In the face of emergencies, employees tend to focus fully on the goals of the organization, work double-time with no prodding and devote themselves entirely to the mission at hand. Since a manager's job is largely to get people motivated to work hard and meet those goals, emergencies can make a manager's job easier.
It's rare when a boss sends out a message to employees chastising them for failing to step up in tough times. More often, managers find themselves amazed that their employees could do so much work in so little time in the face of great challenges. Perhaps it's simply human nature to rise to the occasion.
But there is a flip side to this natural tendency: In times of emergency, people often develop the dowhatever- it-takes practices that include wasteful actions. It's a problem for any organization; it's a bigger problem when the organization is a federal agency spending taxpayer dollars.
When the Transportation Department was charged in 2001 with creating the Transportation Security Administration's 60,000-screener workforce from scratch in a year, employees rose to the occasion and did the job. But an audit of the $740 million effort suggests that a lot more was spent than was necessary. Expensive hotel sites were used, $20-anhour workers were charged to the TSA at $48 an hour and thousands of dollars in questionable phone calls were billed to the agency, The Washington Post reported in June after it obtained an unreleased Defense Contract Audit Agency review. Auditors questioned $300 million of the $740 million spent, The Post added.
The blame game is well under way since The Post reported those results, with TSA officials pointing fingers at the prime contractor, NCS Pearson, and NCS Pearson executives pointing fingers right back at TSA. The key question managers should consider, however, is: Why did this happen?
Given the sheer amount of questionable costs, the carefree spending attitude seems to have been widespread, suggesting that the management culture that formed in the creation of TSA was one focused on mission-without enough focus on stewardship of taxpayer dollars. The messages to the rank and file working on the TSA hiring effort appear to have lacked enough reminders to think about smart spending.
Top-level decisions-such as one to use expensive hotels to review and interview applicants-conveyed throughout the organization the idea that no expense need be spared. The entire effort was governed by a time-and-materials spending method, which allows costs to escalate unchecked, rather than by a fixed-cost figure that would stifle unnecessary spending.
There are times when managers should adopt get-it-done-at-all-costs mentalities, and those include situations when lives are on the line. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the TSA hiring drive had that feeling about it, a grand effort to protect American lives.
Nonetheless, this could have been accomplished without some of the extravagant spending. For managers, the lesson might be that emergencies can help them, but they also can hurt. In addition to motivating their employees, managers also have the responsibility of making sure resources are spent wisely. Using that as a guiding principle in all their decisions is one way to ensure that during emergencies, the ends don't run away with the means.