Preface
Best practices are like textbooks: They’re great for learning. They’re great to have in your toolbox of methods and ideas. They provide a wonderfully intellectual framework for beginning to tackle a particular problem or issue. But the negative side of a textbook is what is often referred to as the “textbook solution.” A textbook solution honors the theory and ideas presented in the textbook but fails to respond to the particulars of the situation at hand. In that regard, a textbook solution is like an ideology: People adopt the solution because they think they’re supposed to, not because it solves the problem they’re attempting to solve in the most cost-effective way possible. Another way to think about the textbook solution is that it lacks common sense. It’s great in theory, but in practicality, will it work as advertised?
The human capital management profession has sometimes overemphasized best practices. Human capital management can be susceptible to trendiness, to a focus on what’s hot and what’s not. A quick review of the evolution of some human capital buzzwords is instructive: Personnel management became human resources management and then human capital management; KSAs (knowledge/skills/abilities) became competencies; position management became workforce planning and then succession planning; morale became engagement; pay became compensation; in-processing became onboarding. Even the term human capital, which we have chosen to use in this book, is beginning to go out of favor in some circles.
In most cases, we would argue, the evolution these changes in terminology represent was positive—either a way to refresh and energize a good concept or practice that had become stale or a real leap forward in thinking about how to achieve certain goals or solve certain problems. But still there remains the element of trendiness, of emphasizing image and perception over reality, in human capital management.
It may seem unusual to start a book on best practices by downplaying the very notion of best practices, but we believe that doing so helps put our approach in the proper context. Use the information in this book for what it is—ideas to learn from and to stimulate your thinking. But don’t use the information formulaically to solve all your human capital problems. Using this approach also helped us set a standard for ourselves in writing this book. In trying to identify and articulate human capital best practices in the federal government, we want to avoid the prescriptive approach, the follow-these-seven-easy-steps approach. We want to be rich on complexity and context. We want to describe what really happened in an agency when its leaders and staff used that best practice. What particular conditions contributed to the agency’s success or failure in applying the practice? How did the agency adapt the practice to make it work in a particular situation? Ultimately, we want to go beyond the glossy image to the reality that underlies the best practice. We want to uncover the messy, practical difficulties and challenges that agencies were able to overcome and explore how they did that—how they were able to conquer their particular reality.
To accomplish this goal, we organized our book around a series of case studies that showcase how particular agencies have achieved significant results through the application of human capital best practices. The case studies span all aspects of the human capital lifecycle—from how agencies have recruited and hired the talent they need to accomplish their mission, to how agencies have developed the competencies their workforce needs to be successful and grow professionally, to how agencies have inspired and led their workforce to perform at the highest levels and participate enthusiastically in the life of the organization.
The chapters are written by a variety of staff from Federal Management Partners, Inc. (FMP), who worked closely with each agency to bring the stories to life. Although we weren’t prescriptive in our approach, each case study follows this general outline:
What was the issue the agency needed to solve?
What process did the agency use to come up with the solution?
What are the nuts and bolts of how the solution works?
What specific, measurable improvements resulted from the solution?
How smoothly did the implementation and change process go and what strategies were used for change?
What would the agency have done differently and what further improvements are anticipated?
What two or three ingredients made this solution successful for the agency?
As we were developing these case studies, we began to see some common themes that enabled each agency to succeed. In our concluding chapter, we step back to take a broader view by focusing on these themes. In many cases, the specific technical features of the best practice proved less important than the way the agency went about building and implementing it. If we could bottle any one overall best practice and prescribe it, it would probably be represented in those themes.
Through our experience, we have learned that sometimes human capital professionals can become myopic. They may come to see their organization through a localized lens that narrows their vision. In this book, we present some though-provoking human capital ideas and possibilities—from a powerful story about how the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General fundamentally changed its leadership culture and blazed a trail for dramatic organizational change; to how the Customs and Border Protection Bureau used metrics, coupled with creative thinking and an unwavering focus on a single goal, to dramatically increase the size of its workforce by nearly 50 percent in just 18 months; to how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office implemented a telework program that resulted in major contributions to the bottom line. If we’ve done our job well, you will be able to see exactly how these agencies applied particular human capital best practices in their unique organizational environment to achieve these results, and how you can apply them to solve the problems and issues your organization faces. In the end, we hope the real value of this book is that it enables you to try on a new lens and to expand your horizons—to realize, “I hadn’t thought of that before. Maybe that would work for me.”
—Erin Pitera