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Previous Manager’s Choice dilemmas
The Vacuous Job Description
As West Dakota’s secretary of environmental affairs, you have worked hard to convince the governor, the budget director and key legislators that the state needs to create a collection of regional environmental partnerships. Now, you have both the authorization and some money. Your next step is to hire someone to create effective partnerships.
 Your department’s new director of environmental partnerships will have a broad mandate. The objective is clear: to get state, local and federal agencies, nonprofit organizations and businesses to collaborate on multimedia enforcement and mitigation strategies to improve air and water quality; to reduce the accumulation of pesticides, toxic substances and other wastes; and to improve wildlife habitats.
But exactly how the director will create these collaborating partnerships is much less obvious. He or she will have to pull people together — sweet talking and cajoling some, bluffing and blustering with others.
Some states have created such working relationships, but each functions quite differently. Moreover, each of these partnerships is structured differently and arrived at its current level of effectiveness through a quite different journey. Thus, there is no one obvious model of how to create such a partnership. Whoever you recruit for this assignment will, inevitably, have to employ different strategies in different regions of West Dakota. The resulting partnerships may well function quite differently, too.
Thus, you need an individual who possesses a broad range of technical and interpersonal skills. He or she must be focused on achieving significant environmental improvements and creative in helping people from different (perhaps even competing) organizations overcome their mutual distrust and work together.
Given the budget for this initiative, you conclude, after talking with Carla Everett, your personnel manager, that you can hire someone at level 22. Now, you and Everett need to create a job description, get it approved by the state’s human resources agency and start advertising.
Everett is a shrewd bureaucrat (in the best meaning of that word) who knows how to get stuff through the system. She gets people hired, upgraded and sometimes even terminated — and you never have to worry about it. But you want to make sure that this job is filled quickly with someone who is tenacious and innovative. So you ask Everett to keep you posted on her progress.
But when Everett sends you a draft of the job description, you are disappointed. It includes such boilerplate phrases as:
“Plan, coordinate and administer activities of assigned program areas to support the accomplishment of program objectives.”
“Develop, coordinate and advise staff regarding program policy.”
“Develop and coordinate new ideas and concepts for program themes, materials and resources to supplement, expand or replace existing program components.”
“This says positively zero,” you complain to Everett. “These words give absolutely no guidance about what this person is supposed to accomplish.”
Taking out your frustrations on your keyboard, you pound out a few words that convey the job’s real responsibilities and specific goals: “Over four years, the director of environmental partnerships is responsible for creating a collaboration of a diversity of environmental organizations in five different regions of the state, with the goal of reducing specific forms of pollution, or of improving habitat productivity by 5 percent in the first year and 10 percent in the second year.”
“There!” you note with some satisfaction. “That’s what the state and the governor want this person to do.”
“But human resources will never approve your job description,” explains Everett. “This state doesn’t have any job descriptions like yours. They’ve just never done it that way. That’s why I wrote it the way I did. It’s the only way we’ll get them to sign off.”
“You mean we always do it this way?” you respond incredulously. “How come you never told me about this?” Then, fuming still further, you sputter: “Let’s take this to the governor. Someone ought to get this fixed. If no one else will do it, we should. And with this new job, we have the perfect case.”
“The case may be perfect for a protest,” demurs Everett, “but a protest won’t speed up the process. Maybe you’ll get someone hired with your job description. But it will take years — years! The folks in human resources will fight you all the way. And they have the troops. Why do you think they call them the Agency of human resources?”
Still, you worry that if you don’t have the right job description, you won’t attract the right applicants.
What should you do?
For Bob Behn's approach to this month's public management dilemma — or to post your own ideas — click here.
Robert D. Behn is director of the Governors Center at Duke University and author of Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Brookings, forthcoming).
Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
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