Public Administration

Reflective Essay

Submitted to the Faculty of the School of

Public Affairs and Administration on
March 25, 2013

Stephen V. Tennant
 I began my journey toward this essay in August of 2008 with a different

perspective than I have now. Then I was interested in pursuing multi-disciplinary

doctoral studies in what I referred to as Homeland Security Studies. My research

interest was (and remains) concerned with security issues along the U.S. -

Mexico border and all the conflicting public policy interests (security, economic,

immigration, and diplomatic to name a few) that are involved in any discussion of

the border region. I believed this topic would be informed by studies in both the

public administration and political science disciplines. I pursued coursework in

both since 2008, but my primary focus has been public administration.

I now find myself considering two summative questions about my

experience in the MPA program: how has my experience informed, enhanced, or

altered my views of public administration and what major changes in my

perspective can be attributed to it? Four broad themes sum up my thinking on

these questions, and I have come to believe they are important for anyone that

wants to make a career of public administration, no matter at what level. Those

themes are competence, stewardship, a calling to service, and citizenship. In my

view, the MPA program touched all four of these themes, and helped me assess

my attitude about and appreciation of public administration. My perspective is

informed by more than instruction – I found the learning through interaction with

other students equal to the learning in the classroom. I will discuss each theme

in turn, but I want to begin by briefly describing my experiences prior to 2008 to

help the reader understand my baseline when I entered the program.

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 I came to the MPA program two years after retiring from a 25-year career

as a US Army Engineer Officer. To my way of thinking, I was an experienced

public administrator, though admittedly in a very specialized field. I spent most of

that career paying scant attention to government at the state and local levels of

government. I lived overseas, moved every 18 months, or lived on a military

installation. In the rare instances that I lived in a “civilian” community, it was a

temporary condition that was soon altered by another change of duty station. I

developed skills in leading organizations, planning and programming public

works, managing training in organizations, and maintaining the equipment and

property provided to accomplish my mission.

I administered a wide variety of programs and functions over my career.

At various times I was responsible for equal employment opportunity and human

resources programs, budgeting and financial management, contracting,

emergency operations, logistics, public affairs and information, supervising legal

counsel, program and project management, supporting interagency customers

with services, National Environmental Policy Act compliance, and even real

property management. I entered the MPA program believing I had well

developed skills that would be enhanced and placed in perspective through the

study of theory. To some extent this was true, but in the main I found myself

dealing with ideas and concepts I never considered before. With that as my

baseline, I will turn my attention to the first of my themes – competence.

I believe that assuring public safety, developing public infrastructure,

setting conditions for economic development, enhancing quality of life, and

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managing public resources are the five main responsibilities of government at

any level. Anyone that seeks a career in public administration probably begins

by working in one of those five domains. They are functional, they require

particular expertise, and governmental competence in these domains is generally

expected by the public. Experience in these areas is the base from which many

public administrators develop, but their technical competency is different than

that required to be functionally effective in these domains. This may seem

obvious, but I would not have been able to articulate this idea five years ago.

In my view, the MPA program did a great job of exposing me to a wide

range of competencies necessary for effective public administration. The classes

in statistics, financing public services, and resource allocation and control were

eye-opening for me. I have developed and implemented budgets for example,

but what I did was nowhere near as complex as the challenges faced in any

municipality. It is easy to budget when you don’t have to consider how to raise

the revenue, and correctly gage how much revenue the public is willing to

provide. I gained great appreciation of the complexity involved in generating,

allocating and using resources to provide public services. Additionally, I never

considered the idea that a budget was an expression of values and priorities

before I entered the MPA program. To me it was an annual plan to expend the

resources allocated to accomplish my mission, and nothing more.

It is easy to provide non-controversial public services like security or

infrastructure, but is much more complex to identify, understand, and both

effectively and efficiently provide services from the government related to quality

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of life or economic development. The former are expected; and often the

conversation is merely about how much we need, not if we need it. The latter are

much more subjective and impacted by frequent changes in political leadership

or public opinion, and require clear understanding of the political art of what is

possible. This leads me to conclude that the tools to identify the need for public

goods, raise the means, allocate resources and control budget execution are

important, but are not the important competencies of an effective public

administrator.

The true competency of a public administrator is problem solving in an

environment defined by ambiguity. Generally speaking, only problems cross the

desk of the person in charge. If an action is routine or expected, no one gets

excited unless it does not occur. No one ever calls a public works director to

thank them for storm drains that work. The public expects routine things to

happen routinely. The public also expects the public administrator will solve

problems that are not routine. The administrator must develop the ability to

balance a complex set of variables in order to meet the needs of the public, the

political leaders they elect, and the organization that delivers services. These

are separate constituencies whose needs are often in conflict. An effective

administrator requires a nuanced understanding of politics, organizations, and

values in order to solve problems with a balanced approach. I found the MPA

program was engaging the problem-solving competency very effectively even as

it was teaching more technical skills. For example, I found the study of

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organizations to be valuable – much more valuable in hindsight than I

appreciated at the time.

I was comfortable studying Edgar Schein, probably because the Army has

adopted much of his work into our instruction on organizational leadership. I was

less convinced about the usefulness of some of the other readings about

organizations until I found myself reflecting on The Accountable Juggler by Beryl

Radin and Working with Culture by Anne Khademian as I studied the challenges

of the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The political and

professional leadership of DHS created a new organization with diverse

responsibilities, while merging dissimilar organizational cultures and unique

internal and external accountability mechanisms. They did this while continuing

an ongoing mission with requirements that varied from law enforcement,

collection of custom revenues, prevention of disease vector infiltration adverse to

agriculture, and provision of immigration and citizenship services. The

organizational problem facing DHS is much like that of the Department of Health

and Human Services (HHS). Borrowing from Radin and Khademian, the idea of

using tasks, resources and environment to understand the differing DHS cultures

and differing accountability requirements for each of them is something I would

never have considered prior to this program. These ideas inform my perspective

as I pursue my research interest in border security.

The next major theme is stewardship. This could easily be understood as

simply assuring that tax dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. I find this

notion of stewardship limiting, and favor a concept of stewardship that is broader

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in scope. A public administrator is responsible for the stewardship of financial

resources, the people entrusted to their supervision, the culture of their

organization, and the trust the public invests in the institutions of government.

Carrying out this stewardship is an application of problem solving in conditions of

ambiguity previously discussed. So how did the MPA program inform my

perspective on this?

I had a healthy respect for stewardship of financial and material resources

from my Army service, and I certainly understood I was responsible for the

people I was privileged to lead. Through my studies I gained a new perspective

on organizational culture and the importance of public trust in the institutions of

government. If the end of government is to provide public goods and services,

then the public must believe that those who work in government will do so with

the public interest in mind. They must believe those in government that provide

services do so with respect, with fairness (which means treating all the same),

and will be responsive to the citizenry and their elected leaders. This trust is

earned through performance, and the public is always assessing if the trust they

give is warranted. If trust is lost it is exceptionally difficult to regain, thus the

challenge of a public administrator is to create and nurture an organizational

culture that fosters public trust.

This culture should promote efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability to

the public. It should also promote a sense of employee-belonging to the

organization, buy-in to the organizational mission and values, and faith that the

culture of the organization will be well tended. Careful thought to things like

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integration and training of new employees, making opportunities for training and

advancement available to all who seek it, effective discipline of employees that

do not measure up to the organization’s standards, effective recognition of those

that do, and promotion of values and a professional ethic are important in public

administration. If an organization has a healthy culture this will be reflected in its

employees, and it will be rewarded with trust from both the political leadership

and the public. If the culture is not healthy, it can’t be hidden and the result will

be loss of trust.

My third theme is that public administration is a calling to service. I must

acknowledge a pre-existing bias derived from a career in an organization for

which selfless service is a publicly espoused value that becomes internalized by

many of its members, and which I believe is a basic assumption held by most of

them. I thought that few institutions could have the depth of commitment to

selfless service found in the military. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of

fellow students I encountered who are as committed to selfless service as any

Soldier. Granted, the MPA program is likely to attract those that are already

committed in this way, but I found very few that saw public administration as

merely a job.

The daily management and administration of an organization, like the

technical competence discussed earlier, is an assumed attribute of those placed

in positions of responsibility in public administration. Developing and nurturing

this calling for service is the difficult and time consuming work of leaders. There

are people that work in any public organization for which the work is just a job, an

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income that provides the means for living; they should be respected and

appreciated for their contributions. The real challenge is to identify those with a

calling to serve and sustain that calling through mentorship and professional

development. Leading people with this type of commitment requires more than

administrative or managerial skills. Leaders must demonstrate by their actions

that they are committed to public service. They must nurture a culture that

promotes values and ethical behavior. They must trust their employees, and

empower them to act within the authorities that govern their position in the

organization. This may mean encouraging subordinates to take on new

responsibilities, or requiring leaders to underwrite a certain amount of risk via

decentralized decision-making. It means creating an environment where

dissenting opinions are considered, and people are not afraid to offer them. It

may even mean helping employees realize an opportunity and supporting them

even if they leave the organization. It most certainly means putting the needs of

employees, the organization and the public above interests that only serve self.

My final reflection is on citizenship. Dictionary.com defines citizenship as

“1) the state of being vested with the rights, privileges and duties of a citizen” and

as “2) the character of an individual viewed as a member of society; behavior in

terms of the duties, obligations and functions of a citizen”. If you asked me if I

was a good citizen in 2008, I would have said yes. After all, I served in the Army

in peace time and during war; however, in light of this definition, I was nowhere

near the citizen I should have been. The MPA program served as a stimulus that

encouraged me to shoulder the duties of citizenship more fully, and I think I am

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better for it. Until I entered the MPA program, I generally only voted in

presidential elections. I paid no attention to local or state government for the

entire duration of my military career. When I began studying public

administration, I became acutely aware of my deficiencies as a citizen, especially

with regard to the second definition of citizenship above. Furthermore, I came to

believe that the most important characteristic of a public administrator may be the

willingness to shoulder the duty and responsibilities of active citizenship.

My deficiencies were really driven home when I was assigned to conduct

a fiscal analysis of a municipality. I chose my city of Leavenworth, Kansas. In

conducting this analysis I interviewed many people from the city staff, as well as

two elected leaders. I examined the city budget over a 10-year period. I began

to appreciate that the budget was an expression of the values of members of the

community who actively shoulder the responsibility of citizenship. The values

expressed were made manifest by the work of the city commissioners and the

city manager. I am sure there are many citizens with opinions about how the

government works and where resources should be spent, however if they do not

exercise the responsibility of citizenship then they cede the expression of their

values to those that do.

I further came to appreciate that the ideas of duty and responsibility of

citizenship were part of what motivated the people that I interviewed. Although

not the exclusive motives, I observed that they had a real sense of community,

and the desire to make the community a little better. This realization impelled me

to service on a public committee, and to volunteer my time promoting the arts by

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bringing live music to the city. As our Parks Department Director later told me,

nothing in the city is possible without volunteers giving their time and talent to

make the city better.

So there it is – my reflection on four years of study. I am sure there is

much more I could have considered, but I think competence, stewardship, a

calling to service, and citizenship, all underpinned by a healthy appreciation of

organizational leadership and understanding organizational culture will serve any

professional public administrator well over the long term. You can hire for

functional technical competence, but you can’t always hire the ability to make

decisions in uncertain times, nor can you effectively lead an organization by fiat

or positional authority alone without eventually losing the trust of all of your

constituents. If you are motivated by service, are willing to be a steward of more

than just money, and are willing to accept the duties and responsibilities of

citizenship, you are likely to be an effective leader and an accomplished public

administrator.

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