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319 appendix d Causal Contributors to the Missing Competences Producing results in government requires managers who possess a breadth of competences . No one individual needs to possess all of them. But an organization’s leadership team does need the capacity for numerate reasoning, analytical thinking , strategic conceptualization, organizational implementation, political savvy, motivational leadership, and the basic, operational capacity to get the job done. This imposing list contains many competences that many public managers fail to acquire. Why? The absence of these competences has, I think, four contributors: (1) the reason why people enter public service; (2) the professional training they receive; (3) the type of daily work they do; and (4) the nature of bureaucratic life. The Public-Service Choice Most people choose a public-service profession to do it, not to analyze it. Few people become teachers because they want to analyze data to determine what teaching strategies are most effective for which students. They become teachers to teach—to help children learn and grow. Few people become firefighters to analyze data to determine what fire-fighting strategies are most effective for which kinds of fires. They become firefighters to fight fires—to help maintain public safety. Those who choose to work in child welfare do so to help children—to save children’s lives. Those who choose public service get their professional kicks from doing it— not from thinking about it philosophically or analyzing it abstractly. If they don’t like doing it, they find another profession. The Limits of Traditional Professional Training Second, they are trained to do it—not to analyze it. Every public-service profession has its collection of best practices, evolved from years of professional work, 17-2527-5 app.indd 319 5/6/14 2:07 PM 320 Appendix D that everyone needs to know. For every common (and not so common) situation, the profession has “learned” what works best and has encoded these lessons in textbooks and iconic myths. Professional curricula focus on what to do—on the accepted professional practices and established standards. When fire cadets enroll in the fire academy or when experienced firefighters take a specialized course, they will learn the same practices that their colleagues have already learned. People who go to the fire academy will be taught to do what firefighters do—not how to analyze the effectiveness of what they do. When those who seek a career in child welfare enroll in a university social service school, they will be taught the latest clinical diagnoses and the accepted practices for treating them.1 With rare exceptions, the first job for most public-service professionals will require little analytical work. Primarily, these entry-level jobs require mastering the organization’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for dealing with disruptive students, kitchen fires, or parental abuse. Such SOPs can be written into the formal policy manual or adopted informally by the professional culture. Either way, these conventions, practices, and routines create the basis for operations . In a new situation, no one has to rethink what to do; all that has already been established and internalized. Sure, as preprofessionals they took some management-oriented courses in budgeting or personnel, and perhaps even a course that sought to convey the tacit knowledge required to motivate humans to accomplish public purposes. Some of the bolder preprofessionals may take a graduate course or two in analytical methods—techniques that they may use to challenge the effectiveness of some practices. Still, within the profession, many will be quite comfortable with the existing orthodoxy. With the profession’s repertoire firmly established, most of its members will not analyze (and thus implicitly challenge) the effectiveness of its standard routines. The few who do may be quickly labeled as cranks. The Daily Work of Public-Service Professionals Third, when they take their first, entry-level job, public-service professionals won’t be asked to conduct much analysis. They will be asked to simply do it. Doing it doesn’t mean analyzing it. Doing it means doing what was taught in the academy or graduate school. It means following the accepted practices. It means taking cues from experienced pros. From the organization’s baseline practices, each neophyte will evolve his or her own professional repertoire, including a few modifications from official practice. With experience, he or she will amend a few of the accepted practices to deal 17-2527-5 app.indd 320 5/6/14 2:07 PM [52.14.221.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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