The Hoping it Fails Syndrome

Something you hear quite often when covering government is the concern among top managers that some, or sometimes many, federal employees want executives who are trying to change government to fail. Most often, it's not politically driven. The change involves business processes and strategic shifts, ideas that are not ideologically spawned or driven. Mangers I have talked to say these employees just don't want to change the way they have worked for years, or they see the change as a threat to their control over a specific detailed process or policy, or they fear the change threatens their livelihood.

Rarely do top managers speak publicly and candidly about this obstinacy. Managers tend to use the more vague and less pointed term "cultural change" to describe what's needed to move federal employees off their crusade to willfully block a new process.

That's why the comments from Linda Pena, associate deputy assistant secretary at the Veterans Affairs Department, jumped out at me. During an event at the Office of Personnel Management announcing the consolidation of 26 payroll systems into four, she frankly told the audience that some VA employees hoped the project, which included replacing VA's 1960s era payroll system, would fail. (Where have we heard that recently?)

She said:

The status quo is oftentimes very comfortable. Succeeding in this means we have to change what we do and how we do things.

The consolidation project, which took seven years to complete, had to be hard enough without battling your own rank and file. Reginald Brown, director of the Office of Modernization at OPM, said they had to convince employees to trust the shared-service providers and let go of control over their own systems.

If government is going to improve, this attitude change has got to be No. 1 the to-do list. Unfortunately, it's been around for years, and seems intractable. But whatever VA and OPM did - one thing includes publicly and candidly acknowledging the problem exists -- needs to be replicated. It could be a good case study for reforming government.