Good day,
Last week we were talking to an inquisitive person who is rising in the local public sector world. The conversation turned to performance management (one of our favorite topics) and the question was posed to us: “What do you think are the biggest impediments to more widespread use of that discipline?
A few answers quickly sprang to our minds, including limited resources and difficulties hiring staff with the necessary skills.
But we’re writing this note to you, state and local elected decision-makers, because the foremost thought in our minds was that the challenge is often you.
Not all of you certainly. Not even most of you. But certainly, enough of you to encourage us to write this note.
Over many years, we’ve talked to scores, maybe hundreds, of people who have dedicated their lives to managing government performance. And they often tell us (usually off the record) that it’s the mayors, councilmembers, governors and legislators who stand in their way.
Sometimes solid performance management operations – including the emphasis on evidence-based practices, evaluations, and performance measurements – can be downplayed, unused or ignored. In more extreme instances, there have been threats to defund, denature or entirely shut down performance management operations altogether.
Why are performance management efforts underused?
For one thing, performance measures that have the potential to inform the public about programmatic success can also point out failures. That can be highly useful for those who want to take steps to improve performance. But after a ribbon-cutting ceremony, who really wants to hear that a heralded program didn’t work out?
What’s more, in the real political world, negative data can be used to beat up on politicians when it comes to election time.
As Marc Holzer, a well-known academic and a pioneer in the field of performance management, told us some months ago, “We have a lot of data out there and a lot of performance measures. But most citizens don’t have access to that because it’s not communicated to them. And in many cases, it’s deliberately hidden . . .”
We blame some of our colleagues in the press for this phenomenon. It’s always been the case that bad news drives out good news, which justifiably may make some of you wary that reporters will be sour cherry picking the bad news from a performance report – even one that is largely positive.
We hope we’ve established that we understand the motivations for wanting to push performance information aside. But when elected officials do so, they are missing the idea that people trust candor.
As we wrote in Route Fifty in February, “People mistrust what they don’t understand. They’re more inclined to have faith in an institution that is candid, even if it’s open about mistakes or ‘performance is proven to be poor,’ says Michael Pagano, dean emeritus of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, Chicago. ‘If voters trust that the government is providing accurate information, they will continue to trust’”
One group, in particular, that we’d suggest that you support are your performance auditors and evaluators, whether they come from the executive or legislative branches. Their reports contain the kind of vital, practical data and recommendations that can help make government run more efficiently and effectively.
And when that’s the case, there will be lots to brag about when election time rolls around.
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