The prospect of a looming executive order to reform the Senior Executive Service has policy experts at the National Academy of Public Administration pondering solutions to fix the ailing division.
At the academy’s Dec. 3 meeting, a panel of industry players, former feds and other executives sought to find the right prescription for the SES, which has been plagued by both a recruitment and retainment malaise.
“[The SES] is in crisis, in a couple of ways,” said Ronald Sanders, the panel’s moderator and a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton.”Both externally and internally, the SES is beset by lots of challenges. I think that is particularly acute during [an administrative] transition. My own view of the world is that many of those executives who are on the retirement bubble are likely to say, ‘I’m not sure I want to go through another transition.’”
And with a draft executive order from the White House currently circulating through agencies awaiting comment, changes to the SES are almost certainly on the way, but the question is whether they will be enough to draw future interest in the service.
Beth McGrath, director of Federal Government and Commercial Clients at Deloitte Consulting—and a former DoD official—said that the SES still serves an important role within the civil service, but how it develops its bench of candidates needs to change, starting with rotating executives through the agencies to garner leadership experience.
“I think we need to revamp how we grow our workforce,” she said. “I had the great opportunity to start as a GS-7, doing logistics for a weapons system in the Navy. I got to do all kinds of stuff there.
“It wasn’t a journey where I said, ‘I want to diversify my portfolio so I can be an SES.’ It was a journey that happened for me because I was interested in diversification and others were interested in putting me in positions.”
The draft order is rumored to have a provision requiring executive rotation for the SES, which the SEA said it supported, but with a designed purpose, in a letter to OMB director Shaun Donovan.
Reginald Wells, Chief Human Capital Officer for the Social Security Administration, said rotations need to be targeted to help develop the abilities of executive candidates and not required for rotations’ sake.
“I would highly endorse that we do not get into a very simplistic approach of sending people all over the place and rotate them every few years from one agency to another,” he said.
“We do have mandatory rotations as Social Security, particularly with our career development programs, because we have seen how taking somebody out of their comfort zone of technical competence and thrusting them into an area where they have not technical competence, forces them to rely on their leadership abilities.”
Alongside rotation, Wells said the SSA uses its Executive Resources Board to help develop its talent on both its SES and general service levels.
“We currently are placing 84 percent of our graduates,” he said. “We are using that Executive Resources Board to actually track the progress within the SES development program and do some early intervention if we see there are some developmental issues that we need to highlight and address.”
Robert Hale, a former DoD comptroller and an advisor for Booz Allen Hamilton, said that alongside rotation and attention, that accountability would be a critical factor in not only the SES but also the civil service.
“We need a better system for separating and if necessary, removing, people who are poor performers,” he said. “There will always be a corrosive [effect], because if they stay, other members will look at them and say, ‘Why should I work, they’re not.’”
Ultimately Hale said SES needs “fewer sticks and more carrots” to incentivize interest in the service, including making it easier to remove poor performers in the civil service, pay reform and expand competencies—including mimicking Goldwater-Nichols’ use of joint officer assignments as a requirement of promotion.
McGrath, Wells, Hale and Sanders have written a book on how to improve the SES, expected out next year, but each said that developing competencies, building a pipeline of leadership talent, enacting pay reform and rotation strategies could incentive more candidates to join the SES.
