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The Clerks Shall Inherit the
Earth
Every bureaucracy, large
or small, urban or rural, wealthy or financially strapped,
shares certain basic characteristics. One of these is the
presence of transactions. Bureaucracies, by definition, are
full of rules, and adhering to the rules involves processes,
steps, chains of command, forms to fill out, signatures or
stamps to acquire, fees to be paid and other activities of
which most of the HR Doctor readers are very
aware.
Most employees of a public bureaucracy,
in fact, owe their jobs to the requirements to administer
these processes and transactions. Many employees find comfort
in the routines, the books of rules and the security of
knowing that the scope of their decision making may be rather
limited.
On the other hand, the few and perhaps
the brave or the foolhardy, elected officials and top
appointees in public agencies are hired not to spend their
time focusing on tactical day-to-day transactions. Rather,
these people are there to bring transformational leadership to
the organization. They are the champions of creating
compelling visions of the future and of setting the strategic
direction for the future evolution of public service in their
community.
This is not a job for
people who seek comfort in counting the number of paper clips
per box. These may be, in fact, the leaders whose jobs lack
job security in the form of union contract provisions or civil
service rules. They are the ones who serve at the pleasure
of the voters or of other leaders in the agency.
The most exciting leaders are the ones
who are truly visionary and enjoy spending their working time
looking at the future and how it could be shaped by their
day-to-day work.
For transformational leaders, the
freedom to innovate and see the results of their work has a
mega-effect on the community and is the greatest source of job
joy. This comes not from the security of books of rules, but
from the challenge and the opportunity to write the rulebook
itself, or even discard the book in favor of interactive
video, Web links and more.
The organization that has an overdose
of transactional employees but a critical shortage of those
who have strategic vision and the charisma to implement that
vision is in trouble from the start. Major changes such as
revenue reductions, otherwise known as tax revolts, new
technologies and confronting new enemies or challenges at the
national or the local level, requires top leaders who focus on
transformation not tactics.
Remember President John
Kennedys compelling call, in 1961, for a national commitment
to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the
earth by the end of the decade? What if he had instead issued
a challenge to create millions of pages of technical
schematics, hire tens of thousands of new government employees
and spend hundreds of billions of dollars? The result would not have
been a rallying of the nation and a call to action, but rather
a call to yawning on a national scale.
On the other hand, no matter how
charismatic the leader is, that persons impressive vision
requires painstaking work on the ground to achieve the
results. People who transact have an essential place in
making progress in the 21st century, just as the top visionary
leaders do. They are a team, whether they think of themselves
that way or not.
In government, it is particularly sad
to see elected or appointed officials emerge as the counters
of beans and the preservers of all that is safely hidden
behind rules.
The flip side is equally true: It is a
tragic waste to see a person who has much to offer as a leader
and an inspiration to others being confined to a role which
does not let them fulfill their potential. Albert Einstein
arguably did his greatest works in theoretical physics while
he was a junior clerk in a Swiss government patent office.
Imagine what the world would have missed if his most crowning
achievement in a long life had been a promotion to senior
clerk.
The world of public service needs both
transformers and transactors. It also needs the hybrids who
can emerge when opportunities flow to transaction experts and
when visionary elected officials are brought a bit closer to
earth by having experiences rooted in reality.
My favorite city manager, Robert Payton
of Miramar, Fla., began his career as the man riding at the
back end of a garbage truck. Appreciating that kind of
background and experience makes it possible to comingle the
risk-taking mind of a visionary with the practical reality of
a transaction expert.
The leader with this
amazing combination can reshape a community and create a
lasting legacy. The roughly 87,000 units of government in the
United States increasingly need that kind
of combination. The clerks truly will inherit the earth, and
they will do it soon if the visionary leaders become extinct.
We dont need to help that process along.
Phil Rosenberg
The HR Doctor www.hrdr.net
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