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.
Tim Curry is a human resources and labor relations expert with 36 years of federal service, including as executive director of labor management and employee relations at the Defense Department and as deputy associate director for accountability and workforce relations at the Office of Personnel Management.
How did you get into public service?
I grew up in Ohio with aircraft flying right over our house from the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but I hadn’t planned to enter public service until I was graduating from my business degree and interviewing for jobs. I became intrigued by what I was hearing from the Air Force versus private-sector companies.
I was drawn to the mission of national security and the role the Air Force plays in protecting this country. There were also more opportunities to work on what I was most interested in—personnel management with a focus on labor relations—right away, instead of years down the road in the private sector.
My first job was at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana during the first Persian Gulf conflict, when many reservists from that base were being deployed. Since it was a small base with about 1,000 employees, we all had to wear many hats. I’m grateful that I was exposed to a wide range of things that would have taken other people at larger bases years to experience: helping supervisors develop performance plans and ratings, dealing with grievances and discipline problems, processing retirements, negotiating with unions on performance policies, supporting performance award distribution and more.
Why is performance management important?
Performance management, when done well, can improve both organizational and individual performance. The process provides employees with clear expectations, regular feedback and opportunities for career growth while giving supervisors information to assess and improve their employees’ performance. This should be done for employees at every level of performance because, in my view, everybody always wants to strive to do better.
What makes performance management challenging?
Implementation really matters in performance management, and I found that a lot of training never went far enough for managers and supervisors to implement well. I commend OPM for trying to improve supervisor training, which must be robust and regular to not just convey policy but to develop the skills to communicate and give continuous feedback.
Right now, there is often limited shared understanding between supervisors and employees about what is expected in terms of goals and performance metrics. This can lead to extensive time spent grieving differences between receiving a 4 or a 5 rating, taking time away from focusing on development and improvement.
Given issues like these and general process burdens, some supervisors see performance management as a burdensome check-the-box, rather than a value-added, exercise. They might only discuss performance at the beginning of the rating period, at the midyear review and at the final rating—leaving employees frustrated or surprised by feedback.
What have you learned from your background in labor and employee relations?
My experience in labor relations has taught me to ask a simple but important question: What problem are we trying to solve? When we negotiated with unions proposing to add new policies that were meant to protect employees but might add more administrative burden and slow down processes, I tried to go beyond the surface to understand the workplace issue that led to those proposals. Often, what was needed was not new procedures but instead fixing existing policy or implementation gaps.
What lessons learned from your career in performance management can we apply to reforms today?
The Defense Department’s National Security Personnel System was an attempt in the mid-2000s to overhaul HR, including instituting pay for performance, but was ultimately repealed after a few years.
Looking back, while we were intentional about change management, I think large-scale reforms require even earlier and deeper stakeholder engagement and dialogue with employees, unions and managers to get buy-in, and then extensive training and communication.
There must also be a careful balance between standardization and flexibility. I worked across DOD, then at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and eventually at OPM. Across agencies, I noticed that organizations often add procedural requirements after a bad case or grievance, which can lead to one-size-fits-all rules—like fixed performance improvement periods for everyone—that don’t translate well across occupations. We need clear standards, but enough flexibility to account for the complexity of different jobs.
We need to seriously consider if current performance management is really achieving its purpose of improving organizational and employee performance. It feeds into so many things—from within-grade increases and merit promotion to career development and rewards to reductions in force and reassignments—but if you’re not getting the performance management part of it right, you might not be making the best decision for all those other use cases.
We should be asking the question: Are we using performance management for too many purposes?
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
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Authors: Kelly Shih, Carolina Payeras