Developing Government Leaders from the Inside

Federal agencies are up against a big workforce challenge: How can you develop and retain top talent in order to prepare leaders for tomorrow?

Right now, talent and retention are major issues inside the federal government. Of employees currently in the Senior Executive Service (SES), only a small fraction actually received their job as a promotion from a mid-level federal job (GS-13 to GS-15); the rest entered from elsewhere across the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, most young leaders either leave government or do not advance up the ranks. In fact, over a 10-year span, only 1.4 percent of the GS-13 to GS-15 population entered into SES federal service.

Federal employees seeking to move into leadership roles require strong training and career development, and the Office of Public Management has made it a priority to increase these types of efforts. But agencies face a number of resource constraints, particularly when it comes to budget for off-site trainings and travel.

To expand the leadership pipeline, government is increasingly looking towards the development of customized training programs. These in-house trainings use curricula and instructors that match an agency’s focus and resources.

“This is leadership and skills training that supports an agency's mission,” says Al Tyree, Director of Business Relations at Graduate School USA. Tyree also notes that there’s a growing demand for these types of trainings in agencies.

To learn more about how customized courses can lead to leadership paths, we talked further with Tyree.

Q: What are agencies not doing right when it comes to leadership development?

Each agency has a different culture and mission, and without a customized approach there are real limitations to preparing future leaders. You have to approach each training from the outcomes and goals first. You don’t really achieve that from a course catalog or an off-the-shelf class. Agencies have to move to a blended learning approach that makes use of customized options. They need to stop thinking about these trainings as a commodity because, in reality, these are results-based trainings with robust learning activities.

Q: What do personalized or customized trainings mean for government?

When you look at the requests that we get from federal agencies, they’re looking for customized trainings and employee development opportunities. The courses range from federal-focused specialties, like government accounting and auditing, to more general offerings, like leadership development. Often, the agency wants a customized course that’s tailored to the topics important to their specific organization. Perhaps there are mission-specific requirements involved. And each course takes an outcomes-based approach — we’re really mapping our course curriculum to the content needs of the agency.

Q: Give an example of a course you worked on most recently.

We provide the breadth and depth to match the evolving needs of agencies. For instance, our federal human resource curriculum is a comprehensive array of courses that prepare HR practitioners to manage human capital needs in specific agencies.

But in the broadest sense, what we’re doing is leadership training. For example, one agency had already established a leadership framework, listing the tenets of successful leaders. Then they called upon us to do the training — not only to prepare employees for future roles, but also to provide a training that underscored their leadership framework. We developed a module-based approach using that framework, and we took key leaders from inside the agency and involved them in the training program. That involvement made it a combination of formal and informal training. There were also opportunities for mentoring, and in this instance we really became immersed in the training culture of the organization.

Q: Where do you begin when you start to structure a customized course?

With our groups, we have curriculum managers who work closely with the agency seeking to develop a course in order to ensure that the course is on the right track. We’ll ask for the agency’s vision, then we’ll look at any requirements and map them to the course content and curriculum. We work very closely with the agency to get a better sense of the goals and desired outcomes of the training. You’re basically gauging outcomes and mapping the course before class even begins.

Q: What should agency leaders keep in mind when they’re considering a customized course offering?

From our perspective, it really begins and ends with our instructors. Most of our instructors are former federal employees who have the credentials and backgrounds to match those organization needs. We try to get them involved early on to make sense of the course. For example, if the Department of Housing and Urban Development requests a course and they're looking for training on leadership, we would try to provide an instructor who has worked in that agency or is very familiar with how work gets done there. In all of our efforts we are going to apply current learning styles, including: classroom instruction, virtual instruction, and online coursework. Many of the learning activities take place outside of the classroom. We’re looking for an integrated approach that goes beyond traditional learning experiences.

This content is made possible by Graduate School USA. The editorial staff of Government Executive was not involved in its preparation.