Can Personnel
Be Fixed?

As chief policy adviser to the mayor of Zenith City, you have been asked to fix the city's Personnel Department — or, at least, to develop a new set of policies that will fix it. The mayor is fed up with complaints about Personnel. He wants you to make the problem — and thus the complaints — go away.

In this case, of course, the complaints aren't coming from constituents. They're coming from inside your own government — from the heads of the line agencies who have to deal with Personnel day in and day out. And the complaints cluster around a few familiar but annoying problems.

When an agency needs to fill a job slot, the Personnel Department rarely produces a set of candidates that the agency's managers think fits their needs. Often, the managers know a number of people who can do the job; usually, they know at least one person who can do it very well. Or so they think. But when Personnel sends over a list of approved candidates to interview, these people are hardly ever on it.

When an agency needs to create a new position, Personnel always seems to classify it too low. Thus, the job (or at least the salary) is unattractive, and the agency can't get the people it wants to apply. And getting Personnel to reclassify a position is virtually impossible. When a valued employee gets an outside offer with a higher salary, the agency wants to match it. But this requires a reclassification of the employee's position, and Personnel simply refuses. We lose our best people, the agencies say, just because Personnel won't let us give them a modest raise.

Finally, directors say Personnel makes them create job descriptions that are arcane and confining. "We need people who are willing to do what needs to be done to meet our goals," one director says. "We don't want people who think they need only do what is on the job description. Job descriptions don't help. They just get in the way."

None of these are new problems, of course. Agency heads in Zenith City (and in most cities) have always complained about the absurdities of the personnel system. But now the protests are getting even worse. At the last directors' meeting on the mayor's performance initiative, a full revolt developed. Ramon O'Leary, the director of the Health Department, complained that Personnel wasn't giving him anything he needed. Or when it did, it took so long that the help was useless. Soon the other directors were chiming in.

Maurice Martinez, the director of personnel, tried to explain why the system worked the way it did, but no one wanted to listen. "You're just giving us the usual excuses," interrupted Wendy Kim, the parks chief. "I don't need to hear all this again. Just stop getting in the way."

The mayor got a little heated in return. He even suggested at one point that department heads were trying to blame Personnel for their own inadequacies. But when the meeting broke up, the mayor turned to you: "We've got to make this thing work. Personnel is too much of an obstacle to our efforts to improve performance. Why don't you develop a plan to fix it?"

You've been working for this mayor long enough to know exactly what these words mean. When he says, "Why don't you...?" what he really means is "Do it now!" He will expect some kind of report, at least a progress report, at the directors' meeting next month. So you get started. You walk over to Personnel and drop in on Maurice Martinez.

Here, too, the response isn't much of a surprise. Martinez says he understands the frustration with bureaucratic and rigid rules, but he and his subordinates have little choice. The state legislature has mandated that all municipalities follow a specific set of personnel procedures, and although the city council has some flexibility to modify these procedures, it has consistently refused to do so.

"Sure, we could take some shortcuts," Martinez tells you. "We could try to speed things up. But that means we have to violate — or at least bend — some rules. And when we do that, we get in trouble. Sometimes it's a journalistic expose. Sometimes it's an expensive lawsuit. When this happens, we're the ones who get blamed — not the other agency. We follow the rules because it's our job to keep the city out of the newspapers.

"We have to be fair to every job applicant and every city employee," continues Martinez. "The directors are always trying to play favorites. We have the unpleasant — but necessary — task of preventing them from doing that. That's really what the complaints are all about."

You are the mayor's policy adviser, not his management guru. As familiar as you are with the litany of complaints, you can't pretend to be an expert on all these arcane civil-service procedures — the "rule of three" and "span of control" and all the other terminology Martinez keeps laying on you. The answer you come up with has to depend on political judgment and common sense, not technical terminology. But you have to have something by the end of the month.

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