Sections of Chapter 5: Organizational Excellence
- Organizational Structure
- Increased Productivity
- The Right Training for the 21st Century
- Transfer of Intellectual Capital
- Greening Wildlife Refuge Infrastructure and Operations
- Workforce of the Futrue
- A Diverse and Inclusive Workforce
Leadership and organizational excellence are inextricably linked. Leadership is doing the right things. Organizational excellence is doing the right things right. In an excellent organization, the many functional parts work together to achieve a central mission while continuing to grow and evolve in order to meet new challenges. Excellent organizations have a vision, streamlined business practices, integrated information sharing, great resilience, motivated workforces, a distinct and positive culture and high levels of performance. Employees are satisfied and fulfilled. Organizational excellence must be an overarching state of being that cuts across all aspects of the Service. Any vision for the future must result in an agency of strong and talented leaders who achieve the mission of the organization better and more efficiently because of their passion and a commitment to excellence.
The Service will lead by how it manages the organization – encouraging and embracing change and innovative ideas, anticipating opportunities, and taking calculated risks. In today’s rapidly changing society, organizations must use the latest technology to communicate, conduct science, and lead in their field and communities. Doing so promotes organizational excellence and allows an organization to focus on the highest priority goals and objectives. Organizational excellence reduces administrative burdens, prevents information overload, and effectively shares institutional knowledge.
Organizational excellence will result from clear business practices that allow efficient and consistent operations within the Refuge System and that focus on the highest priority goals and objectives. It will reduce administrative burdens, prevent information overload, and effectively share institutional knowledge. Through organizational excellence, the Service can improve efficiency to facilitate better stewardship of the nation’s natural and fiscal resources.
The Service has the potential to be the premier conservation organization in the world, and the Refuge System will emerge even more so as a benchmark by which other land management organizations measure success. Conservation professionals will covet careers in the Refuge System, not only because of its critical mission, but also because of the quality of its leadership and the efficacy of its practices. There will be a clear vision; streamlined business practices; integrated information sharing; great resilience in the face of change; a motivated workforce; a positive, welcoming, and inclusive culture and high levels of performance towards specific goals and objectives.
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Chapter 5: Organizational Excellence. This is an important topic and there is much to like in the chapter, but also much to criticize. Overall, I think the authors tried so hard to capture big picture phrasing and themes, tried so hard to hit a home run, that they forgot we have to bring a bat and ball to the game. Right now, we are operationally dysfunctional in ways I have not experienced before in my 25 years of service. We are worried about executive management training yet we can neither hire people nor purchase goods and services in a timely and effective fashion.
From where will tomorrow’s key leaders emerge? From today’s entry level employment pool. It is a timeless truism. And emerge they will, but only if we hire them in the first place. Literally today, as I write, we can’t fill basic seasonal biological and interpretive positions we need and for which we have funding. I have made a basic business decision made by generations of refuge managers and which I have made countless times before: spend X dollars in exchange for Y people to do work, yet the positions languish internally in our human resources office for months. Once we finally hire them, they will languish for more weeks and months awaiting background investigations which sometimes don’t clear until July for a position recruited in January. Why would it not be hours or days instead of months to advertise a position or create a certificate of eligibles? It is not because of incompetent or uncaring HR professionals – of course they care and are working hard. It is a result of systemic problems crying out for solutions. Applicants – tomorrow’s leaders – are calling and saying they can wait for us no longer so they are taking other jobs. Our ability to select the very best of the bunch this year is gone. Twenty years from now, some brilliant leader we are eager to have step up for us won’t do so because he or she never started working for us in the first place and became invested in another organization or another career. Meanwhile, funded, mid-career permanent positions, the daily bread of refuge career development, sit idle for months and months as they plod through the recruitment and hiring process. It takes us 6-12 months to fill a vacant, funded, career position. That is fundamentally unacceptable.
Our weaknesses extend beyond hiring. I have a 4 million dollar budget, yet I can’t decide to spend $3500 to fix a problem just by calling someone up to get the job done. When we bring our own hard working and talented contracting experts to issue a contract, it takes us months and months to make any progress. It takes as much time and effort for a $30,000 contract as for a $300,000 contract. Why do we accept that?
Endless time and resources are wasted on basic business functions, hiring people plus purchasing goods and services, in ways which dwarf our deficiencies in all other operational areas, from technology to leadership development. Perhaps this is too painful and too mundane to discuss in a grand vision document, but our operational deficiencies are a cataract, clouding our vision and impeding our progress. It deserves, if not a solution in this document, at least some acknowledgement of its existence. Many of these business operation issues extend beyond the agency’s immediate control, but that’s no excuse. Climate change, habitat loss, and changing American demographics are also outside of the agency’s immediate span of control yet we acknowledge them and at least make some attempt to address them here. Business operations should be no different. As a refuge manager, I am failing an important leadership test by being unable to resolve these fundamental business operation problems. Until I can hire people and purchase things with some reasonable level of efficiency, it’s hard to get excited about the other legitimate leadership development issues described in the vision document.
Organizational Excellence; what a laudable goal! I read this section with visions of leadership, bold paths and upward mobility in mind. My realization is that we don’t have a business plan that makes sense. OK, we have pushed the reporting requirements out to the end user. Lots of reporting requirements. At the same time we have decreased administrative staffing with consolidations, groups and deleted positions. Oh, as an aside, we spent two administrations moving towards having all of the DOI bureaus do business the same way – corporate model with headquarters and branch offices. I am not making this up. The current reality is that at home we spend an inordinate amount of time seeking competition, finding FFS vend screens, coaching CCR registration; when away we pay with our time for signed trip authorizations for trivial amounts and persnickety GovTrip consecutive screens. The payperiod is wrapped up with painfully slow Quicktime reporting, verifying and validating; a poorly designed and unused tracking system. Really, this is the way it ‘works’, and that’s just buying something, taking a trip and reporting time. Computers and Internet have vastly improved communication, but we are shackled by fear; the result is that ITM restrictions directly reduce organizational efficiency. The hiring process is broken, but they hope to be able to bring new employees on within 3 months in the future. Seriously.
These observations are not visionary and don’t blaze new ground. They do address the day to day reality for most Service employees. Bad decisions stand because no one has changed them. Time was, most of the rank and file was well insulated from new initiatives with changing administrations. Today our organization is less bureaucratic in the sense that rather sweeping changes can be instituted in months vs. years.
We persist, find work-arounds and strive to deliver for wildlife. We do have excellent people and thank goodness for that, our employees make it work. Perhaps it was ever thus, but we can dream of an enlightened organizational structure where issues are more important than egos, where outcomes count and process is not an end onto itself, where there are very few priorities and we obtain them.
I think it is important to recognize that our leaders are discouraged by our current business/leadership practices and employees are asked to do so many administrative tasks each day that they struggle to be positive and passionate about stewardship of refuges. I am finding it more and more difficult to find positive, big picture thinkers in our organization because of these business practices. Most of us did not join the Service with a desire to be an administrator and while some of us accept this as part of the job, many of these tasks leave us scratching our heads at the end of the day and wondering when we will be allowed to do conservation work. Some have become philosophical about their ability to change the world we live in and no longer see an opportunity to affect that change. This is unfortunate as we discuss the future and hope to inspire others. My fear is that we will not attract the best and the brightest or be able to lead with vision. People have a fundamental need to contribute, especially people who work for the Service. Service employees believe in affecting change, contributing to conservation and to dedicating their lives to excellence. Working on QuickTime, SAMMS, recruitment issues, budget related exercises and other administrative tasks do nothing to inspire. I promise you….our people are getting tired. Let’s find a way to inspire new leaders and support Service employees with a new business plan.
Fundementally, excellence is found through simplicity. In order for our organization to thrive, we should examine our need to over examine. We as an agency need to define what is really important to accomplish our mission and what is a distraction. Some business practices and models simply don’t work. Only time will tell whether FBMS will turn out to be the next greatest thing or the biggest threat to our efforts to conserve the environment for generations to come. When someone asks how your day was spent, and you answer the question with anything unrelated to conservation efforts (whether environmental education or on the ground work) then you begin to diminish the value of the USFWS workforce. If more than 10% of your time is spent on metrics, then what is the metrics on metrics collection? Does the public deserve to know? For example, we are all aware that we should be reducing our carbon footprint, walking the walk. So why aren’t we drawing a straight line and getting toward an end goal of carbon neutrality. Because budgets are tight. Why? Because we are stuck in a rut at times and have too many folks working on data calls. It may be as simple as accountants trying to quantify something that shouldn’t be reduced to a number. How can you quantify the soaring of a California Condor along a thermal draft? Or the spring run of chinooks? or a pristine meadow of endangered wildflowers? Before we ask staff to account for one more database, one more data call or one more report, we should ask, how we can reduce the number of requests we place on the field or the regional office staff. Turn our attention more toward accomplishing our mission, and answer the question: what have we done to conserve the resource today?
p 43, L 25: delete “reduce administrative burdens” Really? Seriously?
L 33-36: delete starting with “There will be…” It is redundant with L7-9
p 45, L 6: delete “find”, insert “continue to find and expand”
p 46, L 1-3: it would greatly beneficial to find a way for us to add and remove programs as needed for day-to-day operations as well as update programs currently running on our computers. And yes, tech support is good at what they do, but the majority of the times when it is time-critical to get something done (and often times our Partners are depending on us) we have to submit requests, figure out a time that works for region staff, wait for it to happen, none of which is any fault of IT staff. It is just an onerous burden not to be able to respond and come through for partners, public, Friends groups, or other refuge staff due to computer management.
L 5-6: but this is not going to happen by continuing to use huge, elephant programsas “one size fits all” mentality, whichis not usuable for field staff with frequent turnover and requires 2 weeks of training to become proficiant at it.The burden on field staff is exacerbated when not only is a program hard to maneuver through, but it takes time to figure out how to get refuge information into the system because field info doesn’t fit into the small boxes designed to capture things not really commensurate with the refuge info which needs to be reported.
L 28: insert “Continue to” before “Invest”
L 29-30: change to “develop effective systems to track supervisory performance”
p 50, L 15-16: I disagree. This section only emphasizes the need for mul;ti-disciplinary staff to be able to use information effectively at the field level.
p51, L 11-14: I’m not sure I agree with this rec. If you are targeting a label to meet a number goal instead of searching and hiring the best candidates, you foster an atmosphere of distrust and frustration when filling positions, both within and outside of the Service
p 55, L 7: delete “in greater numbers”
L 8: insert “qualified” before “employees”