Beryl A. Radin - The Accountable Juggler: The Art of Leadership in a Federal Agency

The Accountable Juggler

Public Affairs and Policy Administration Series

The Accountable
Juggler

The Art of
Leadership in
a Federal
Agency

Beryl A. Radin
University of Baltimore

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Copyright 2002 by CQ Press, a Division of Congressional Quarterly Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Radin, Beryl.

The accountable juggler: the art of leadership in a federal agency/Beryl A. Radin.

p. cm. (Public Affairs and Policy Administration series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56802-643-9 (alk. paper)

1. United States. Dept. of Health and Human ServicesManagement. 2. Public administrationUnited States. 3. Leadership. I. Title. II Series.

There is a scene in the movie Ben Hur, in which Ben Hur tries without success to get his four new chariot horses to run swiftly around a track. The bedouin who owns the horses tells him that each horse has its own personality and skills and that they must be harnessed together in a way that allows them to run as a team. That story underscores the essence of successfully managing a large, complex cabinet agency.

Beryl Radin, a distinguished scholar of public administration, has taken on a task almost as difficult as managing and leading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). She has decided to analyze and explain the management and strategic challenges that government leaders face.

Her context is the public administration literature and what it tells us about large, complex public agencies. Her protagonist is a fictitious, newly nominated secretary of HHS. Professor Radin tells this hapless patriot what he needs to know not just to get through his confirmation hearing but also to make a difference during his tenure. Making a difference, according to Professor Radin, requires understanding the different cultures of the various agencies within the department and using accountability and management processes to make the sum larger than the parts.

Not since Professor Roscoe Martin dissected the Tennessee Valley Authority have any scholars steeped themselves in the culture of a large government agency over a substantial period of time and reported their findings with such insight. Professor Radin is an outsider with keen and thoughtful things to say about the work of HHS, the single federal agency that impacts the lives of most Americans. Her discussion of accountability inside and outside the department is a particularly important contribution to the literature.

The most important lesson for a successful leader is flexibility: Standing on principle is not the same as standing in cement. The writers of our Constitution did not create a system in which one side wins all the time. In fact, that was the last thing they wanted. What they wanted was a system in which men and women of good willalthough of differing viewscould hammer out compromises that would, over time, bring a better life to every citizen. This book tells us how that political and administrative process works.

For any policymaker or student of public administration, this book is the best ever written on a modern cabinet agency. I hope every new cabinet secretary and agency head will read this book after winning confirmation. If they read it before, it might scare them away from public service. If they read it after, it may help them to become stronger, more effective leaders.

Donna E. Shalala
Secretary of Health and Human Services, 19932001

I cannot avoid making explicit what is apparent to anyone who knows me. This book is the work of an HHS/HEW groupie. For many yearslonger than Id care to admitI have followed the machinations of a department that contained policies and programs that preoccupied me both as a scholar and as a citizen. I began my encounter with what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when I worked with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, concerned about the implementation of civil rights policies within HEW. My doctoral dissertation (and first book) focused on an aspect of that effortimplementation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the education programs within HEW. I spent a year in the department during the Carter administration, working on a policy document that reviewed the multiple programs within the agency. Coauthoring a book on the creation of the Department of Education gave me still another perspective on what had become the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979. In the years that followed, I continued research on human services policies and the role of the federal government as it attempted to influence the programs that were actually administered by others, particularly state governments.

By the fall of 1995, it seemed that it was again time for me to spend time in HHS. The secretary of the department, Donna Shalala, arranged for me to come into the federal government through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (legislation that allows faculty members to be hired for short-term appointments). For two years I worked out of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget, first cochairing a departmentwide task force looking at the use and potential of technical assistance efforts within the department and then working with ASMB on the implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act. When I returned to my teaching position in the fall of 1998, for two years I continued to spend a day a week as a consultant with ASMB. In addition, through grants from the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government, I was able to write two monographs on management issues during the Shalala regime in the department.

The combined experiences within the department gave me an appreciation of the challenges faced by a cabinet secretary who attempts to deal with the multiple accountability expectations imposed on him or her by nearly every possible interest group and constituency I could imagine. I felt that much of the literature on cabinet officers and on accountability minimized the cacophony of voices and demands aimed at the secretary. I wanted to present a picture of this job that would give readers a sense of the complexity implicit in the role.