If you wanted to hear about the top challenges— and opportunities—facing federal agencies during these tough budget times, a good place to start would be with the 46 winners of the 2012 Presidential Distinguished Ranks Awards. Earlier this year, the Senior Executives Association (SEA) talked with this group of career senior executives and senior professionals who collectively saved the federal government more than $94 in 2012.

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ForUM:
Invest in the Workforce and Prioritize
Programs to Meet Challenges
by Jenny Mattingley
I
f you wanted to hear about the top challenges—
and opportunities—facing federal agencies dur-
ing these tough budget times, a good place to
start would be with the 46 winners of the 2012
Presidential Distinguished Ranks Awards. Ear-
lier this year, the Senior Executives Association (SEA)
talked with this group of career senior executives and
senior professionals who collectively saved the federal
government more than $94 in 2012.
Prior to celebrating the accomplishments of the
award winners each year, the SEA Professional Develop-
ment League gathers them for a “Morning of Reflection”
to meet one another and reflect on their accomplish-
ments and a current topic; this year, it was the challenges
presented by sequestration. To encapsulate the broad
reflections aired during this meeting, SEA published a
monograph in August 2013 (which can be found at
www.seniorexecs.org/images/documents/MOR2013.pdf).
Given the experiences of the winners, it was, as always, a
robust and insightful conversation.
How to Meet the Mission
With Reduced Resources
As the monograph points out, “the cuts [from sequestra-
tion] present a management challenge, namely, how to
continue to meet the agency’s mission and produce the
results expected while doing so with reduced resources.”
Career senior executives, particularly the Rank
awardees, are well-positioned to examine the challenges
facing the workforce and the federal government. Many
of the challenges discussion participants identified were
long term, recognizing that many of the effects of seques-
tration have yet to be—and may not be—felt all at once
but rather gradually in a downgrading of services and
personnel preparedness.
Many of the Rank Award winners agreed that a
major challenge is that Congress and the administra-
tion have not engaged in a conversation about what the
government should be doing, an issue that SEA has
consistently pointed out on Capitol Hill during the past
few years. Instead of identifying those programs within
agencies that are priorities and funding them appropri-
ately, none of the work gets cut, only personnel and bud-
gets. This leaves agencies stretched thin and lacking the
resources to meet their missions.
One of the main resources being stretched thin is
the federal workforce. “Do more with less” is the frequent
refrain, but advancing the mission while dealing with
budget cuts is a difficult challenge facing the govern-
ment’s career workforce.
Meeting this mandate becomes even more challeng-
ing when budget cuts decrease investment in the work-
force but not the functions performed by agencies. In
other words, many of the problems that will lead to long-
term harm to agency mission are directly related to the
care and feeding of the workforce. Agencies are only as
strong as their people, and agency performance is directly
tied to having the right people—with the right training—
in mission-critical jobs.
Care and Feeding of the Workforce
As discussed in SEA’s monograph, Rank Award win-
ners expressed concern about the move toward “deferred
maintenance” of personnel—in training, succession
planning, and development. The cuts to this type of
investment save money in the short term but leave the
workforce in a weakened position to deal with the chal-
lenges ahead. Many talented people are leaving the work-
force with little succession planning being done to ward
off brain drain.
Some of the Rank Award winners worried that we
are missing the next generation of leaders, those who can
“come in and sit with us before we walk out the door.”
But the pressure to deal quickly with budget cuts has
taken focus away from ensuring that knowledge trans-
fer happens. Furthermore, those employees who are left

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Workplace Reality: Creating Stability Amid Uncertainty
shouldering the burden of the work that still needs to be
done (because missions and expectations on deliverables
have not shrunk along with budgets) are not being ade-
quately trained.
Many of the human capital challenges identified by
the career senior executives are not new. Some echo the
1990s, while others are a direct result of sequestration
coupled with a lack of flexibility from Congress to allow
agencies to make targeted cuts. Between increases in
retirements, people leaving due to the vilification of the
workforce, and hiring freezes, we may be faced with yet
another gap in the management ranks, much like the one
that occurred after the workforce cuts from the National
Performance Review during the Clinton administration.
That being said, there are some clear takeaways from
the human capital challenges identified above. One of
the foremost is to focus on the life cycle of career federal
employees across the government.
No matter what stage of their career they are in, the
better trained they are, the better engaged they are, and
the more knowledge transfer they receive as people walk
out the door, the better they will be able to handle the
challenges presented by the current environment.
Although the easy, quickest cuts are done to training
and development to preserve mission-critical programs,
those programs cannot run effectively if the people part of
an agency is gutted. Agencies must prioritize training and
succession planning to prevent a loss of skills and abilities
that then hamper an agency’s ability to meet its mission.
Managers and executives can use the uncomfortable
budget cuts as a reason for innovation and to examine
new ways of procuring training. For years the SEA has
supported legislation to require agencies to train all first-
time managers within a year of taking their positions.
Ideally, the training would be in person.
Budget cuts and the pressure from Congress on agen-
cies to curb travel and training funds have largely negated
this type of training—especially if it takes place at a
conference. Some in Congress have pushed legislation to
require that training, conferences, or other developmental
sessions be conducted via video conference. But this, too,
carries an infrastructure cost and loses the benefits that
in-person training delivers.
To cost-effectively identify a range of training initia-
tives, agencies should look for opportunities to combine
resources with other agencies, share training events, and
use what is already available rather than creating a train-
ing or development plan from the start. Resources such as
hru.gov already house many options.
Problems Can Create Opportunities
The difficult budget cuts that agencies face may actu-
ally be an opportunity for agencies to assess the needs of
their workforce and the programmatic skills needed to
make long-term investments and strategies on training,
development, and succession planning that often have
happened in an ad hoc fashion across the government.
To sum up the problem, one Rank Award winner
notes that we are in a different environment, “an environ-
ment of much more austerity, having to make some really
critical decisions, when to
take risks or avoid risks, yet
we’re not training a complete
generation of leaders to han-
dle those decisions.”
Another executive
noted that while her agency
had reduced its training
budget by 87 percent,“we’re
going to crumble on the
back end because the very people who will end up out
there doing the work are not going to be properly trained.”
Federal agencies need to meet this challenge now
instead of waiting until the problems identified by the
Distinguished Rank awardees above become reality.
Jenny Mattingley is the legislative director of the Senior Executives
Association. Contact her at jmattingley@shawbransford.com.
The cuts to training, succession planning, and development
save money in the short term but leave the workforce in a
weakened position to deal with the challenges ahead.
Copyright ASTD 2014