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Find Some Allies

To: The Manager of Zenith City’s Street Maintenance Division
From: Bob Behn
Re: Wringing Some Help from Your HR Staff
Date: October 2002

Your department’s HR staff do not think of you as their customer. They think of themselves as the guardians of the rules — as the champions of some weird notion of fairness to all departmental employees. They don’t think of themselves as responsible for the performance of the Department of Public Works, let alone the performance of your Street Maintenance Division. (They don’t even think of themselves as being fair to all of the department’s employees who do their work diligently and who won’t even consider abusing their civil-service protections.) Until you change the HR staff’s conception of their responsibilities, you won’t get any cooperation from them.

While each of Bob Behn’s Manager’s Choice dilemmas is set in a particular public agency and deals with a particular problem, each is intended to provide a specific context for a common management challenge — one that might just as easily come up in a different kind of agency facing a different kind of problem. All Governing readers and Governing.com visitors are invited to draw on their experience and submit suggestions.

Moreover, their conception of their responsibilities may well extend beyond the formal statutory and regulatory requirements. Yes, DPW’s HR staff are charged with ensuring that every personnel action complies with all of the statutory protections established by the West Dakota legislature and the Zenith city council. And they are also charged with ensuring that all such actions comply with the relevant regulations promulgated by the West Dakota Personnel Agency and the Zenith City Human Resources Bureau. Still, like many other “support” units within line agencies, DPW’s HR shop may have created an additional collection of rules that are required neither by statute nor by regulation. They may see themselves not merely as the guardian of the statutes and the regulations, but also as the guardian of what they think these statutes and regulations should be.*

Furthermore, because Higbe is not an HR expert, he, like you, depends upon your department’s staff for guidance in every step of the processes for hiring, promotion, disciple and termination. If HR tells him to do it, Higbe does it. If HR tells him not to do it, he doesn’t. Both of you are captives of your own HR staff’s interpretation of the statutes, regulations, and rules.

Engineer a Minor Revolt

If you are having trouble getting help from Randi Bragen, your fellow division directors must be having similar problems. Talk with each of them, one at a time. You might be general at first. Don’t ask: “Is Randi Bragen uncooperative with you too?” Rather, ask “From what support people do you get the best help?” (You might not get a truthful answer to this question. Some managers may not want to have the support people upon whom they rely for quick assistance to become overburdened with your problems.) Then ask, “From what support people do you have the most difficult time getting help?” (To this question, you might get more details than you can ever use.)

If I am right, if all (or most) of the other division directors have similar complaints with DPW’s HR division (or other support units), have another round of conversations. This time, offer a simple proposal to each of your colleagues. Suggest to them that every year, all of the directors of the department’s line divisions should evaluate all of the support units: HR, procurement, budget, IT, real estate. Don’t just propose that you evaluate HR; this would be (correctly) interpreted as an assault on the personnel folks. Instead, propose that you each evaluate of all of the support units. (After all, your biggest problem may be with HR. But the director of the Water & Sewer Division may be more ticked off with procurement.)

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

If you can give someone else credit for inventing this evaluation, do so. If someone says they already proposed this idea, convert yourself into his or her chief advocate. If someone else wants to make the first presentation or send the first memo, help them prepare it.

Focus on your objective. You want to convert HR (and the rest of the department’s support staff) from an obstructer of your division’s performance to a supporter. And if letting someone else get the credit for this small idea is a price you have to pay for that significant improvement, pay it.

Craft an Evaluation Process

Next, develop the evaluation form and evaluation process. Ask your line-manager colleagues for their suggestions: “What questions should we put on the evaluation form?” “When should we conduct the evaluation? In January? At the end of the fiscal year?” Try to use at least one idea from each of your colleagues. Make them their ideas.

If possible, model the evaluation form (and, perhaps, even the process) after one that is already employed in Zenith City — perhaps after one that is already employed in DPW. If, for example, the Water & Sewer Division already has a citizen evaluation form, you might copy its layout and basics. Or you might copy the layout and basics from the form that HR devised for the department’s annual personnel evaluations. How can Bragen and her HR colleagues object to something they impose on everyone else? (OK: I’m sure that they can think of some reason to object.)

Be sure that some of the questions on the form relate to the department’s mission and overall performance: “Has this staff unit helped your division improve its performance?” “How has this staff unit helped the department achieve its mission?” Don’t let the form appear to be merely an opportunity to gripe. (Any annoyed manager can easily attach some additional pages of gripes.) Make sure that the formal part of the evaluation focuses on how these support units contribute to the ability of the department to achieve the director’s key priorities.

Maybe you ought not to call this an “evaluation.” Maybe you ought to call it a “customer survey.” Maybe you want to think of this as mechanism to get the support-unit staff to think of the line units as their customers — or, at least as much their customers as their rules. And it might be that within DPW (or within Zenith City), “customer surveys” have a long tradition and better reputation than “evaluations.” Of course, it could also be the other way around.

Win Your Department Head’s Approval

When should you first discuss this with Walter Higbe? I’m not sure. It all depends upon the kind of manager he is, and upon your personal relationship with him. Maybe all it will take is a brief suggestion to him while the two of you stand around the fax machine (killing time, while waiting for your own faxes to come in by reading other people’s faxes). Maybe Higbe likes innovative suggestions and likes to give his staff the freedom to run with their ideas. Maybe he likes people to first bounce their ideas off his chief of staff. Or maybe Higbe prefers a formal, fully developed proposal laid out carefully in a detailed memo. Whenever you approach your boss, be sure to do it in a way that meshes directly with his personal operating style.

What kind of pitch should you use? Again, to what kind of arguments does Higbe respond the best? Is he driven to improve operational efficiencies? If so, make the case that these evaluations will help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of both support and line units. Does he like his department (and himself personally) to be known for experimenting with innovative policies? If so, argue that these kinds of internal evaluations will be one more feather in his innovation hat? Does he pride himself in being a tough-nosed manager? If so, describe these evaluations as another example of no-nonsense management.

Implement the Evaluation

Who should conduct this evaluation? Not you. That would undermine the legitimacy of the results.

Ideally, this evaluation would be run out of Higbe’s office. Ideally, the annual memo requesting line managers to evaluate the support units would be signed by Higbe. But Higbe himself won’t compile the results. Perhaps his chief of staff will do this. Perhaps his administrative assistant will. If Higbe signs the annual memo, if he reads the summary of results, and if he somehow allows publicly that he has seen and understands the results and their implications for the department’s performance, this annual evaluation will have an impact on the behavior of the support staff.

The Theory

Public employees are people. So are the public employees who work in support units. They pay attention to what people say about them. That’s why the support staff pay attention to the statutes and the regulations. That’s why they add new rules. They are very alert to the possibility that people will say bad things about them because they failed to obey a law or a regulation — or even because they failed to add a rule that could have prevented some obvious mistake for which there should have been a law or regulation.

Meanwhile, they also recognize that no one is going say much nice about them when they help your street maintenance division fill the potholes more quickly next winter. The credit will all go to the street maintenance staff.

That’s what you have to change. You have to get the people who work in your department’s support units to pay attention to what the managers of the line units say about them. And this evaluation (or customer survey) is one way to do it. You want every individual who works in a support unit to know that the department’s director knows what the line managers say about them.

If Randi Bragen knows this, she might actually help you get rid of Casey Hugh.

To see responses posted by other readers, click here.

* For an example of how a support culture such as the one described here can foster additional, unnecessary rules see, Steven Kelman, Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance (AEI Press, 1990, pp. 25 & 188).

A note to readers: Do not believe that the scenario described in this month’s Manager’s Choice is too surreal. It has happened. A public manager — working within the borders of the U. S. of A. — told me a nearly identical story. Only the names and other identifying details have been changed. Randi Bragen’s unwillingness to help is very, very real.

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