lot of time and energy managing those things centrally."

In Managing Succession, NAPA urges the Vice President to create a succession board made up of respected career executives. SEA favors a similar approach. In NAPA's version, the board would meet once or twice a year to review leadership candidates and pick people for development training and jobs based on the core qualifications. It also would annually review government's bench strength. To set the stage for the board, NAPA recommends a government-wide "zero-based review of the need for political appointees in specific positions and organizations with show-cause for not using a fully developed and tested career executive as the standard."

This type of corporate approach could go far to reduce the fragmentation now plaguing the SES as well as rebuild its esprit de corps. It could open new and more challenging jobs to career executives, at once solving the mobility problem and raising the executive risk factor.

The problem of comparatively low rewards may solve itself, says Shaw.

Today, most executives are covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, rather than the more portable Federal Employees Retirement System. Most CSRS-covered executives are loath to leave government until they're eligible to retire, because they can't take their benefits with them to a private-sector job. Until they do, government won't be forced to compete as hard with the private sector for executive talent.

The gilded retirement cage frustrates current executives, says Browning. "I could make more money in the private sector, but I'm in the Civil Service Retirement System and I have golden handcuffs and I can't get out," she says. "The Army is not offering early outs, and if I resigned, I'd have no annuity until I was 62."

"As more and more senior executives are in FERS," says Shaw, "they are going to move out of government and government is going to have to recruit more from the outside and pay more."