Building an accountable and effective Senior Executive Service through the Public Service Leadership Model
The Senior Executive Service provides a critical leadership link between politically appointed agency leaders who execute the president’s priorities and career civil servants who implement those priorities and carry out directives from Congress in line with their agency’s mission.
For government to perform at its best, members of the SES should be held accountable for managing healthy, high-performing agencies and recruit, retain and develop top talent through improved hiring and leadership development.
The Partnership for Public Service’s Public Service Leadership Model and reform agenda, along with new guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, seek to meet these imperatives.
Strengthening leadership performance and accountability
A best practice for accountability is having a performance management system with clear competencies, goals and evaluations—for all levels of employees, including politically appointed leaders. The key to success is having those competencies and goals aligned with tenets of strong leadership that serve the public good.
The Public Service Leadership Model includes core values that anchor public service leadership—Stewardship of Public Trust and Commitment to Public Good—and four core competencies that propel success.
OPM’s new SES performance appraisal system also introduces five critical elements that executives will be evaluated against:
- Faithful Administration of the Law and the President’s Policies
- Government Efficiency
- Merit and Competence
- Holding Others Accountable and Treating Them Fairly
- Achieving Organizational Goals
These elements mainly center on Achieving Results, one of the Public Service Leadership Model’s competencies.
In the public sector, success is measured by service in the public’s interest, while the private sector measures results that tie to sales or shareholder value. The Achieving Results competency is a critical way to measure impact in government, but also requires leaders to master the model’s other competencies: Becoming Self-Aware, Engaging Others and Leading Change.
To optimize leadership performance and accountability in government, the Partnership’s reform agenda recommends modernizing leadership requirements at all levels—including in the SES—and evaluating against these competencies. By adopting a framework like the model, agencies can standardize and elevate their performance management.
Hiring and developing the best executive talent
The Partnership’s reform agenda also makes recommendations for improving SES hiring and development.
The methods for recruiting and hiring senior executives have been the same for decades and are due for an update. The government needs leaders with experience across the public, private or nonprofit sectors to solve problems in a complex, digital world.
Incoming and aspiring senior executives should be recruited for and assessed on leadership competencies—like those in the Public Service Leadership Model—as well as the skills most needed for their roles.
The government should also do more to grow its own talent and continually develop current executives. In addition, agencies should standardize onboarding to set leaders up for success as well as coordinate rotational assignments within and between agencies to broaden leaders’ executive experience.
Finally, agencies should provide aspiring government leaders with opportunities for joint-duty assignments and cross-sector collaboration, and make professional development more widely available to senior and midlevel employees in the leadership pipeline.
Visit our policy page to learn more about our vision for a better government and our recommendations to strengthen the civil service.
