As part of the Partnership for Public Service’s Government for a New Era initiative, leading practitioners and experts share their insights on building a more effective, responsive and accountable government.
Elizabeth Kolmstetter, Ph.D., is an award-winning industrial-organizational psychologist with over 30 years of federal service across nine government agencies. She retired in 2025 as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s first chief people officer and now works as a consultant, a speaker, a writer and an educator.
How did you combine industrial-organizational psychology with public service?
I have always been intrigued by the complexity of people—why we make the choices we do, what drives us and how our different experiences shape who we become. So, I studied industrial-organizational psychology, which focuses on human behavior in the workplace, trying to find the best way for people to do their best work.
I started my career at a research consulting firm in the Washington, D.C., area, and never planned on joining the government. Then, I saw a job posting for the FBI, and it really intrigued me. I became the first IO psychologist for the agency and am very proud of what we did to validate and modernize its agent selection and promotion system.
While I was in my next role at the National Skill Standards Board, 9/11 happened. I helped stand up the Transportation Security Administration by leading the largest civilian hiring effort in history, then joined the Intelligence Community, bringing 17 agencies to work together as an enterprise. I went on to lead human capital efforts at the U.S. Agency for International Development, NASA and CISA.
I never thought I’d be able to bring my ideas and IO psychology expertise to such important work. I have loved working with feds—many of whom put their lives on the line every day without requiring praise because they care deeply about their work, the American people and this country.
Why do you think performance management is important?
At a baseline, government must be accountable to taxpayers and needs a process to ensure federal employees are doing the work of the American people. A government for the people should be high performing—not just satisfactory—and performance management can be a tool to drive that. It should reward those who are doing well, and reinforce that behavior, while moving those falling short of expectations toward better performance or removal.
Employee development and career growth are also crucial components, although they are currently lacking in most performance management experiences. Having multiple purposes, from accountability and improvement to rewards and development, makes performance management the hardest kind of talent program to design in any organization. I’m not sure all these important aims should be bundled together because then you’re trying to do a lot with one system.
What have you learned from implementing performance management in so many different government agencies?
The system must be fit for purpose, meaning it’s designed for an agency’s specific mission, structure and workforce.
Pay-for-performance systems can be effective in motivating individuals doing complex knowledge work, provided there is capacity to calibrate and review ratings. At the CIA and in the Foreign Service, having the rank-in-person system, where employees carry their rank or pay level with them, gave flexibility to easily move to different assignments and to promote based on readiness rather than on longevity or the need for higher-grade positions to open. This helped in workforce planning, employee motivation and career development.
But trying to implement pay for performance at TSA on top of the huge hiring surge, without adequate supervisor training and for a role where expectations are more standardized and harder to differentiate, was not as successful.
I have also seen promise in the two-tier pass/fail system when most employees are already high performers, but you need a process to address poor performers. Supervisors can dedicate time to improving or removing those identified as failing, rather than having to spend time differentiating between 4s and 5s on a rating scale. But to complement that simplified accountability system, you need a well-designed awards system to incentivize and reward high performers.
What is the biggest challenge of doing performance management well?
Performance management should be treated as part of the talent ecosystem, not as a stand-alone process. It must reinforce and be reinforced by the agency’s culture, operating models, leadership and values.
Agencies could design a state-of-the-art performance management system, but if leaders devalue it as an HR check-the-box exercise, that is the outcome you’ll get. Agencies could try mandating honest and constructive feedback, but if supervisors are not trained well or agency culture stifles continuous learning, the policy may never translate from paper to practice. Or if an agency institutes a hiring freeze, managers may be disincentivized to address poor performance, thinking they can’t afford to lose people.
Reform to performance management—or any other talent system—must be approached as part of the broader human capital ecosystem.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
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