When the Senior Executive Service was established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the vision was as lofty as it was pragmatic.
The government of the United States needed to attract and employ a pool of the highest quality management executives available. And it needed a better system for holding those executives more uniformly accountable for their individual and organizational performance.
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While the Senior Executive Service succeeded in replacing a convoluted array of separate executive personnel authorities, SES executives to this day continue to face widely-varying performance expectations and appraisal systems from department to department. That in turn has made it harder for senior executives to move within agencies, and from one agency to another.
That’s what lies behind a new performance appraisal system being issued to federal agencies today by the Obama administration.
The new performance appraisal system emerged after two concentrated months of discussions late last summer with senior agency officials from nearly 30 federal agencies, along with representatives from the Senior Executive Association, the National Academy of Public Administration, Congress, and the President’s Management Advisory Board, according to a briefing document Breaking Gov has obtained.
If these are the qualities (executives need) to get in at an agency, then these should be the qualities you should exhibit (and be evaluated on) once you’re in.”
The new system establishes a more uniform and consistent framework to communicate expectations and evaluate the performance of SES executives, according to a joint memo due out today from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget.
Step toward alignment
The performance appraisal framework, which is also to be issued today, will eventually replace dozens of disparate appraisal systems and is expected to be phased in as agency-specific systems expire.
“The system will provide agencies with a standardized approach to managing the performance of SES employees-furthering Congress’ original vision…of an executive cadre that can readily move into different assignments as needed by the government,” said OPM Director John Berry in a memo written jointly with OMB Deputy Director and Chief Performance Officer, Jeffrey Zients (pictured above).
For the nearly 8,000 SES executives in government leadership positions, the new appraisal system is intended to improve SES performance management across the entire federal government by providing greater equity and uniformity, and as a byproduct, also promote greater transferability.
At the same time, the system allows agencies the flexibility they need to customize performance objectives.
The new performance appraisal system being introduced today is expected to revolve around five critical areas of competence–which now, more than before, align with the same criteria used for evaluating prospective executives. Executives will be rated on how well they:
- Lead change
- Lead people
- Build coalitions
- Demonstrate business acumen
- Demonstrate a bias for results
Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executive Association which represents SES executives, and who participated in the appraisal systems development, praised the new framework’s alignment with existing criteria for hiring senior executives.
“If these are the qualities (executives need) to get into an agency, then these should be the qualities you should exhibit (and be evaluated on) once you’re in,” she said. Agencies currently are allowed to develop different performance criteria in evaluating SES executives.
At the same time, she expressed a wait-and-see attitude about how much of an impact the new system would have in improving the performance appraisal process.
There is no question, she said, “You want to create the best system possible, but it’s ultimately not about the system as much as the implementation.”
Larger dilemma
A senior agency official familiar with the new system, who spoke on condition of not being identified, said the design of new system is to promote greater uniformity and not force a specific distribution curve in the ratings, or to address poor performance.
The existing rating systems have come under attack, dating back to the Bush adminstration, over concerns about the wide disparity of SES executives earning top performance ratings at some agencies more than at others.
The latest available report from OPM for fiscal year 2010, for instance, shows that two-thirds or more of SES members earned top ratings at a number of agencies, including the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, NASA, and the Social Security Administration, while only one-third or fewer SES members earned similar ratings at a half-dozen other agencies, including at the Department of Defense, EPA, and OPM.
That has led to what some believe has been misplaced pressure to reduce the number of executives earning top performance ratings at various agencies.
“The SES are the finest and highest caliber employees in the federal government, and are appointed because of their excellence, so they are expected to excel,” the senior official said. “Furthermore, agencies often deal with poor performers in ways that do not show up in the data,” by removing them during the probationary period, through downgrades, resignations and retirement.
Bonosaro agreed, saying the SES executives “are an elite group, so you’d expect higher performances.”
The ratings have become the source of another growing concern as federal budget freezes have nullified performance rewards.
That and the increasing challenges of meeting agencies’ performance objectives is causing current, as well as up and coming senior executives to think twice about taking on new assignments.
The seriousness of the problem hasn’t been lost on senior White House officials, who began efforts in the spring of 2009 to try to strenghten the SES corps.
“At the very time we need ever greater output and performance, the SES is under tremendous pressure,” Berry and Zients said in a joint memo issued to agencies Feb. 18, 2011, which outlined the administration’s plans to strengthen the SES system. The memo went on to outline four major initiatives to:
- Improve SES professional development programs
- Streamline burdensome administrative processes
- Strengthen personnel performance management
- Expand and diversify executive talent pipelines
Berry’s and Zients’ note of year ago captures much of the same dilemma facing SES executives–and agencies– in 2012:
“Today’s economic environment constrains agency budgets and federal employee pay; these limitations complicate developing, recruiting, and retaining senior executives,” they wrote.
SES members “are consistently asked to do more with less against a backdrop of heightened accountability for performance and too few professional development opportunities.
“At the same time, the best organizations know that especially in challenging economic times, investing in their senior executives pays off.”