Workforce

Do you have “guerilla employees” in your organization who work around (or against) their leadership? How do you deal with them?

This is the focus of a provocative article in the current issue of the Public Administration Review by Maxwell School professor Rosemary O’Leary, “Guerilla Employees: Should Managers Nurture, Tolerate, or Terminate Them?”

Two dozen federal agencies are running on-line dialogues between now and March 19^th to gather insights on what citizens would like to seen them include in their OMB-required Open Government Plans. These first-ever open dialogues are an important symbolic step toward better engaging citizens in their government. But in the end, how will agencies make sense of thousands of comments and ideas?

Most of the news media focused on the size of the budget and which agencies gained or lost. However, the budget also included an overview of the Obama Administration’s management initiatives, as well.

The overall emphasis of these initiatives is on achieving defined mission-oriented results. It de-emphasizes (but still addresses) improvements to mission-support functions and the reporting of performance information.

The latest issue of FastCompany magazine has a terrific piece by Chip and Dan Heath, “Find a Bright Spot and Clone It.” While it uses private sector examples, their insights apply equally to government.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, like HUD, is undertaking significant transformation efforts with congressional support. Its initial “Transformation 21” plan was framed around its fiscal year 2010 budget. Subsequently, more is on the way, but it has not yet been fully released.

Note:  The IBM Center recently released Seven Drivers Transforming Government, a series of essays exploring key drivers of change in government. It is based on our research and numerous insights shared by current and former government officials.  This blog is the fifth in a series of excerpts from each of the seven essays.

“The key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control,” write Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in the January 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. How? “. . . scrupulously avoid impeding progress.”

Amabile and Kramer surveyed more than 600 managers, and then asked hundreds of knowledge workers to keep daily diaries to find out what was the top motivator of performance.

The issue of poor performers is a perennial topic. This topic seems to continually top the list of issues the President’s Management Council – comprised of deputy secretaries – wants to address by streamlining the rules. But a new report by the Merit Systems Protection Board concludes that it is not the rules, but the managers, who are the problem.

Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients debuted before an audience of federal managers yesterday at the Excellence in Government Conference 2009, recapping what he has seen and learned during his “listening tour” of the government in his first 100 days in office.

No, this isn’t an early Halloween blog! I had the privilege of sharing lunch with Harvard Business School’s legendary

Rosabeth Moss Kantor last week during her whirlwind tour of DC where she is promoting her latest book: “SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.”