Ensuring Excellence: A Guide for Cultivating Healthy High-Performing Agencies : National Academy of Public Administration , September , 2024
Ensuring Excellence: A Guide for Cultivating Healthy High-Performing Agencies : National Academy of Public Administration , September , 2024
From the report: “In the fall of 2019, the National Academy of Public Administration (the Academy) announced 12 Grand Challenges for the field of public administration. These are the most significant issues facing the government from a public administration standpoint over the long term.
One of the Grand Challenges is to Modernize and Reinvigorate the Public Service. As governments are increasingly called upon to address complex and interconnected problems, they need leaders, managers, technical experts, and front-line workers in the right jobs with the right skills at the right time. Yet many public agencies have long struggled to build a workforce that can deliver critical public services given laborious and time-consuming hiring practices, limited salary flexibilities, and promotion rules that value longevity over expertise and performance. Effective recruitment and retention are especially critical with the current wave of public service retirements.
Against this backdrop, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration asked that the Academy identify effective strategies for strengthening organizational health and performance in the current world of work. To build and reinvigorate the public service, this report contends that agencies must develop a strong internal culture with a focus on high performance to ensure that the public gets the services that it wants, needs, and deserves. This report is intended to serve as a playbook, or how-to guide, for leaders and managers. It highlights concrete strategies, and evidence-based practices along with resource links and case examples that can be used to continually assess and respond to evolving work environments in ways that will improve organizational health and performance.
As a congressionally chartered, independent, and nonprofit organization with over 1,000 distinguished Fellows, the Academy has a unique ability to bring nationally recognized experts together to help government agencies address challenges. I appreciate the great work both of the Study Team that led this work and of our Fellows who offered such important advice in the development of this report. I also want to thank the many federal and nonfederal leaders who participated in the three symposia hosted by our team—these leaders provided incredible insights that greatly increased the usability and specificity of the final document. Moving forward, I hope that leaders and managers at all levels will find this report to be a useful desktop resource for building healthier and higher-performing organizations.”
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