The Case for a Strong Career Leadership in the Federal Government
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The prompt for this round of the FEDforum is team morale. This week, hear from the Senior Executives Association (SEA).
Leadership and morale are intrinsically linked. When effective leadership breaks down in a work environment and the connection between managers and employees is ruptured, disengagement sets in, beckoning diminished productivity, disengagement, and increased turnover.
A recent Gallup study revealed approximately 70 percent of employee productivity is the result of a manager’s leadership. However, the same study found that companies fail to select the candidate with the right talent for the job nearly 82 percent of the time.
Companies, like the government, often promote employees to managerial positions due to their subject matter acumen rather than their leadership abilities. While experience is fundamental to promotion decisions, an employee's skills and behavior should also play a significant role. According to Gallup research, just 2 in 10 employees possess the necessary inherent skills to manage, training and experience can prepare another 1 or 2 out of 10 for success, and the majority of employees are unlikely to be successful in leadership roles managing others despite any amount of investment or training.
The federal government has routinely failed to select the right employees for advancement into the management ranks, which is further compounded by the lack of professional training, development, and growth. As the pandemic only bolstered the importance of the role of managers and leaders, equipping them for success—first as individuals themselves, for their teams, then their organizations—is a mission-critical investment to tackle the federal government's historical workforce issues and shift to the future of work.
In July, the Senior Executives Association (SEA), in partnership with Microsoft Federal, hosted leaders from the public and private sectors to discuss this new role of the manager and how employees have reshaped their expectations of the workplace thru the pandemic and the rise of hybrid work.
"Managers are the key—we realized that even more through the pandemic. In expecting them to do all this stuff and to give great care to their employees, we were asking a lot of them," said Amy Coleman, Corporate Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft. "[Managers] are the heartbeat of the employee experience. They’re models for the future."
Coleman went on to describe how during the pandemic, Microsoft intentionally trained and supported its over 26,000 managers and undertook an internal mindset shift around the unique demands placed on this population of employees, to include trainings, communities of practice, toolkits, and support systems. “There’s a real tone change for how hard it is to be a manager,” Coleman noted.
Traci DiMartini, Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) at the General Services Administration echoed this sentiment. “We need to work on the selection of our managers and then their care and feeding and their constant evolution and growth,” DiMartini noted.
As the leading voice among the federal career executive corps, SEA actively supports highly qualified, accountable, and focused leadership in the federal government to ensure agencies meet their missions. The association’s policy agenda focuses on securing for resources and policies that (1) strengthen the government's workforce as a whole; (2) reform the Senior Executive Service (SES) performance management system; (3) promote accountability in managerial performance. More tactically, the association offers a community of leaders who come together thru frequent forums, trainings, and information sharing to improve the practice of public service leadership.
Ultimately, the first step forward in addressing team morale and agency performance must be to invest in and strengthen career leadership. The public service leadership model developed by the Partnership for Public Service provides a framework and tools the association believes the government can and should rally around.
As highlighted by the near 5 percent government-wide employee engagement drop this year’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, in the absence of change, federal employees' satisfaction and engagement will only continue to decrease as the federal government faces significant risks from this neglect. In other words, how long will it take for the great resignation to reach the federal government, and how can we get ahead of it?
The column from the Senior Executives Association is part of the FEDforum, an initiative to unite voices across the federal community. The FEDforum is a space for federal employee groups to share their organizations’ initiatives and activities with the FEDmanager audience.
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