The Call and Challenge of Re-Presenting Jesus

By Steve Ignell and Douglas DeMaster, February 2025

“Bill” was the manager of a small and geographically separated research group. He was an acclaimed scientist well-known throughout the region.  His program’s research products were highly valued, especially by the industry sections with money and clout. The internal dynamics within his program, however, were broken. Bill didn’t delegate.  He kept all the critical tasks on his desk.  Lower-priority work languished, and much of the program’s work remained unfinished. Most of the unfinished work dealt with staff projects or staff manuscripts needing managerial review.  There was an “A” team and a “B” team in the program and only “Bill” was in the former.  Staff grew frustrated, and the working environment became toxic. 

News of the dysfunctionality spread, first to the next level of leadership and then to levels above. Corrective-oriented visits ensued, burning the time and energy of higher-level leadership. Changes were made, written understandings developed, and things often got better. But like a flywheel returning to its original position, all the changes eventually became undone, and the toxic office environment returned.

“Bob” was an agency leader in a mid-management position.  He had a storied career and was an internationally known expert in multiple scientific disciplines. On paper, he had it all, from being an “A-Team” scientist widely respected by scientists and stakeholders alike to an experienced manager in differing parts of the agency.  In real life, however, staff withered under his leadership.  Like “Bill,” “Bob” distrusted staff.  He was a consummate critic when interacting with his staff, seeing every opportunity to convey a “peer review” type of message. Staff grew frustrated, and the work environment soon became toxic. Some people left while others withdrew and became independent.  And again, like in the case of “Bill,” news of the dysfunctionality spread, burning the time and effort of leadership at higher levels. 

“Bud” led one of the critical organizational units for the agency.  He had an impressive resume showcasing his accomplishments in a variety of past positions. Stakeholders liked him.  But “Bud” just couldn’t let things go.  He inserted himself into everyone’s business.  The result was a rigid, stifling work environment where even the pencil supply was controlled through a strict, accountable process.  His unit became dysfunctional with staff paralyzed by fear.  Agency leadership eventually had to step in, expending large sums of money to right the sinking ship.

Stories like these are not isolated features in most organizations.  Toxic work environments abound, even in highly respected agencies like NOAA. In fact, nearly 30 million workers across the United States consider their workplace toxic. The three main contributing causes, according to research[1] by the MIT Sloan School of Management, are bad leadership, toxic social norms, and poorly designed job roles. And the responsibility of all three of these lies in a leader’s domain.  This is true even for workplace social norms, as these are largely established and maintained by leaders or managers.

In the following monograph, we tell our story about “how to avoid toxic work environments.” Our story is about the power of leadership, and the setting is the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC or Center). This center is part of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which comprises about 10% of NOAA Fisheries’ workforce and is divided into five science and one administrative divisions. Our experience was during a time of fiscal uncertainty and political change (i.e., 2012 to 2017). 

It’s a story filled with multiple voices, not just ours.  Lori Budbill, our Operations Management and Information Director, and Jennifer Ferdinand, our Planning Officer, served with us as the executive team of the Center.  The four of us were then part of a larger “Management Team” which additionally included the Directors from the five science Divisions along with our IT and communication leads and our science coordinator. Each person on the team owns a portion of this story, too: Jeff Napp, Russ Nelson, Patty Livingston, Ron Felthoven, John Bengtson, Phil Mundy, Chris Rillings, Martin Loefflad, Mike Sigler, Ajith Abraham, and Marjorie Mooney-Seus. 

The Center hasn’t always seen smooth sailing. It’s had its share of difficulties. But without the foregoing people and the value they brought to establishing a healthy leadership culture at the AFSC, we’d be back to bailing water, struggling like so many other organizations inside and outside of NOAA to stay afloat. 

So its to them that we dedicate this monograph for their extraordinary effort to make the Center a better place for its people and mission.  And to the AFSC employees too, for they are the most valuable asset NOAA has. They are the ones who make a difference. They are the ones who make or break NOAA’s stewardship mission.  And all of this hinges upon good leadership. In the following chapters we tell the AFSC story of at least one way that this can be done.

Introduction

“Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.” – Albert Einstein[2]

In the following chapters, we argue that Einstein’s insight into scientists should also apply to science organizations. Here, we present a leadership model that includes several ideas or approaches we have found useful in leading science organizations in a Federal setting.

However, we are not introducing another new academic approach; we are pretty sure that there is “little or nothing new under the sun” when it comes to this topic.  Instead, our goals are modest: 1) to argue that having leaders with the right leadership values – i.e., character – is foundational and even necessary for a healthy science organization, and, more specifically, 2) to provide a set of specific principles that we believe will help science organizations better achieve excellence in the way their missions are pursued.  We use the term, “organizational excellence” as a sort of short-hand for this premise.  The second half of the monograph is illustrative, describing our experience at a Science Center within the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and addressing leadership issues within the organization and within the larger agency environment.

Check the Foundations

Our motivation stems from observing how fellow leaders often attack the symptoms of organizational dysfunction rather than the root causes.  Hence the symptoms tend to persist, likely to surface again like a game of whack-a-mole: one issue is addressed, only to have another pop up to take its place.  

We’re reminded of a story about a building manager in New York City who discovered a set of cracks high up in their building on the 42^nd floor.  He promptly called the architect and asked him to help inspect the damage on the 42^nd floor. After waiting several hours, the manager eventually discovered the architect in the basement of the building.  There he had found material deficiencies in the building’s foundation, which had caused cracks to appear in the upper floors.  Further investigation revealed that a security worker had been slowly removing a few bricks at a time and taking them home to build a garage.  Over time, the slow weakening of the foundation became visible on the upper floors of the building.  But those cracks in the upper floors were just symptoms of a critical weakness introduced in the foundation.

Our experience indicates that organizational excellence most often develops when organizations understand this, identifying and then addressing those foundational issues that matter most to employees.  We have further learned that the most important foundational issues are, first and foremost, associated with the values and work ethics of an organization’s leadership.  Leaders who fail to exhibit principled behavior can seriously undermine an organization’s foundation, brick by brick, especially when the organization is facing challenges like major policy changes or revisions to organizational structures.  Without this focus on leadership values, we have observed time and time again how needless conflict can develop across an agency, which then requires an extensive investment of agency time (and money), often in a crisis mode, to resolve. 

Foundations = Leadership Values

Our primary tenet is that organizational excellence depends inter alia on excellence in leadership.  We further believe that such excellence is best expressed in terms of effectiveness and exhibition of what is often referred to as “servant leadership”, as demonstrated through a leader’s ability to listen, empower, and develop staff in a manner marked by humility and authenticity. Culture matters, and through value-based leadership actions, servant leaders profoundly affect the morale of an organization.  They understand that even a single act of unprofessionalism by leadership can have a ruinous effect on staff morale and staff trust in their leaders. Good leaders seek to create shared values that permeate across the organization, informing behavior and actions. 

A strong commitment by an organization to implement its vision, inspired by value-based leadership, has a high payoff and imposes a strong directional influence in the work environment. Ted Sinek’s leadership model, called the Golden Circle,[3] illustrates how this works.  Successful organizations are those who know why they exist. They have a clear understanding of purpose, which sets them up for success by setting the stage for the right “what,” or product or service, to be delivered to customers or stakeholders. They don’t consider the middle step or the “how” to be incidental or secondary to their success.  Instead, they understand that organizational success often hinges upon the principles or values that inform “how you get there.”  They see those principles as foundational, informing every step of this process, from the why to the what and through the how.

The Importance of the ”Why”

Looking back over our careers, first as bench scientists and then in science leadership positions in the Federal government, Sinek’s three categories have stood out as watershed principles that shaped our future activities and decisions. First, we can still remember the day we saw Simon Sinek’s TED talk[4] on finding the “why” in our professional responsibilities.  It immediately resonated as we understood its profound application to a science organization like ours.  It confirmed that we were on the right track as, over the years, we had learned that the more we focused on the rationale for why what we were doing was important, the more our strategic focus sharpened, both internally and externally, where everything became about the mission and the people behind the mission. 

Hence, when we spoke to the public, we no longer just dwelt on describing the great, fascinating science we did.  Instead, we shifted to the why behind the science, the importance of sustainable stewardship, and the benefits of that stewardship to the nation and its future generations.  In doing this it changed the focus from us to them through a posture of service.  We were just role players, driven by a purpose defined by the needs of the resource, the resource managers, and the public we served.  

The Necessity of the ”What”

To transform purpose into reality, we then needed a plan or roadmap that determined how best to respond to the “why” behind the mission, how we assign our limited resources and capabilities to achieve mission impact, and how we translate our good intentions into meaningful consequences through engaged staff empowered within the right organizational environment. 

Our use of the term “roadmap” is meant to signify a process or protocol for making hard decisions within an organization.  Such decisions include, but are not limited to, staffing levels, allocation of limited resources, facilities decisions, and training.   A roadmap should also identify alternative routes that may be either unworkable or suboptimal resulting in opportunity costs and loss of mission achievement.  It’s often an organization’s ability to avoid these suboptimal or unworkable routes that matter most to an organization’s effectiveness, or, as in the words of Edison, “a good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.”[5]

Leaders need to understand how priorities are integrated into funding and allocation decisions and what adjustments should be made to best meet Agency priorities, given funding and policy constraints.  In a resource-limited environment, organizations cannot afford to waste time and resources pursuing activities that are unsupportive or suboptimal.  Having a process that tells an organization what not to do is powerful.  It is easier to identify activities that support the Agency’s highest priorities than to select which of the remaining actions, all of which are typically useful and important, should be stopped so that at least the top-priority actions are accomplished.

Such a path or process should include the establishment of priorities at both long and short time scales.  It must enable the translation of those priorities to decisions on a range of mission activities using a set of common programmatic and risk criteria, enabling the translation of prioritized decisions into annual business activities.  Such a process works best when transparent and value-based, empowering the creation of a common corporate culture throughout every level of the organization.   When done successfully, this process enables an agency’s vision to act like a beacon, leading an organization through the fog of uncertainty, yielding the best answer when there is no right answer, even in challenging fiscal environments. 

The Indispensability of the “How”

Thirdly, we found that how we executed our mission became just as important as what we executed.  This is the middle component of Sinek’s Golden Circle model of inspirational leadership and the critical pathway for connecting purpose with outcomes.  

We found that having the right culture directly affected our success in providing the science and information needed for the management and sustainable use of healthy marine ecosystems. Through leadership, culture is slowly forged as leaders steadily exert their influence throughout the organization.  When leadership ethics are healthy, they shape the workplace environment by promoting a relationship of trust between staff and supervisors.  In our experience, trust is one of the keys to empowering staff, and the straight line between staff achievement and leadership ethics goes through leadership values.  Values, therefore, serve as the basis or foundation for organizational excellence because, ultimately, it’s all about employees trusting their supervisors, both scientists and support staff, as they are the ones who advance the mission.

Such trust largely depends upon the degree to which its leaders demonstrate fairness and dedication to employees across the organization.  Recall the Gallup Report[6] findings that the primary reason for employees leaving a job is because of the boss (and not the job). For most organizations, especially those engaged in scientific research like NOAA, employees are the creators and innovators.  They are the ones who produce high-impact science, and it is the high-impact science that enables mission excellence.  An organization that loses talent through attrition caused by ineffective supervisors will never be an organization that achieves excellence in the pursuit of its mission. 

Our counsel is that organizations must match the dedication and excellence of their staff with an equal dedication and commitment to excellence in leadership.  Such leadership excellence should be wide-ranging, from strategy to execution, from the hard skills such as technical competence to the soft skills of people management.  It requires that the mission execution be transparent, providing staff with a compelling rationale for all key decisions.  This is the step we often find missing but is perhaps most important to organizations, especially science organizations which have a natural tendency to focus on technical excellence.  It requires honest, open, and frequent communication, a critical pathway for trust between staff and leadership. It requires leaders who are mature, rooted in good character, able to do the right thing, and able to influence others to do the same. 

Outline of the Monograph

In the following chapters, we discuss in greater detail several of the leadership principles we found most helpful in our pursuit of organizational excellence for the Science Center we led within NOAA.  These insights may also be of value to organizations external to NOAA in the Federal system or external to the Federal government. The first section promotes a leadership posture comprised of six interconnected characteristics of leadership excellence: 1) virtue, 2) authenticity, 3) listening, 4) (being) unafraid, 5) (striving for) excellence, and 6) service. Cast as an acronym called VALUES – mindful of our constant advocacy within the agency for values-based leadership – they are intended to be a teaching aid, providing guidance on how we should go about the business of science, translating mission goals and objectives into strategy and then execution and execution into impact. 

We then show, through the example of our experience, how these principles can be applied in science organizations, both at the local and national level, integrating the why, how, and what components of organizational excellence.  Through doing this – articulating key leadership principles that we have found essential to the success of a science organization – we seek to elevate the importance of leadership values to organizational excellence.  And through that, to elevate the mandate for a people first, mission always posture.

Part 1

VALUES, The Foundation for Leadership

Virtues – the “V” in VALUES

Maybe you had the same initial reaction as us: Einstein, the great Einstein, really said that a great scientist is principally defined by great character? Now consider your own science organization, especially the leadership environment that sets the tone for how the organization will operate.  Is there a recognition that character matters, even as much as scientific achievement?

Perhaps most would answer in the affirmative. They are diligent in ensuring scientific integrity in their research enterprise. They resist external pressures to shape their findings while embracing a code of scientific conduct that ensures original authorship and independence. 

But that’s only one part of the character issue.  A science enterprise not only relies upon researchers with a personal sense of pride in their intellectual accomplishments but also on high-performing teams of people working towards a common goal.  In our experience, it takes a community of people with differing gifts and roles to accomplish a science mission as complicated and demanding as marine stewardship. How that is accomplished becomes a character issue too, as our interactions with each other occur within a cultural setting with explicit (or implicit) norms of behavior.  Those norms act like an operating system, creating a social environment that either enables work to be done in a cooperative and productive manner or not. 

Leaders must take this one step further, however, seeking the flourishing of their employees so that their people might prosper as the mission prospers. They do this by creating an environment of trust based on high moral standards of leadership, which is then reflected in the character of the organization. This association is unavoidable yet often overlooked.    

Leaders need not be constrained to selecting one common set of moral standards.  Organizations vary in mission and cultural history; hence, their social and behavioral norms will likewise vary.  It’s important, however, for leaders to find those virtues most critical to their mission success.  This is not always an easy task.  The process of paring down a long list of possible virtues can take time and be difficult. But leaders will find, as we have, that it’s a most rewarding task and one of the most valuable actions they will take in their career.  In the following paragraphs, we briefly highlight four virtues that we have found key to successful leadership: 1) justice, 2) demonstrating fairness and consistency throughout the organization, 3) humility, and 4) generosity.

A just leader champions both diversity and inclusivity throughout their organization.   Such a posture fosters an environment of trust across the staff, which creates a work environment that emphasizes service, performance, innovation, and productivity.   Diversity has been shown to be fundamental to most high-performing teams, even when the members of the team weren’t necessarily the very best in the field.  That’s because a group of us is generally smarter than any one of us.  When that group is inclusive of individuals demonstrating fundamental human characteristics of empathy, trust, and value in addition to differing life experiences enabling novel viewpoints into issues, the outcome is a synergistic effect where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. 

In our view, organizational excellence requires leaders who are committed to fairness in the workplace and intentional about fostering an atmosphere of trust, consistency, and inclusivity. Leaders who are viewed as inappropriately self-serving cannot motivate and inspire a workforce. It is that simple. Leaders who champion personal favorites over the use of performance metrics in rewarding staff with promotions or opportunities are likewise ineffective. 

A servant leader, which is the type of leader we believe NOAA leadership should aspire to, sees humility and generosity as foundational to the whole of leadership.  Humility pushes back against pride and champions selflessness and respect.  Generosity counters excessive ambition through a willingness to give without the need for commendation.  True humility requires an external focus, enabling empathy and compassion for others and looking out for the best interests of others. 

Humility of opinion allows a leader to be open to learning new things.  It counters the human tendency to be more confident than is appropriate or to seek out data or information that confirms what we already believe.  Humility opens us up to alternative opinions, enabling a robust decision environment.  It guards against the seducements of power; it allows one to admit mistakes.  It challenges us to examine where we could be wrong and where we can learn from others.

Five Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Values

1. A leader’s personal character or values provides the foundation for organizational values.
2. Commitment to fairness and transparency is a necessary virtue for organizational excellence.
3. A commitment to diversity and inclusion flows out of a commitment to fairness.
4. Humility, perhaps the most important virtue, opens the door to learning and protects from the seducements of authority. Of what we consider “soft skills” in a supervisor, this character trait is most often underrated. 
5. Generosity guards against selfishness and ambition through actions that help others.

Authenticity – the “A” in VALUES

We still remember the day when one of our staff transitioned to a transgender female.  Because this was apparently the first such public transition in our agency, several of our Washington, DC, leadership came out to assist.  Although they had ultimate control of the day, we were asked to provide opening remarks and host the meeting.  When that day came the conference room was packed to overflowing. Our staff knew something was up. Although we had not conveyed the intent of the meeting, it became the biggest crowd we had ever seen at an all-hands meeting.

It was an honor and privilege to lead this meeting.  We advocated for acceptance. We noted that we were our “brother’s keeper,” and what happened to any of us at the Center mattered to all of us.  Finally, we informed the staff that we all had a great opportunity to show generosity to one another in this situation.  Such statements were easy to say as they were all part of our core values talk which we routinely gave.  However, this all-hands meeting was different. 

The fallout from that day was overwhelming. For the weeks following, staff spontaneously talked about that day. Dozens came up to us, at first daily and then weekly, thanking us and indicating that they had never been so proud to be part of an organization.

Leading people, like living life, is a mixed bag of successes, mistakes, missed opportunities, and should-have-done moments.  That day was a success for our Center, our people, and even our mission. It’s something still celebrated today.  We had other days, however, that fell into the latter three categories.  Nonetheless, we saw them as teachable moments, using each of them as an opportunity to engage staff honestly and transparently in a collective pursuit of our mission. 

Authentic leaders are living demonstrations of core values. They operate from a moral compass that is easily seen and understood by those around them, fostering honest relationships and legitimacy in leadership.

Authentic leaders recognize the value of self-awareness and empathy within relationships, either at the group or individual level.  Having a keen sense of how others are perceiving us in a conversation or meeting and then being able to “step” into someone else’s “shoes” to increase our understanding of their needs is a basic and fundamental characteristic of authentic leaders.  It inspires trust within an organization by demonstrating that the leader is “real and genuine.”  It engenders a capacity within a leader for compassion and kindness.  When mixed with self-discipline, it protects against unneeded conflict and disruption. 

Authentic leaders lead by example, becoming role models in all areas of work, from competency to character.  As the retired CEO of Louisiana Pacific, Rick Frost has opined, a good leader leads with their “hat.”[7] That is, a good leader inserts themselves into the midst of the action, committed until a resolution is reached.  It’s equivalent to the facility manager donning their nail belt and helping their staff complete a difficult task, or when, as Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis once said to his officers, “everyone fills sandbags in this unit.”[8] 

Leadership by example serves as a clear illustration of how good leaders “walk the talk,” living out the values they believe. They understand values are best “caught (i.e., observed) rather than taught”.  They see no task as being beneath them.  They are willing to roll up their sleeves to work side by side with staff to get the job done, even if the work is more symbolic, given the press on the leader’s time.  Such actions motivate staff, which is essential to not “leading alone.”

Authentic leaders have learned to listen to their “gut,” paying attention to small clues about how a certain decision “feels” during an issue or decision process. This type of intuition is hard to define but powerful in action. It is also susceptible to innate biases and confirmation errors[9] and must be grounded in virtues such as humility and teamwork.

Finally, authentic leaders “develop their voice.”  In our experience, that means understanding our strengths while recognizing weaknesses, being fully accountable for all of our behaviors, and aligning our personality, analytical skills, and communication to lead diverse people in diverse situations. When mixed with two other virtues, courage and confidence, an authentic leader’s voice will be amplified and made more effective, a force multiplier in organizations, especially if that voice is wrapped in a shroud of humility. 

Four Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Authenticity

1. Two critical qualities of leadership are self-awareness and empathy.
2. Great leaders serve as role models to staff, leading by example and practicing what they preach.
3. Effective leaders learn how and when to listen to their “gut.”
4. Leaders develop their “voice,” when they understand how the convergence between their mission, role, and abilities enables them to project their message.

Listening – the “L” in VALU

Years ago, StoryCorps[10] set out to record an oral history of America with the voices of everyday people. After over 10,000 interviews, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay “realized how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives don’t matter, and fear they’ll someday be forgotten.”[11] In 2007, they chose one of their core principles as the title of their 2007 New York Times-Bestseller book: “Listening is an Act of Love.” 

We believe and have learned through experience that good leaders are good listeners. In fact, they are 360-degree listeners, listening not only to those above them but equally so to their peers and those below them. This act of listening is an outgrowth of virtue, as seen through the window of authenticity. It is also an outcome of humility, a consequence of core values, and an outflow of generosity of one’s time, which, as we all know, is a limited resource.

Listening generates respect and respect is foundational to influence and motivation.  By establishing a practice of listening, leaders take the focus off themselves, signaling a commitment to an environment where others can become more successful. Employees must feel valued and understood to be motivated, and that value is nourished when they see that their leadership is genuinely and authentically concerned about them and willing to listen to their opinions or observations.  Through a combination of humility, inclusiveness, and confidence, a leader who excels at active listening can bring out the best in their employees by recognizing and valuing their knowledge and experience. It turns leadership influence into a two-way street.

We have found that staff respond best to leaders who are quick to listen, empathetic, concerned about staff career goals, and open to new ideas.  Staff working in that sort of environment became enthusiastic about joining teams or working groups needed to promote the mission of the institution.  Such teamwork is evident when we work together toward common goals – building community, seeking out each other’s strengths and viewpoints to add value to our own work, looking out for the needs of others, being forgiving and compassionate for one another, being generous to one another extending understanding to one another’s shortcomings, and helping others to succeed. 

We have observed that a team, by definition, wins together or fails together.  Hence, being a team means that we truly are “our brother’s keeper,” and what happens to one of the team matters to us all.  A now retired NOAA leader once summarized those thoughts by succinctly suggesting that leaders consider a posture of professional intimacy in relationships with staff.  That is, successful leaders should engage in a professional dialog that is long in listening, demonstrating that we care about the totality of their person, even those things that keep an employee awake at night. 

Active listening brings visibility to staff by tangibly showing that their views, accomplishments, and knowledge matter.  Such listening can also provide the basis for honest feedback, setting the stage for difficult conversations with the goal of helping staff be successful in the job.  For example, in our experience few supervisors are willing to invest in listening during annual performance reviews that should have a goal of encouragement, as well as constructive feedback – to both employee and supervisor.  Rather, they come to such reviews with an attitude of knowing what the person has done and where their performance fits along the continuum of staff contributions.  This lack of willingness to be an active listener should be recognized for what it is – a missed opportunity.  However, we have found that those with commitments to both active listening and honest communication turn out to be the most successful supervisors, able to make a difference in employee lives and helping them to make any necessary changes to contribute at a very high level.  It’s easy to praise, but it takes real leadership commitment to invest in change in someone else’s life. 

On reflection, one failing of upper-level leadership in NOAA has been, in our experience, the lack of accountability in the way supervisors perform annual performance reviews.  It appears to us that this lack of accountability worsens as one moves up the supervisory chain of command and serves as evidence that leadership values must be seen as a first-order priority, starting from the very top of an organization.  This is likely the case at many institutions. 

Finally, consider all of the values we have discussed in this section centered around listening: humility, inclusiveness, putting others first, giving preference to their needs, generosity, understanding others’ shortcomings, caring, and honest feedback. Would it be too much to suggest that so many of these, born out of a culture of listening, are really outcomes where leadership and professional intimacy go hand in hand? 

Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said yes to that question: “If you seek long continued success for your business, treat your people as family and lead with love.”  Ken Blanchard, a well-known leadership writer and author of The One Minute Manager, concurred by saying: “It might sound slightly bizarre, but one of the keys for effective leadership is to be madly in love with all the people you are leading.”[12]  We agree, finding the advice by Martin Luther King most pertinent to leadership when he said- “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve … You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”[13]

Four Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Listening

1. Good leaders are active listeners, valuing the knowledge and experience of employees and colleagues where leadership influence is seen as a two-way street.
2. Successful leaders are able to effectively articulate to staff an enlarged view of teamwork, where “we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.”
3. Effective leaders champion professional intimacy, caring about what keeps staff up at night.
4. Honest listening includes the “tough love” of honest feedback.

Unafraid – the “U” in VALUES

Courage is knowing what not to fear.  That adage, first attributed to Plato, is worth sharing with staff.  However, successfully dealing with fear can only happen when individuals have sufficient self-confidence to trust their instincts. Such self-confidence among supervisors, though, must be recognized as being an important element of an organization’s efforts to achieve organizational excellence.  Otherwise, courage without justice (lacking virtue) becomes an occasion for injustice.[14] 

Timidity incurs a cost to an organization’s mission and must be addressed. It acts like a hidden tax, robbing the future while diminishing the present. Especially in the arena of organizational excellence where, as Maya Angelo once said, “Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” In addition, it should be recognized that achieving an optimal decision in every decision point is not realistic.  When courageous decisions are made that fail to meet a given objective, corrective actions may need to be taken. Here again, having a leadership environment of acceptance and good faith makes a difference.  Humility, as always, helps too.

One notable event that probably fits into this category was when we made the difficult decision to close out a high-performing research program at our Science Center, reassigning staff to higher-priority assignments elsewhere due to fiscal constraints at the Center.  We had earlier implemented a priority-based resourcing process that funded research activities according to mission priority as deemed by our stakeholders.  The process forced us into a constant mode of change. As every supervisor knows, at least in the governmental science enterprise, some changes are harder than others for staff to accept.  In particular, changes in organizational structure or office space assignments are going to create angst.  The individuals in the research group that we were reassigning had been formed years earlier.  They were a highly accomplished research team.  But the mission had changed, and it wasn’t going to change back.  Change was necessary to make optimal use of limited fiscal resources.  

So off we went, creating a change process reflective of our values, such as listening, compassion, generosity, and transparency.  In meeting after meeting, we listened and then adjourned to evaluate, hoping to find a compromise that stayed true to the mission while honoring the wishes of the staff.  For months and months, this process stretched out until the decision was finally made, albeit overdue and past our initial expectations.  In our desire to base our actions on core values, focused on listening in an atmosphere of authenticity, we took too long to decide and overly impacted staff despite our best intentions.  We were too timid.  We were fearful that perhaps our decision was wrong.  Nonetheless, over time and with the trust of our staff that our hearts were in the right place, we achieved an acceptable outcome.  We only wish we would have moved more quickly; it would have been less troubling to the staff involved. 

Staying on mission is a continuous process requiring continuous modifications to the science enterprise, a process that relies upon clarity in objectives, timelines, and actions.  It also requires leaders who are not only unafraid of change but also unafraid of the outcome, trusting in the robustness of the process and work environment to make things right.  A healthy organization, led by effective leaders who listen to staff in an atmosphere of authenticity, creates “trust capital” that will serve as a resilient storehouse in times of stress.  That storehouse then supports a posture of courage and confidence, which, when embedded in humility, becomes a force multiplier in a leader’s effectiveness.

Good leaders are unafraid of other people’s opinions regarding their style as leaders and are hence teachable, quick to listen, and slow to speak, shunning self-sufficiency.  Rather than being seen as the “smartest person in the room,” good leaders choose instead to listen first, often offering a synthetic or integrative role at the end which leads to a decision.  This “my opinion has no dominion” approach is one of the most powerful leadership attributes we’ve ever experienced.  It leads to better decisions, unleashing the power of diversity and inclusivity, knowing that a diversity of experiences and approaches will help identify the best path forward for a particular problem or issue in this rapidly changing world.  

Good leaders are bold and unafraid of taking reasonable or calculated risks.  Rather than avoiding any sort of decision that involves risk, they seek excellence by managing risk appropriately.  One metric for evaluating a lack of tolerance for risk, which is currently underutilized by NOAA, is monitoring the amount of process required to achieve a standard operating function (e.g., procurement, hiring, communications, etc.).  Risk-intolerant leadership cultures tend to accumulate processes without concern for their impact on performance.  The administrative burden of excessive processes is something all organizations should take seriously and actively manage.  In our experience, this sort of management is rarely practiced and almost never considered a priority. 

Cultivating a “0-risk tolerance” culture invariably leads to a distortion of organizational values.  It overemphasizes personal or institutional survival at the expense of its people and mission.  Compliance is championed at the expense of customer service, both internally and externally focused.   A culture of compliance leads to a loss of resilience because it inevitably results in a focus on failures rather than accomplishments.  That is, “0-risk tolerance” yields a blaming culture rather than an innovative mission-focused culture.  Similar to the pattern of leaders becoming less able or less willing to actively listen as one moves up the supervisory chain, the ability to tolerate an acceptable level of risk in management decisions seems to become less common in Federal agencies as one reaches the upper echelons of an organization.  This needs to be addressed, or excellence in performance at the agency level will remain elusive. 

You’ve probably heard the expression “mission first, people always.” But great leaders, in our view, reverse that and say “people first, mission always.”   Although this adjustment is consequential to an organization’s posture, it’s notable that neither of these sayings makes mention of the leader.  Great leaders are intentional in shifting the focus from themselves to the mission and staff.  They are unafraid of not focusing on their own interests first, looking instead for the interests of the people they lead and the mission of their institution.  Although seemingly altruistic, it’s really a discipline stemming from self-interest informed by values and founded on high moral standards.  Steeped in virtues such as humility, generosity, and service, great leaders hitch their wagon to their people, unafraid to succeed as a team or fail as a team. 

Five Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Being Unafraid

1. Courage and confidence embedded in humility is a force multiplier for leaders.
2. Leaders should be teachable, quick to listen and slow to speak.
3. Courage and confidence should enable and welcome diversity and inclusivity.
4. Calculated risk acceptance is a requirement for organizational excellence; shunning a 0-risk tolerance culture is a mark of good leadership.
5. People first, mission always.  A great leader does not put their own interests first.  Rather they are willing to let their fortunes rise and fall upon a posture of people first, mission always.

Excellence – the “E” in VALUES

We always enjoyed visits from congressional leaders or agency leadership to our Science Center.  Each visit brought a new opportunity to show our stuff and we were most proud of our staff.  The hard part was deciding what not to show, as our pride extended to each Division and the great research they were doing.  We would showcase research such as: 1) saildrone research in Arctic waters remotely assessing pollock and marine mammals, 2) computer representations of ecosystem models in the Bering Sea, one of the world’s richest and most productive food regions, 3) trawl and longline electronic monitoring systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI) image processing, and 4) immense seal surveys in the arctic using an advanced technology camera system that enabled efficient processing of millions of images.

Yes, we were proud of our research excellence, but the excellence in Center performance turned out to be much more than that.  It took a careful balance of attention to planning, infrastructure, provision of staff opportunities, and cutting-edge science. Every part counted, from science to facilities, from planning to administration. 

Our facilities, especially those in Alaska that we self-managed, were award-winning and known throughout the nation for their innovative achievements. Our OMI Division (i.e., operations) was nonpareil throughout the agency.  With the largest science enterprise of the agency, our Center’s financial complexities, with dozens of budget lines and external funding sources, were unmatched by other Centers.  Nonetheless, we were proud of our budget execution, as we typically accomplished our mission each year with few funds left over at the end of the fiscal year, but still never in the red.  This required our contracting staff to annually handle thousands of procurement documents, juggling fiscal year end with ongoing field operations. 

Our science supported the management of Alaska resources, a region considered to be one of the gold standards in US fishery management.  The Alaska region has only one overfished stock (at the time of this writing), and no overfishing has been practiced for decades.  That is a stewardship outcome that no other region in the United States could boast.  We supported that through a posture of customer service and through one of seeing the managers at the Alaska Regional Office as our number one client.  The result was a unique relationship within our agency through a collaborative partnership that was aligned in stewardship values and mission.  

Sounds like bragging, doesn’t it? Well, maybe so, but there is always a story behind such excellence, and it’s worth identifying some of the nuts and bolts behind those accomplishments that complement the leadership principles articulated in previous sections.  

Excellence can be, on occasion, motivated by times of scarcity.  Over the years, through our experience and in observing others, we’ve seen how excessive resources often make us lazy and create mission drift.  That is, it’s not until our backs are against the wall that we are willing to undergo the scale and scope of changes and process development needed to respond to shortfalls in resources and capital.  Good leaders are proactive and intentional in times of plenty but especially so in times of scarcity, seeing such an environment as an opportunity to improve, recognizing the promise of innovation for solving such problems.  But the very best leaders find solutions to problems they didn’t know they had, not only anticipating the future but setting up the organization for success in an unpredictable fiscal future. 

Leadership excellence must also be practical and strategic. It must pay attention to excellence in mission execution and address the development of good administrative, planning, and organizational systems. Good leaders pay attention to their internal systems, recognizing that good administrative systems make great organizations possible. 

Protocols addressing training, safety, communication, asset and facility management, decision roles and responsibilities, and employee performance management yield improved mission execution and employee morale. Other protocols, such as risk management, internal controls, and budget/financial management, serve as lines of defense against the unexpected and enhance mission performance. 

System development must, therefore, be intentional because organizations often take the path of least resistance. Healthy organizations, on the other hand, never happen by accident. Healthy organizations create processes that ensure corrective actions are taken regularly or timely. System development must always operate within the boundaries of organizational core values, keeping in mind the overarching maxim: people first, mission always. 

Effective leaders need to keep things simple and can’t be engaged in everything.  They routinely triage.  They identify and do what is essential, then judiciously delegate, delegate, and delegate.  Good leadership is predicated upon intentional actions: workplace values like safety, inclusivity, showing gratitude to employees, providing adequate feedback, etc.  All of these efforts take premeditated actions. 

Great leaders don’t make excuses; rather they take responsibility for problems.  They don’t put blame on others.  They are biased toward the positive, being a constant “cheerleader” of their staff.  Especially when times are difficult, embracing Adm William H. McRaven’s admonition that leaders “start singing when they are up to their neck in mud!”[15]

Excellence in leadership is characterized by tolerance, flexibility, and commitment to strict performance standards.  Excellence requires professional competency, achieved through a disciplined mixing of hard work with integrity, skill, self-organization, and professional conduct.  A commitment to excellence requires the employment of strategic resourcing processes, translating national or regional priorities into resource decisions through a transparent, criteria-based process.  

In sum, excellence in performance requires hard work and work that is directed by leaders who know where the mission is going and are smart about the journey.  Leaders who achieve organizational excellence are able to set priorities and inform staff and constituents as to why some activities are more important than others.  In this fiscal environment, doing more with less is no longer a reasonable goal for effective leaders.  Rather, the goal must be doing less with less, but strategically.  After all, our mission of science-based marine stewardship is just too important to tolerate anything less than optimal performance.  

Four Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Excellence

1. Excellence must pervade all aspects of an organization, from individual integrity and leadership function, to mission advancement.
2. Excellence involves triage, strategic selection of priorities and judicious delegation.
3. Excellence requires intentionality, yet must be bounded by organizational core values.
4. Excellence yields increased fitness of the organization and its mission impact.

Service – the “S” in VALUES

One of the many challenges we faced as a regional center was in the management of remote facilities.  In an era of telework, shared documents, and online connections, you wouldn’t think such separation would matter. But it did, especially when the separation allowed remote institutions to create their own culture independent of the Center’s. Being out of sight and often out of mind from the bulk of the Seattle staff brought a sense of isolation to those in the field. Remote staff complained about the lack of career opportunities connected with critical mission-related activities.  It seemed to them like the plum assignments always went to staff based in Seattle and not to staff based at the smaller laboratories/facilities.  Some even called themselves the “unwanted stepchildren.”

This sense of isolation then created a sense of independence as remote staff looked elsewhere for money and research opportunities.  Their success in obtaining “soft money” resources further isolated them from core Center activities, deepening the push-pull of isolation and independence. Although much of their science was outstanding, it came at the expense of the Center’s mission.  With limited budgets and escalating costs, our stakeholders needed every appropriated dollar spent in support of the nation’s stewardship mission. 

In our largest remote facility, the Division director (Phil) stepped in and slowly, over time and, through great perseverance, changed the Auke Bay Laboratory’s (ABL) narrative toward one that was inclusive rather than exclusive. Phil was a consummate team player, relentless in the pursuit of the Center’s mission. He constantly encouraged staff to “hitch their wagon to the Council,” one of the Center’s primary stakeholders. He led by example, creating new connections between other parts of the Center and ABL.

Phil skillfully and steadily changed ABL’s focus from a dependency on easily secured “soft money” independent of the NMFS Alaska mission to a mission-critical emphasis on top stakeholder issues. This was a difficult lift for many of his top scientists and senior managers. Phil needed both skill and courage to help them stay the course and do the right thing. Yet through his willingness to serve those above him as he served those below, Phil helped build a bridge over the geographical divide.

Phil’s facility manager, Jack, was another example of a servant leader, showing to those above him and beneath him what good leadership looked like.  Jack created followers by leading with his “hat,” fostering passion and gaining the trust of staff through example. He empowered staff by placing his confidence in them and giving them opportunities to succeed. Jack made generosity a habit, to those within and outside of our agency. His team transformed a new world-class research facility into zero-carbon usage, leaving two locomotive-sized furnaces idle by extracting two degrees of heat from 36-degree cold Alaska water.  He then showed others around the world how to do the same. 

The inclusion of service in our VALUES model provides a fitting end to a discussion on organizational excellence as customer service should permeate everything we do as leaders.  Much more could be said about this value and in some regards, nearly everything we have discussed so far has illustrated different components of servant leadership.

The stories of Phil and Jack shows how organizational excellence is fully realized when leaders are intentional about serving others, being tactful, full of respect for one another, and placing the needs of others before theirs.  Who are their customers?  Everyone they meet, whether internal or external to the organization and whether in positions above, below, and alongside them.  Such servant leaders manage down as well as up, treating their administrative support staff with the same honor, respect, and thankfulness as their science staff. People first, mission always!

Three Things to Remember Regarding the Importance of Service

1. With a foundation of high moral standards, service is the tie that binds all of the elements in our acronym, VALUES.
2. Servant leadership is intentional and focused evenly between customers and staff.
3. Servant leaders put others first.  Their success is measured in part by the success of those they supervise. 
4. Their service arises from a posture of humility and is exhibited by a nature of generosity. 

Part II

NOAA Case Study (Our Experience)

There is a great temptation for science organizations to see scientific advancements as the primary focus of a scientific institution.  That is, advancing the state of the human scientific endeavor is worthy by itself of justifying the use of an organization’s resources.  We saw the mission of our Science Center through a different lens, finding Sinek’s why, how and what model of inspirational leadership congruent with our experience.

The “Why:” Mission, Mission, Mission

Years ago, while working late into the night helping to wire a friend’s house, the electrician abruptly announced to one of us (SI) that life could be condensed into two dimensions, “motion and direction.”  That bit of insight by an electrician moonlighting as a modeler, proved valuable over the years, reaching into our professional work lives as we have sought to serve the public through fostering relevant, “direction” rich science. 

We have learned that a “well-oiled” science enterprise characterized by great processes and policies (yielding great motion) must still ensure that its science activities are shaped towards goals critical to the agency’s vision and mission (providing direction).   That is, an organization without vision and goals may abound with impressive activity but will always be constrained relative to its mission potential.  When activities poorly connect to an organization’s vision and mission, it not only results in underachievement of mission impact, but incurs an opportunity cost with directionless activities being done instead of directed activities that help fulfill the mission and vision of the organization. 

Vision is forward-looking. It anticipates a desired future state, reminding us of the famous quote by Gretzky, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”[16] For a public research agency like ours, such a vision, so necessary for mission success, must be then directly connected to societal needs or aspirations. Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk[17] on the “why behind the what” captures this concept well, arguing that when we connect our mission to the underlying reason for why we do what we do, it provides a powerful focus for an organization and a bridge to connect us with our customers. 

“We are Relentless in the Pursuit of our Mission” 

Such a phrase was commonly heard in our management meetings and even at times in our meetings with staff and in discussions with those elsewhere in our agency.  We said that because we believed strongly in the why – in the underlying reason behind our mission and the devotion of resources towards that mission.

Our mission was all about stewardship, ensuring that the natural resources in Federal waters we enjoy today will be enjoyed by our children and grandchildren because the right science-based management decisions were made. As Chief Seattle once said, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”[18]

Stewardship of federally managed marine resources (e.g., commercial fish stocks, stocks of marine mammals) is a critical element of food security for the nation, especially for the many small rural towns and villages in Alaska. Their livelihood and daily protein come from the abundance of the sea which our science helped provide for long-term sustainable use.  It’s hard to find an organizational mission that is as clear or as important as that of NOAA Fisheries.  

It was our practice to mention this “why” at every venue possible. We routinely emphasized the importance of our mission in our management team meetings, communications with staff, presentations to stakeholders, and intra-agency discussions. We intentionally developed skill in communicating the “why,” fashioning our message as clearly as possible so that our mission could be understood in a wide variety of fora.  

We endeavored to ensure that our communications program was re-oriented around the “why.”  In a world-class science organization like ours, the “what” or the story behind an emerging model or research methodology was often a welcomed story, captivating the public with new advancements in science.  Nonetheless, we resisted the temptation to just talk about the high-quality science, ensuring that we always circled back to the stewardship-driven “why” behind each scientific advancement.

Establishing the “Why” Through Service

Our goal was to support marine resource managers with the type of science that enabled them to ensure the sustainability of our nation’s marine resources while deriving a reasonable economic and social benefit to stakeholders.  We made our “Vision and Mission” inseparable from their “Mission and Vision.” Our science was a tool (that we were very good at).  It was not the end goal.  Hence, our overarching goals weren’t about developing great science, although we did strive for that. Our Vision was about resource sustainability, and our Mission was to provide the science needed by managers to achieve long-term sustainability.  

This level of interconnectedness, developed with the regional managers, seemed risky at first.  We essentially handed over the “keys to our Center” to the resource managers we supported, allowing them to annually shape our Center’s priorities that were then used in our funding decisions.  We encouraged them to be an active participant in our strategic planning process, which resulted in winners and losers in terms of funded science projects.  We met with them regularly and routinely asked for their advice on Science Center policy development.  We opened our books to them in a spirit of transparency.  In summary, we were relentless in the pursuit of a mission they had a principal role in defining.  They were our primary customers and, through them, the public: our focus was on service. 

The “How:” People, People, People

One of the watershed moments for one of us (SI) came through reading Kouzes and Posner’s book called “Leadership Challenge.” Chapter 3 is about finding your voice where they assert that to become a credible leader, you must first understand the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions driving your actions. We immediately saw the development of core values as a vehicle to embed virtue into the work environment.  We understood back then what David Brooks later articulated in his book The Road to Character, about the power of virtue in society, including the workplace and its culture. We wanted our voice to be a promoter of such virtue.

Few would dispute the importance of an organization’s culture and its role in shaping staff behavior, values, and beliefs. However, how that happens and how leaders can influence it are not nearly as clear. Nonetheless, we understood its importance, and it was one of our primary goals as leaders to help shape the organizational culture under our responsibility. 

We understood it was essential to promote a culture of workplace health and safety, where everyone saw health and safety as a core part of their jobs –not only with themselves but with others as well.  We saw the imperative to promote a culture of diversity and inclusion, where everyone was honored and valued.  We believed that it was critical to promote a culture of core values where everyone saw basic human values such as service, teamwork, and inclusion as indivisible from their work. 

Hence, we saw the task of shaping our Center’s culture as one of our greatest mandates and a critical task of leadership. Through being intentional and skillful in this endeavor, perhaps we could make an impact on our agency, Center, and staff.  We saw that task as a privilege, something that not only benefited our mission but employee wholeness and well-being.  A people-first perspective had to be something we intentionally and continually committed to, worthy of our time and investment. We had to, as Steven Covey has said, ensure that the main thing was “to keep the main thing the main thing.”[19] 

Changing the Atmosphere

Although we found few if any roadmaps or “how-to” guides to aid us in this culture-shaping task, we found the following advice for the statistical analysis of observational data as reported by William Cochran to be helpful in developing our approach to this mandate:

“When asked in a meeting what can be done in observational studies to clarify the step between association to causation, Sir Ronald Fisher replied “Make your theories elaborate.”  The reply puzzled me at first since by Occam’s razor the advice usually given is to make theories as is consistent with the known data.  What Sir Ronald Fisher meant, as the subsequent discussion showed, was that when constructing a casual hypothesis, one should envision as many different consequences of its truth as possible and plan observational studies to discover whether each of these consequences is found to hold…”[20]

Perhaps then, we could “make our theories [of culture-shaping] elaborate,” by adopting a strategy where our efforts to influence the Center’s culture would be many, diverse, intentional, and assessed for positive impact. 

So we did just that, seeing this task of culture shaping as our province where we could set the tone for our Science Center through our values, actions, policies and example.  We did this by keeping culture change in mind at all times, especially in our judgments and decisions.  We reshaped our communications to be both mission-advancing and culture-setting.  We clarified what we were – neither an “ivory tower” nor a “university”- rather, we were an applied research laboratory that provided the information needed to provide for the sustainable use of marine living resources and stewardship of protected species. 

We attempted to teach by example, practicing what we preached and understanding that important messages must be repeated.  We then made ourselves accountable by using the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) results as a metric for success or failure.

The Buck Stopped With Us

How we worked together as a leadership team, demonstrating a daily commitment to trust, cooperation, mutual respect, and listening to one another, would set the stage for how the Center functioned as a whole.  We understood the power of unity, that the sum of leadership is greater than the parts, and though we each had different roles, through a posture of humility and inclusiveness we could adopt a “people first- mission always” perspective that made such unity easier to achieve.  

We projected those leadership values onto the Center as a whole, empowered by a management team that was built on and abided by those principles.  We ensured that our team represented all Center components to foster inclusivity and transparency.  The team operated as a roundtable where everyone was heard and involved in all decisions and process creation, helping us to ensure fairness and consistency in all of our management actions.  We met weekly with three retreats per year to cultivate teamwork and cross-Center understanding.  Consensus was the goal; when consensus was not achieved, the Director/Deputy Director of the Science Center made the final decision.

Incentivizing Teamwork

We were intentional and then relentless in fostering a culture of teamwork across the Center, paying particular attention to the natural barriers caused by the unavoidable compartmentalization of our science mission.  We created a cross-division ZP-5 science coordinator with clout (delegated authority), money (budget ownership), and rank (ZP-5). We created a cross-division ZP-4 planning officer that held status in our executive leadership team.  We created cross-divisional research teams and then incentivized cross-divisional research through the power of the purse and through performance management language.  We were proactive and willing to occasionally step in to ensure cross-center equity.

We compensated for geography by diversifying the locations of key personnel and by subsidizing travel for remote personnel to attend Center functions.  We made geography part of an inclusivity emphasis in approving conference travel, organizational assignments, and other such “perks.” 

Everyone Counts

We operationalized a 360-degree perspective to our leadership values.  Everyone counted: there were no MVPs in the operations of our Science Center, only role players and that included us.  We saw this perspective to be particularly important for our administrative team, ensuring that others saw them as we did, mission equals to the programmatic team.   We then held our feet to the fire by fostering a daily operational awareness of this truth, seeing administrative staff functions such as facilities and administrative controls equal in mission value to the higher profile programmatic staff functions.  

Leadership Effectiveness

Perhaps our most promising area of influence was in the selection and supervision of our five science and one administrative Division Directors. Rather than following the historical practice of assessing applicants’ technical qualifications for top leadership positions, we looked first at their emotional intelligence, which we considered to be the sine qua non for any of our supervisory or management positions. 

An applicant may have the best scientific mind in their specific discipline, an innovative, analytical mind, and typically be the smartest person in the room, but they won’t be a great leader without great emotional intelligence.  That said, we also recognized the importance of a scientific leader having significant scientific training and insight.  A great leader at our Science Center had to demonstrate both above-average emotional and technical skills. 

We shaped our interview process for hiring and ranking candidates to assess a candidate’s level of self-awareness and empathy, perhaps the two most important aspects of healthy relationships in our experience.  We created interview questions that plumbed their ability to recognize and regulate their emotions and behavior in diverse situations.  We probed their underlying value system by posing hypothetical scenarios that they we likely to face if selected.  We sought to get beyond generalized responses by asking for details in their answers.  We made good use of references to improve our assessment of the recruit’s level of self-awareness and empathy.  Unsuccessful searches resulted in the initiation of a new search process.  Any delays were worth it. 

Leadership Priorities

Many supervisors see their performance management and supervisory duties as just that, as duties that must be performed because they are required.  We needed our supervisors to see themselves as mentors, using each interaction with employees, especially those directly reporting to them, as an opportunity to promote the flourishing of their employees and to shape the cultural environment under their leadership.  Their actions and behavior could help set the tone of the Center by modeling attitudes and behavior to employees, showing appreciation, encouraging their development, providing constructive feedback, keeping them informed, and providing inspiration and vision.

All-hands meetings, opening remarks at symposiums, and welcoming presentations for employee functions were no longer seen as obligations but as opportunities to shape the organization’s culture. For example, when providing opening remarks for the Combined Federal Campaign, we discussed the science of kindness and generosity and how generosity yielded measurable health benefits. Such mentions of core values were frequent and diverse in both internal and external communication venues. 

As leaders, we regularly communicated with our management team, staff, stakeholders as well as throughout other parts of the agency.  We saw each of these communications, even those relatively mundane, as important and useful.  Whether it was an offhand mention about safety, a reminder of our customer service role in providing scientific information to managers and stakeholders, or even an exhortation for inclusiveness across Divisional boundaries, we intentionally seized each opportunity to mentor, encourage, and then shape behaviors in the organization we were responsible for. 

A Heart to Serve

Peter Diamandis has said that “the truest drive comes from doing what you love.”[21]  James K.A. Smith echoed that when he said “Your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits. This is because our action—our doing—bubbles up from our loves.”[22]  It’s often surprising to new leaders, especially in governmental organizations like ours, how little impact they can have in some areas.  However, developing an organization’s culture is an area in which they can have a great impact.  But there must be a strong desire, a willingness to pursue a “full court press”, in shaping the culture of an organization.  Returning once again to the earlier quote by Martin Luther King, “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve … You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

The ”How” Again: Aligning the Culture by Managing Upward

Organizations like ours don’t operate within an isolated bubble.  Other institutions and organizations, whether those in authority or in association, influence the mission and impose constraints.  Hence, to fully address our Center’s challenges, it wasn’t enough to just focus on things under our leadership or control. 

Our parent agency, NOAA, was experiencing its own challenges on a number of fronts, and those challenges were impacting the Center’s mission and staff, too.  The development of a top-down “0-risk tolerance” culture had brought the agency to its knees through an ineffective and dysfunctional Human Resources Office.  In an overreaction to an unfavorable audit, the hiring process in NOAA became effectively broken for nearly 10 years through a severe reduction or relocation of HR staff and excessive and restrictive interpretation of HR rules.  Compliance trumped customer service, and the NOAA mission was severely hindered throughout this time and beyond. 

It may be surprising how a well-respected agency like NOAA could maintain the reputation it has, while nearly failing in several of its administrative processes and operational policies for over a decade or more.  In our experience, the incredible accomplishments of NOAA employees have occurred at times in spite of unnecessarily risk-averse policies implemented at both NOAA and the Department of Commerce levels through extraordinary efforts by the staff that push through the headwinds created by leadership.  

We should add that these leadership challenges hadn’t gone unnoticed, as several NOAA-led management initiatives were undertaken to respond to this failure. In fact, Organizational Excellence became a strategic imperative within NOAA, eventually appearing in nearly every strategic plan, mission statement, or annual guidance memorandum.   

Looking across the agency, we saw that many of these problems appeared to be foundational, stemming from deficiencies in leadership values.  We also saw this as an opportunity for agency-wide engagement, serving the greater organization through the application of leadership tools, experience, and the values message we had developed within our Center (which represented approximately 11% of the NOAA Fisheries workforce).

Although this additional mandate was aspiring and engaging, we knew that the actual work to shape the culture of an organization would be challenging. We knew we would need courage and confidence to have any success in shaping the wider agency culture.  Confidence in the culture-changing message we could bring to the larger organization, which was a message of vision/mission informed by the “why” combined with a mission optimization process informed by leadership values.  And courage to lead from behind, knowing that we were pushing for change and hence could face the potential of threatened colleagues with competing interests and differing values. 

Our motivation for doing this stemmed from our experience in seeing how poor leadership values and execution can undermine an organization’s foundation, brick by brick, especially when joined to a new policy designed to ratchet down the specter of risk.  For example, the clinical focus on process in a risk-averse work environment without equal attention given to leadership values and the quality of the employee’s work environment can yield an oppressive workplace atmosphere destructive to the mission. 

Hence, our first step was to advocate the importance of the “why,” emphasizing what was at stake and why the mission was so important to the nation.   We did this relentlessly in leadership meetings, willing to speak up on behalf of the employee, mission, and field.  Secondly, we turned words into actions by investing in agency-wide issues, volunteering for working groups, showing how our Center processes could help resolve agency challenges, and applying our strategies and practices to agency-level issues, especially in the areas of operations, management, and leadership. 

We sought mentoring opportunities, inviting staff from across the agency to participate in our leadership retreats.  If they couldn’t come to us, we then went to them, providing presentations on how they could implement strategic actions such as our priority-based resourcing (PBR) process.  Third, we willingly took the point on controversial issues such as labor cost control and rightsizing headquarters-field investments in support of agency objectives.  We were willing to expend our capital toward agency objectives.

Fourth, we tirelessly addressed the “how,” advocating for the development of agency core values and for the recognition of the importance of leadership values to NOAA’s mission success.  We believed that the historical NOAA practice of being overly risk-averse was a clear symptom of leadership problems.  We were fortunate that there were others within NOAA who thought likewise, and we joined their efforts to embed strong leadership values into the culture of NOAA. 

Ensuring The ”What” Serves the “Why”

Years ago, while struggling with flat budgets and increasing demands on our mission, we decided something had to change. We foresaw that the odds of increased budgets in the future were low and, in any event, diminishing with time. At the same time, our costs were escalating due to cost-of-living increases, agency decisions that led to increased administrative costs, and inflation. 

We had worked hard to mitigate this escalation through developing new survey technologies, lowering costs and increasing efficiencies, and pursuing new partnerships to hopefully leverage shared research interests.  But it wasn’t enough.  We simply couldn’t accomplish everything that we had done in the past.  We had to change our trajectory and do less with less strategically, as further mitigation measures would never be enough to reduce the gap between mission needs and available financial resources. 

In essence, we needed a different science delivery model which would include decreased staff levels along with a decreased mission scope.  We needed to review our mission from the bottom to the top, rightsizing people and mission activities to provide the most important data needed by managers for resource sustainability. In practice, this involved balancing (a) a prioritized list of core mission activities, (b) operational costs of executing those activities, and (c) labor and infrastructure costs (fixed costs).  A critical part of this balancing was to determine which core mission activities were needed such that we would be willing to adjust staffing in terms of overall levels (e.g., cost impacts) while aligning workforce capabilities.

We found it relatively easy to identify mission priorities.  The hard part was finding a rational, transparent way to identify which specific mission activities should be foregone to make room for the highest-priority activities.  This was hard because for most organizations like ours that have experienced a past history of budget constraints, most of the obvious activities that could be cut (i.e., low-priority activities) have been cut, and all of the remaining ones have been deemed critically important. 

Our approach was to develop a priority-based resourcing (PBR) planning process comprised of the following seven steps or components:

• a Science Plan that provided long-term priorities,
• an annual guidance memorandum,
• deconstruction of the mission into discrete chunks called Activity Plans,
• programmatic and risk-based ranking criteria according to management priorities,
• scoring of the Activity Plans using the ranking criteria,
• resource allocations (funding, ship time, etc.) and hiring based on scores, and
• incorporation of prioritized activities into staff performance plans.

Laying the Foundation (Steps 1 – 2)

The first and easiest part of the PBR process was identifying strategic priorities, which could then be input into the resource allocation phase. Here, we needed a long-term vision for our research Center that could then serve as a foundation for identifying annual areas of research emphasis.

Step 1 – Our foundation began with a Science Plan that mapped the AFSC mission into the NOAA stewardship mission based upon priorities given in the NOAA and NMFS Strategic Plans as shaped by the regional managers we supported.  They, the regional office, were our primary clients, serving as interlocutors between us and primary stakeholders such as the public and fishing and subsistence communities. Our science was just a tool (that we were very good at).  The end goal was to serve and support natural resource managers with the type of science that enabled them to ensure the sustainability of our nation’s marine resources while deriving a reasonable economic and social benefit to stakeholders. 

We built the Science Plan around three research categories or “themes:” (1) monitor and assess populations and associated resource-dependent communities; (2) understand and forecast effects of climate change; and (3) achieve organizational excellence.  We then divided each theme into a discrete set of research or programmatic activities called “foci.”  When taken together, the total set of research foci provided a granular accounting of the potential scope of research needed to address resource management issues as identified by our primary clients.   

It’s worth noting that embedded within this plan was the concept of “Core Activities” – the set of research “foci” what we would do under the most restrictive budget scenarios, e.g., (1) maintain current fish and marine mammal stock assessments; and (2) provide scientific support to fishery managers at the regional management, regional council, and headquarter level. 

Step 2 – The annual guidance memorandum (AGM) established annual priorities within the framework of the Science Plan and based upon needed stewardship actions as determined through the management side of NOAA.

After highlighting significant accomplishments from the past year, the memorandum laid out specific goals for the coming year, a set of research emphasis areas (which would subsequently be used to prioritize research allocations and staffing decisions), and strategic partnerships we intended to pursue that year. 

Besides its strategic purpose, we found the AGM to be a great communication tool, both for our staff and external stakeholders. As with other strategic communications, we always ensured that the “why behind the what” was discussed, linking our strategic priorities and prior-year accomplishments back to the underlying stewardship mission we served.

Then The Work Begins (Steps 3-5)

Step 3 –Our PBR process required us to deconstruct our entire research enterprise into relatively homogeneous “chunks” of research activity. For each of these “chunks,” a 3-5 page Activity Plan (AP) in a proposal-type format amenable for quantitative scoring was developed. We found it important to right-size these plans, as too few plans made scoring difficult, and too many plans made the PBR process overly time-consuming.

This Activity Plan creation was a big lift for the center.  It not only took extensive staff time to draft 130-150 plans (~$90M budget), but it also changed the power structure in the Center.  The traditional practice of distributing bulk funds to research divisions had once provided a measure of autonomy to the divisions. Now, with everyone’s research intentions visible and the process of funding centralized, new inclusive leadership structures were needed due to the loss of divisional autonomy. 

Step 4 – We next developed four programmatic and three risk criteria for ranking the Activity Plans.  Once again, our regional managers helped ensure that our criteria promoted research outcomes most aligned with regional stewardship needs.  The programmatic criteria targeted the uniqueness of research, consistency with the strategic plan, applicability to critical management needs, and alignment with AGM annual priorities.  Risk criteria targeted stakeholder impact, sustainability of core research competency, and political risk to the agency.

Step 5 –Division Directors and the Center Directorate then independently scored all 130-150 Activity plans, followed by a two-day retreat in which each activity plan was discussed by the collective management team, and scores were compared and revised based upon those discussions.  Particular attention was given to reconciling large differences between Division and Center Directorate scores with the goal of minimizing those differences to the extent possible or at least working to understand the basis for these differences. Following this discussion, the Center Directorate provided a final ranking of AP plans, resulting in a prioritized list of all proposed Center research functions for a particular year.

There’s Hard, and Then There’s Difficult: Resource Allocation (Steps 6-7)

Step 6 – With the time-consuming analytical work essentially over, steps six and seven were perhaps the most difficult, as this is where the hard decisions took place. A ranked list meant that there would be winners and losers within a research enterprise already trimmed down to high-priority and seemingly essential work.  But we needed to do less with less, and that meant canceling some of our high-priority research activities.  We accomplished this by using the ranked scores in a zero-based process to build the Center’s annual budget, allocate resource opportunities such as ship and aircraft charters, and prioritize new hires. 

Step 7 – To complete the PBR process, we communicated the results to staff through all-hands Divisional meetings and incorporated prioritized activities into staff performance plans.  This also was a difficult part of the process as we recognized that employee career decisions would be influenced by these resource allocation decisions. Doing less with less meant, in practical terms, canceling important legacy research with a history of staff investment. Nonetheless, we found that the inclusivity of the PBR process, the involvement of our regional stakeholders, and the transparency in outcome helped soften the blow.

Our PBR process, especially the difficult aspects of it, was helped in large part through the creation of a management team that met regularly to advise Center leadership decisions.  The management team lowered boundaries while increasing interconnectivity within the Center. It built unity by demonstrating the worth of values such as transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration. It improved our science by applying advances in new technologies and management strategy evaluations to determine the viability of alternative approaches to our science delivery.[23]  

PBR Success Requires Cost Controls

We supported our PBR process by reducing fixed costs where possible, developing annual labor targets sized to meet continuing core mission needs, and an ongoing process to revise AFSC science services based on tradeoffs informed by future budget expectations, technology advances, management strategy evaluations, and strategic partnerships.  Of these, active labor cost control was the most critical for our ability to maintain essential operational/program funds in support of our mission. 

Left to themselves, labor costs escalate annually, even when the size of the labor force is fixed.  Employee annual performance increases, annual cost of living increases, and inflationary contractor costs all drive costs up, and when retirement rates are low, the reduction in salary costs due to new, less experienced, employees is insufficient to balance out the other drivers of cost escalations. As a result, a fixed labor cost ceiling (annual labor targets) translates into fewer staff, fewer hires, a greater number of “empty” positions, reduced mission scope, and the need to realign staff into higher priority activities. 

Once Again

• Ground Zero: Developing the right leadership environment
• The start: A Science Plan
• A bit further: Annual Guidance Memorandum
• Regional Office directed priorities
• Activity Plans (deconstruct mission into discrete elements)
• Apply Ranking Criteria informed by Regional Office priorities
• Priority and risk-based allocations
• Communicate results to staff
• Performance Plans are constructed from prioritized Activity Plans

PBR is an exercise in alignment between the why, how and what.  It’s a stepwise, rational, and risk-based process for connecting purpose with outcome.  It draws straight lines between priorities and performance plans, ensuring those two sets of requirements harmonize. It shows an organization what not to do. It’s strategic, transparent, inclusive, and fair.  And although it places a significant demand upon an organization’s time and effort, we found the outcome well worth the cost given the vital importance of a stewardship mission that supports an earth “we borrow from our children.” 

One last point regarding our PBR budget allocation process. Although it was a demanding process, it became easier and less burdensome to staff over time.  Clearly, the entire science enterprise of our Science Center was not recreated every year.  Many of the stock assessment surveys were conducted with few changes at some set interval.  Therefore, over time, the effort needed to draft proposals for a significant fraction of our science enterprise became easier from one year to the next. 

Final Thoughts

It’s no secret that scientists, researchers, engineers, and computer professionals struggle with the skills of leadership and communication[24].  Accomplished scientists catch the eye of senior leaders, resulting in opportunities to leave the bench early in their careers to lead laboratories, research programs, or organizations. Unfortunately, scientific skills are too often unrelated to soft skills such as emotional intelligence, authenticity, and active listening.

Our primary goal in this monograph is to promote a change in how science organizations view leadership.  As noted above, we strongly believe that character matters.  We further believe that the historical practice of emphasizing technical skill over leadership ability should be reversed, recognizing the critical value and importance of soft skills to an institution achieving performance excellence.  Further, appropriate levels of risk-taking by leadership should be not just tolerated but celebrated.  

In the final analysis, it’s about the mission and the reason for why the mission is so important.  For the agency we worked in, our mission was marine stewardship in US Federal waters, ensuring that the natural resources we enjoy today will be sustained through effective science-based management decisions to enable enjoyment by our children and grandchildren.  We dared not to fail, ensuring that both the mission and the employees behind the mission received the best that the agency could provide. 

Using the acronym VALUES, we identified a number of interconnected leadership traits we found essential to good leadership.  We used Sinek’s Golden Circle model of the why, what, and how of an organization’s mission to describe how organizational values permeated every part of our organization, from our work environment to the mechanics of science delivery. We showed how such values supported our transition from doing “more with less” to doing “less with less, but strategically” through a strategic budget process responsive to stakeholder priorities and funding constraints.[1]

It is fitting that the VALUES are bookended by leadership virtues and servant leadership, as both of these are foundational and interdependent. But if pressed to identify the two most important factors for creating a great leadership environment, we would answer by saying: 1) “pay attention to the why or the underlying purpose of the agency” and 2) “pay attention to what motivates leaders in the organization.”

We’ve addressed the importance of purpose to healthy leadership throughout this monograph.  Yet the importance of what motivates a potential leader at a scientific institution is just as critical in our opinion.  Why does a particular person in a leadership position agree or desire to serve in that position?  The answer to that will make the difference between a healthy, productive organization and one fraught with problems and low productivity.  Is it more pay, more authority, the reward for technical achievement, or even a stepping stone as part of a long career path?  Or does it stem from the right values: a desire to empower people, love of mission, alignment of skill and ability in the leadership area? 

Like high-leverage data points that exert exceptional influence within a statistical model, answers to those questions will equally exert exceptional influence within a science organization.  Such influence will be witnessed through a change in culture that establishes a cadre of leaders who will focus on the integrity of the whole organization.  It is because the right character standards lead directly to the right motivation for effective leadership.  And with the right “why” behind an individual’s desire to lead comes an ability for that leader to optimally support an organization’s mission as seen by stakeholders on every floor of the organization, not just those on the 42^nd floor.

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[1] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-fix-a-toxic culture/?utm_source=outr2&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=sull0922

[2] Essays Presented to Leo Baeck on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday” (1954), edited by Samuel H. Bergman.

[3] https://simonsinek.com/books/start-with-why/

[4] https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6589870-a-good-intention-with-a-bad-approach-often-leads-to

[6] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/232955/no-employee-benefit-no-one-talking.aspx

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWHlDSVEoy4 

[8] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309654

[9] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[10] https://storycorps.org/about/

[11] https://www.facebook.com/pg/StoryCorps/about/?ref=page_internal

[12] Both quotes from Phil Dourago’s book, The 60 Second Leader: Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites.

[13] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/757-everybody-can-be-great-because-anybody-can-serve-you-don-t-have

[14] Ambrose of Milan. De Officiis Ministrorum, I.35.176

[15] McRaven, W. H. 1. (2017). Make your bed: little things that can change your life…and maybe the world. First edition. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

[16] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/wayne_gretzky_383282

[17] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw

[18] A 1991 report from the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality ascribed this saying to Chief Seattle but no citation was given.  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/22/borrow-earth/

[19] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/stephen_covey_110198

[20] Page 5 in Rosenbaum, P.R. (2002) Observational studies. 2nd Edition, Springer, New York. doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-3692

[21] https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/peter_diamandis

[22] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/441817.James_K_A_Smith

[23] Additional information about this process can be found on the AFSC website at: (https://www.afsc.noaa.gov/GeneralInfo/AFSCSciencePlanFINALJUNE12010.pdf).