What should be the mission of the Department of Labor Security? I don’t know. It is probably something like: “To protect the health and safety of the workers of West Dakota and provide assistance to anyone who is harmed on the job.” But what I think it is doesn’t matter. What matters is what your staff thinks it is. What you need is a mission that all of your staff — both in headquarters and in the field — will support.

So devote next week’s meeting to creating, reaffirming, or modifying your mission statement. Maybe your existing mission statement is completely adequate. Maybe it hangs prominently in the lobby of headquarters and every local office. Maybe it is on the back of every staffer’s business card. Maybe everyone can recite it from memory. Maybe everyone believes in it. If so, spend the meeting making sure that everyone is in perfect agreement — over both the words and their meaning.

Let them talk it through. Perhaps discussing their general agreement on their overall mission will temper they personal animosities. So don’t try to cut the discussion short. For this kind of process, you will discover both the wit and wisdom of that old saying about meetings: “Everything has been said, but not everybody has said it.” So let everyone talk. Indeed, encourage every individual to talk. Each individual who contributes to the discussion will become a little more invested in the final conclusion.

Of course, they may not agree about what the mission is or should be. And, if they don’t, let them all fight it out. If it takes more than one meeting, fine. If it takes six months, fine. You may need to nudge the group towards some consensus, reminding people of the purposes outlined in the preamble of your authorizing legislation or pointing to the mission statements employed by similar agencies in other states. But keep pushing them to develop a clear statement about what the department is trying to accomplish.

This discussion can easily deteriorate into the old centralization-decentralization debate. Don’t let this happen. Keep the group focused on the department’s overall purpose. Emphasize that they can’t begin to think about what should be centralized and what should be decentralized unless everyone possesses the same clear and common understanding of what they are all trying to accomplish.

Until you have created some general agreement on the department’s overall mission, you can’t begin to deal with problems of local office discretion.

Then, once you have created this agreement, you ought to use every opportunity and every vehicle to reinforce this statement of mission. Don’t just put it on the walls and the business cards. You need to begin every meeting, every speech, and every legislative testimony with a clear statement of the department’s mission. You need to ensure that every individual who works for the Department of Labor Security understands and salutes this centralized mission.

Decentralize Implementation

Each decision requires someone to determine the applicable facts, to ask the appropriate questions, to probe for the relevant circumstances, and to make intelligent decisions. These decisions will always be judgments. They will be based on the nature of the department’s overall mission, the requirements created by law, and the constraints imposed by regulations — and by judgment. So you need to be sure that every person employed by your department (including every individual who works in the field) completely understands the mission, law, and regulations — particularly the mission.

And you need to ensure that people base their decisions on the mission. Yes, the laws and regulations impose requirements and constraints. But these laws and regulations don’t predestine every decision. Yes, every decision has to satisfy the requirements of some laws and some regulations. But the inevitable contradictions and ambiguities leave lots of room for discretion. So when people choose a particular alternative, you want them to base it on the department’s mission.

So repeatedly ask people this question: “Why did you make this choice?” And when they respond with a legal or technical answer, probe further: “But how does this decision further our common mission?” Teach everyone in your department that you expect a mission-driven explanation. I know: Some people will make a technical decision and then invent a mission-driven justification. Still, that’s progress. And once people recognize that they will have to be prepared with a mission-driven justification, that they will eventually need to invent one, some will begin to think about the relationship between the mission and their decisions not as an afterthought but from the beginning.

You need give the local offices discretion. You want the local offices to exercise discretion. For “without discretion, there can be no accountability.”¹ And if you don’t provide the local offices the opportunity to exercise their discretion, everything will come to a halt as all of the non-simple decisions end up on your desk.

But you also need to give the local offices a clear basis on which to exercise this discretion. That’s why you need to give them one common, centralized mission. You want them to focus on the mission as a means of ensuring that their decisions are intelligent.

Support Your People

So don’t send Willoughby up to testify alone. Go yourself. And when a legislator goes looking for headlines and subpoenas some front-line worker to testify about a controversial decision that he or she has made, you need to be at the hearing too — right on the witness stand. This will give you yet another opportunity to explain to a large and attentive audience the mission of your department. This will give you yet another opportunity to explain the basis on which the people in your department exercise their discretion.

This will give you yet another opportunity to explain how a centralized mission drives decentralized decision making.