Dan Honig's "Mission Driven Bureaucrats"

Dan Honig is an associate professor of public policy at University College London's School of Public Policy/Department of Political Science, and an associate professor at Georgetown' University's McCourt School of Public Policy.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People To Help Government Do Better, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the 2nd page of chapter 6 – it opens by noting that “this chapter ultimately asks what combination of managerial strategies maximizes performance for a given agency.” It then goes on to ask when empowerment-oriented or compliance-oriented approaches will work better, and then describes some examples of high-performing agencies that use empowerment.

If I had to choose one page at random, I suspect I could have picked a good number that would have given a better sense of the book. There are also a great many pages that are more evocative, more illustrative; page 99 is a bit dry, certainly in isolation.

That said, I do think reading page 99 gives a decent sense of the overall thrust of Mission Driven Bureaucrats. This is a book about what will work better, when; it’s a book focused in large part on the (in my view underappreciated) upsides of empowerment.

Rules often get in the way of public servants’ ability to do good things, as and where they want to. A lot of them want to (that’s why they join the public service); empowering management helps attract and retain the mission motivated. It also helps make the mission motivated; bureaucrats, like all of us, respond to management practice. Employees who are trusted and empowered, who can see how their work contributes to a meaningful mission and feel like part of a larger team effort, are more likely to act in ways that forward the mission.

I see a role for all of us – managers, citizens, leaders, front line public servants – in moving towards more empowerment. The final three chapters of Mission Driven Bureaucrats outline concrete steps we all can take to move towards more managing for empowerment, and a Government that achieves as much as possible for citizens. Mission Driven Bureaucrats are all around; they generally want to do good things. We will all often be better off if we build managerial systems that let them.

Visit Dan Honig's website.

--Marshal Zeringue