Experts call for top leaders at agencies to commit to diversity

Federal agencies need strong leadership commitment, structural changes and a willingness to confront internalized biases if they want to create a truly diverse workforce, speakers at a National Academy of Public Administration panel said on Friday.

"People look at mechanisms to improve diversity, but the bottom line is if you don't have support at the top, those other things don't matter," said John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service. "Managers need to be held accountable for providing that culture."

Tania Shand, staff director for the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, said a new bill introduced by Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., would provide some of that structural reform and accountability. The bill would create three-person panels that include a woman and a member of a racial minority group to review appointments to Senior Executive Service positions, and then report those appointments to agency heads.

"It says you must know about what candidates are moving forward," Shand said. "You should know if your SES is getting more or less diverse."

Ron Stroman, managing director of the Office of Opportunity and Inclusiveness at the Government Accountability Office, said those kinds of structural changes were important, but that inherent biases had an impact on the ability of federal workers to advance as well.

"Work sometimes gets done informally," Stroman said. "You're walking down the hall, you're talking to your colleagues. Who are you going to have those conversations with? You're going to have those conversations with people you feel comfortable with, who look like you, whose office you can go into. It has real implications for the work you do, for the ratings you get, the promotions that people get. This natural implication to work with people who look like them is something agencies really have to understand if they're going to deal with this issue of diversity."

Palguta said it was not enough to simply recruit a candidate pool and expect that would result in a diverse leadership team.

"We've got overall, pretty good diversity, but [it's] clustered at the lower levels. I don't think we can assume that takes care of it," Palguta said. "It may be that we need to focus and move away from spending all our time on recruitment efforts, and look at what we're doing to get our folks ready to move up into leadership positions."

When it comes to making those final decisions, Stroman said, stereotypes and biases can be at their most pernicious.

"As you go up the ladder, the criteria for selection becomes vague," he said. "It's things like 'do you have leadership skills?' What are leadership skills? Who defines that? As the criteria for selection becomes less precise, stereotypes creep into the decision-making process."