Managing
Up from
Mediocrity

Two years after the governor appointed you director of West Dakota’s Department of Economic Development, most knowledgeable observers in the state rate you a success. And this includes the governor. What more could you ask?

When you became director, your agency was the state’s symbol of governmental incompetence. Business executives complained vociferously that Economic Development was a liability. If legislators needed attention, they simply held hearings about your department. And on a slow news day, columnists and editorial writers could easily pick on one of its many obvious failures.

You have changed all that. You fixed the Division of Tourism, which has not only created some attractive promotional materials but now also responds quickly and accurately to all inquiries. You eliminated the bureaucratic infighting between your corporate recruiters and the regulators in the Department of Environmental Protection, and built working partnerships. You organized several international trade missions, which created some new opportunities for West Dakota’s businesses. Further, to help guide economic development strategy, you created a research bureau. And you organized the Governor’s Business Advisory Council.

As a result, stakeholders are no longer complaining. Legislators have stopped holding hearings. Editorial writers have found new agencies to dissect. And the governor’s office is concentrating on other agencies and other problems. You have achieved the bureaucrat’s ultimate measure of success: You have kept your department off the front page.

All this, however, is not true success. The department is no longer a liability, but it is not a true asset either. All you have done is get it back up to zero.

You know this. The key people on your personal staff know this. And a couple of your division heads—the two that you were able to select yourself—know this. But the rest of the people in your department, from division chiefs to front-line employees, think everything is wonderful. From their perspective, things haven’t been this good in years. They are, after all, professionals. When they are doing a good job, they expect that no one will pay attention.

Tourist visits, however, are not up significantly. They are no longer going down, but they are just barely creeping up. The promotional materials look better—a lot better—but even people from neighboring states can’t find many good reasons to cross the border for a vacation. The Division of Tourism has yet to put West Dakota on the map.

Yes, your people have stopped battling constantly with the regulators who are responsible for keeping the state’s air and water clean. Indeed, everyone in both departments—Economic Development and Environmental Protection—recognizes that West Dakota’s environment is a major advantage when seeking to recruit or keep a business. But the interagency cooperation that you fostered has yet to produce any major successes—or even a boost in the number of minor successes. Just last month, the CEO of e-hardware, whom the governor and you had been courting for over a year, decided to locate her manufacturing plant just across the border in East Dakota.

Finally, while the overseas trade missions have helped build the governor’s personal rapport with key leaders in the business community and generated a variety of inquiries, your staff is unable to attribute, directly or indirectly, any major foreign investments in West Dakota to these overseas trips. Similarly, although the state’s international exports are up slightly, they are up no more for the nations that you and the governor visited than for the world in general.

In two years, you have corrected all of the readily apparent problems that were plaguing the department when you took over. But you were lucky. The department was in sufficiently bad shape that you just needed to do a few simple things well—not brilliantly, just well—and people would start calling you a managerial whiz. Your initiatives were rather obvious. You took a broken agency, and you fixed it.

Thus, if you quit now, you’d get glowing references as a turnaround expert, operations manager and organizational leader. And this halo effect does feel warm and fuzzy. You, however, realize that you don’t quite warrant all this praise. Fancy brochures and efficient operational responses, interagency partnerships around commonly accepted purposes and values, and overseas trade missions that dramatize new public-private cooperation—all are just means. And so far, these means have yet to produce the desired ends. Only by converting these means into meaningful ends, you well recognize, will you have really accomplished something. Only by achieving the ends can you prove that you are worth all the praise.

You have improved the department from poor to mediocre. Now you want to take it from mediocre to excellent.

For Bob Behn's approach to this month's public management dilemma — or to post your own ideas — click here.

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