Leadership

The Federal Coach: When Michael Scott works for Uncle Sam

Despite the presence of outstanding leaders throughout our federal government, the bad ones have a disproportionate impact on government performance. Michael Scott may be television’s version of a bad boss on NBC’s The Office, but from what I hear, there are lots of leaders with similar failings roaming agency hallways. It may be funny toRead… Read more »

Congratulations to the 2010 Cafritz Foundation Awards Winners!

The George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership is pleased to announce that the evaluation and selection process for The 2010 Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Awards for Distinguished DC Government Employees is successfully concluded. An independent selection panel, composed of a group of individuals who have extensive experience in public service andRead… Read more »

Leadership: Are You Really Committed?

This article was originally posted on the Tri Tuns, LLC blog at https://trituns.wordpress.com/ Please check out this blog or the Tri Tuns website for more articles and other great resources. OBSERVATION “We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.” We all know that leadership commitment to a new project, ITRead… Read more »

An Australian Response to U.S. Open Gov Plans (Craig Thomler)

Excerpts from a post originally published at the eGov AU blog. In the last 24 hours, over 30 US Federal agencies have released their Open Government plans in a strategic outpouring that demonstrates some of the best whole-of-government Gove 2.0 leadership in the world. GovLoop has published a complete list of these Open Government plansRead… Read more »

GovReads – ReWork – Reinventing Work

So I’m a big fan of the folks over at 37signals.com – a great blog written by the designer/developers over there who have created great stuff like BaseCamp. What I like about them is they are not afraid of speaking their mind and they are often contrarian. They are purposely small, purposely advocate working less,Read… Read more »

NASPAA on Fixing Graduate Student Hiring

Great white paper by the folks at NASPAA on fixing graduate student hiring in the federal government Personally I do see there is a great opportunity to take the PMF program and expand and make more of flagship program like Teach for America. The federal government is losing a lot of great talent by notRead… Read more »

Federal Eye: Eye Opener: Will new tool cut federal hiring time?

Happy Friday! The Federal Eye gets mail and hears from plenty of readers. One of the most commonly heard complaints is that the federal job application process is too long and confusing. But a new set of government databases promises to help federal agencies cut three weeks from the hiring process, potentially making it fasterRead… Read more »

Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What To Do Instead

This is the title of one of my favorite books on this topic, authored by Mary Jenkins and Tom Coens. Many people have strong opinions about how to do performance appraisals, what improvements we can make and whether they even work at all. One of the best management thinkers of our time said: “(The annualRead… Read more »