Leadership Void

icture the scene: A canoe filled with unsuspecting paddlers drifts down a river. Flowing water gurgles past; trees cast shade from the river's edge. Up ahead, just where the river is about to plunge over a rocky ledge and become a dangerous waterfall, a sign reads, "Human Capital Falls Ahead. Use Caution." This image, drawn in magic marker on a big white presentation board in the office of Michael Brostek, associate director for federal management and workforce issues at the General Accounting Office, would be amusing if it weren't so serious.

As Brostek and human resources experts across government know, federal agencies historically have paid precious little attention to personnel issues. Congress in recent years has passed a series of laws forcing agencies to plan strategically for their information technology, financial management and other management needs. Although some of these laws touch on the issue of human resources, none directly focuses on it. As a result, "there's a gap," says Stephen Altman, GAO's assistant director for federal management and workforce issues. "Human capital--the area where agencies invest the lion's share of their budgets--hasn't been addressed in any comprehensive way."

Compounding the problem are a number of demographic and market trends. Perhaps most significant, the aging baby boomers--those born between 1946 and 1964--who now hold key management positions in agencies will be taking vast amounts of expertise from government when they begin retiring in 2001, the year the first of them become eligible for early retirement. At the same time, with the average GS-15 employee nearly 51 years old and the average GS-14 employee nearly 48, these people, too, will soon be eligible for early retirement, potentially leaving gaping holes in the ranks of qualified talent to promote into the Senior Executive Service. Although not all those eligible will take early retirement, agency officials must be prepared for a substantial exodus.

Replenishing the leadership pipeline won't be easy. Because birth rates in the late 1960s and 1970s were relatively low compared with the baby boomer rates--14.8 births per 1,000 people in 1973, for example, compared with 25.3 in 1954--there's a smaller pool of younger talent available to succeed GS-level retirees. Further complicating the matter is today's highly competitive labor market, which is making it harder than ever for agencies to attract and keep good candidates for government jobs that often pay less than private-sector ones. Several senior officials interviewed by Government Executive predict that a failure to overcome these challenges by aggressively recruiting and cultivating future leaders could become a crisis of major proportions in the early years of the 21st century.

Downsizing's Downfall

Today's average federal worker is older, better-paid, better-educated and more highly skilled than ever before. He or she also works in an environment that, after the elimination of more than 366,000 positions in the past six years, has never been less stable. True, only about 30,000 people have been let go via reductions in force. But many who chose not to accept buyouts and were not ready to retire were shuffled out of their eliminated jobs and reassigned to positions they may not have wanted or been especially well-suited for. Most observers agree that the government needed some trimming, especially in the administrative area. But they now lament that cuts were made without regard for the future health of the workforce.

"There was plenty of room for downsizing," says Rosslyn Kleeman, distinguished executive-in-residence in George Washington University's Department of Public Administration and former director of workforce issues at GAO. "But it was just done so poorly. It was done without any workforce planning, so I think we lost many of the people in their mid-careers who were still fresh and good, and we left a lot of the old timers who were close to retirement and have calendars on their walls counting off the days until they can retire. Agencies could have done a much better job [of] workforce planning instead of just saying, 'Anybody who wants to take advantage of buyouts, just go ahead.' "

During the years of heavy downsizing, intern programs and recruiting all but stopped, notes Ray Sumser, a senior human resources management consultant at the National Academy of Public Administration. Many va-cant lower-level jobs--in the GS-5, GS-7 and GS-9 ranks--were filled with internal candidates. The good news is that, compared with the number of positions cut, relatively few people were involuntarily let go, he says. "The other side of the story is the skills imbalance and the older workforce and the no fresh intake--no seed corn."

Pipeline Problems

The net effect of downsizing has been pressure on the pipeline of future leaders, which threatens to create big problems as greater numbers of top managers retire. At the Commerce Department, for example, within three years, 59 percent of SES members will be eligible to retire, and within seven years, 84 percent will be eligible, says Debra Tomchek, director of human resources management at Commerce. They will take with them not only leadership experience but also critical technical skills. Unless the agency puts in place a replacement strategy, "we're going to have a crisis at the top," she says.

At the Treasury Department, too, a large percentage of senior leaders are eligible to retire, says Kay Frances Dolan, the department's deputy assistant secretary for human resources. In addition, because of lower birth rates, the number of Treasury employees aged 35 to 44 will drop by about 15 percent in the next few years, so there will be fewer people to groom for leadership roles. "And all this is happening at the same time top talent is in increasing demand nationwide," says Dolan.

With the daily work of government ever more dependent on information technology, the IT pipeline is especially worrying to some. "The Treasury Depart-ment is approaching a crisis in information technology skills," concluded James Flyzik, Treasury's chief information officer, in a February report to former Secretary Robert Rubin. Flyzik noted that "this is a highly experienced workforce, which is moving in great numbers toward retirement eligibility." He argued that the department needed to quickly undertake a "coordinated and comprehensive effort" to recruit, retain and develop employees.

Agencies already have suffered the repercussions of failing to plan for future IT staff needs--in the form of the year 2000 computer problem. The Health and Human Services Department, for example, had to bring back 40 retirees to help prepare its systems for Y2K. Evelyn White-Brown, deputy assistant secretary for human resources at HHS, believes that had the department kept an alert eye on the horizon, it could have prevented that need. "We could have been better prepared to offer retention bonuses to individuals in the information technology field to stay with us long enough to attach them with some of the younger workforce who didn't have the skills, or do some retraining so that in the two or three years beyond that we would not be facing the problem as we've had to," she says.

Getting Prepared

Priming the pipeline to avoid such problems in the future is precisely what agencies are trying to do now. Some are further ahead than others. Commerce Department officials are implementing an "SES 2000" program that will identify the positions that are likely to open up soon via retirements and will train and develop a new generation to fill those jobs. Tomchek is tracking numbers across all occupations to identify potential gaps before they occur. Turnover doesn't have to be a bad thing, as long as an agency plans for it, she notes.

Treasury has created an executive leadership program for senior executives. Treasury provided solid training on technical and core mission skills and was good at funneling people into the SES, but it had a training and development void within the SES ranks, Dolan says. Treasury officials hope the new program will encourage people to stay with government rather than flee to higher-paying private-sector jobs. "Research shows that the feeling that [people] are continuing to contribute and that they are continuing to learn has a lot to do with whether people stay," Dolan says.

The Defense Department, which has 686,500 civilian employees, has created perhaps the most systematic plan to train and develop future leaders. The Defense Leadership and Management Program was established last year in response to a 1995 report by the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces, which said DoD needed to take a comprehensive approach to developing civilian leadership.

Competition for slots in the program, which lasts six to 10 years, is very competitive. The program gives people at the GS-12 or GS-13 level a "developmental assignment" for at least a year outside their normal occupation or division, says Diane Disney, deputy assistant secretary of defense for civilian personnel policy. "This opens our civilians' minds," she says. "It opens them up to options and gets them out of the narrow stovepipes that they used to be in."

At the GS-14 and GS-15 levels, participants study national security decision making, something all military officers must do. "As a democracy, we believe in civilian control of the military," Disney says. "There-fore, it's imperative that our civilians know what our military members are learning." Throughout the program, students take defense-focused graduate courses in business administration.

Before this program, DoD's approach to civilian leadership training was "random," Disney says. "There was not a coherent departmental policy, so that the developmental opportunities a person gained were to some extent dependent upon how much that person already knew, which people that person knew, whether that individual had mentors--the luck of the draw, one might say. But as a department we can't afford that. We have a more complex mission with fewer people, so we have to make sure the people who are here have the capacity to do more and to think more broadly than their predecessors."

Program People

Agencies also are being more strategic about training program staff in critical new skill areas. Government no longer needs mere rule-followers, but rather people with analytical and communication skills, HHS' White-Brown notes. In contract management, for example, "we're talking about a different skill level today," she says. "We're not talking about people who know how to order pencils and paper clips. We're talking about people who monitor multimillion-dollar contracts. You take someone who's been engaged in having it all spelled out, with all the i's dotted and the t's crossed and then say go analyze this and go solve the problem--someone may get lucky and do it, but they haven't been prepared to function in that arena." Unless agencies provide procurement managers with sufficient training to adapt to the new way of doing business, or find them more appropriate jobs, White-Brown adds, "it's setting us on a course to fail."

With similar concerns in mind, the Census Bureau has developed a contract management certification program in partnership with George Washington Univer-sity. The program consists of seven week- long courses that are taught at Census headquarters in Suitland, Md. Employees must be certified before they can manage major contracts, says Nancy Potok, principal associate director and chief financial officer at the bureau.

Census officials also have funneled more training to mission-specific needs. For example, after noting widely varying--and often inadequate--surveying skills among college graduates with statistics and other related degrees, the agency created a master's program in survey methodology in partnership with the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. The agency considered it a critical move, Potok says, because "survey methodology is our core competency here."

Rethinking Recruiting

Before agencies can train, develop and cultivate leaders from within their ranks, they first have to attract top entry-level talent, something that has been no easy task in recent years. In fact, the 55 departments and agencies that provide financial support for NAPA's human resources-related research have highlighted recruiting at the GS-5, GS-7 and GS-9 levels as one of their biggest problems, says Sumser, who is leading the research effort.

What agencies have to accept, Sumser says, is that they can't attract good people unless they're willing to spend a bit of money on marketing and on-site recruiting. "If you're not willing to spend the resources to establish a campus identity year-round--not just when you have a college recruiting visit--and if you're not willing to do your specific college recruiting with trained, well-informed people, then you're not going to get the cream of the crop," he says.

That means having a formal recruiting strategy. "You need to step back and think about what kind of image are you trying to convey," says Mary Lou Lindholm, associate director for employment at the Office of Personnel Manage-ment. Agencies have to identify their target audience, as well as the exact type of information they want to convey through brochures and other advertising, she notes. "You have to have a plan. You can't just go at this haphazardly."

At the Federal Reserve Board, which NAPA plans to study to learn some best-practices lessons, "we try to capitalize on the prestige of this organization," says Kathy Cimral, manager of human re-sources. "We quite frankly tell people that a job here will open doors" for graduate school or other jobs. The Fed also has recognized the importance of having program employees help with the recruiting process. "There's something to be said for talking to a line person face-to-face," Cimral says.

The Customs Service, too, has found front-line workers critical to the recruiting process. Employees such as customs inspectors and canine enforcement officers accompany HR recruiting specialists to college campuses so students can get a more direct sense of what the agency's jobs are like, says Deborah Spero, assistant Customs commissioner for human resources management.

Selling Points

Recognizing that federal salaries often pale in comparison to what private firms can offer, agencies also are selling other aspects of jobs, such as work-life programs, as part of their compensation packages. "From a recruiting standpoint, it's important for employees to know that they can balance both work and family life and be successful in their work life to the extent that they can continue to get awards and bonuses and things of that nature," HHS' White-Brown says.

One of the key goals of the HHS work-life effort, which Secretary Donna Shalala started after seeing the toll downsizing had taken on her workforce, is to improve employee satisfaction. A work-life center offers counseling, job search, child care and other services. And employee suggestions for changes often are implemented. For example, when employees complained to Shalala that having to fill out sign-in/sign-out sheets every time they left for a lunch or other break was a demeaning nuisance, she abolished them. "Employees are inclined to produce more and work a lot harder if they feel trusted," White-Brown says.

Such changes also help retain people, she adds, "because employees can feel they are working in an environment where management leadership cares about them. They're not just here to suck them dry and get all the work out of them."

For all the worry about low salaries, Sumser is convinced that money doesn't have to be the deciding factor in the recruiting game. If aerospace engineering students hear NASA recruiters discuss the space program, they'll be hooked, he says. The same goes for budding environmental scientists and the work done at the Environmental Protection Agency. Virtually every agency has a compelling mission to sell, he says.

Sumser reflects fondly on his 42-year military and government career. "I worked for NASA during the manned space flight years. I worked for Health and Human Services. I worked for the Labor Department when the poverty program was created." Although he worked in human resources rather than on special programs, Sumser always understood that his work fit into the broader agency missions. "I can't believe that there aren't lots of people out there who have that same perspective."

Disney also believes there are ample incentives for young people to join public service even without the big salaries. Most significant, she says, is that today's young people will have unprecedented opportunities. "People will be able to rise more rapidly than their older siblings [or parents] would have been able to because of the turnover that's going to be engendered among the oldest people who are here," she says. "I see it as a wonderful career opportunity."

Disney says if she were counseling young people on career options, she'd say: "Folks, this is the place to be because in five years, 10 years, you can be overseeing major efforts. You'll be doing things at a much younger age than the baby boomers could have done because there were so many in the baby boomer cohort that there was lots of competition for all kinds of positions. As those vast numbers move out, lots of opportunities open. So if you want to position yourself for a really good career, the civil service . . . is the way to go."