Public-Sector Succession: A Strategic Approach to Sustaining Innovation

Abstract

Is it possible to think strategically about succession in the public sector? The author reviews the private-sector succession literature for insight and analyzes the barriers in the public sector to taking succession seriously. With a case study based on her own experience managing succession at the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice, she offers four strategies that the public sector leader who is committed to a strategic approach to succession might usefully employ. In the public and private sectors alike, demand for change is the one constant. There is a loud call for leaders who can accommodate change personally and who can initiate and drive broad changes in their organizations. These demands make sense but raise a troubling issue. By relentlessly insisting on change, are we risking the loss of innovations recently realized? This is a particularly salient question for public-sector agencies, which are currently under attack from all sides. In this article, I assert that while change must be on the agenda of any public agency for its very survival as well as for the public good, it is just as important to ensure that gains achieved in one administration be given a fair assessment and not be jettisoned, without review, to the god of change. Indeed, the importance of -- essentially keeping change alive -- is an increasing challenge for public agencies.(1) Will innovative programs created as a response to social problems be allowed to live out their natural lives, or will they be killed off before their time, independent of performance and outcomes? This issue is particularly acute in the transition between elected or appointed government officials -- especially in a highly politicized environment that limits government's capacity to continue efforts across administrations. Moreover, one critical tool available to the private sector, succession planning, is rarely used by public agencies because the executives fortunes are generally tied to a particular administration. Many public-sector leaders have devised strategies for continuing efforts across administrations. Some establish support beyond the government, for example, from the business community or other local elites; some obtain early bipartisan political support. Still others avoid program demise by identifying a champion linked to the incoming administration so as to have a voice inside, or by creating wide support within the agency (and other agencies) so that the new governor or mayor hears a consistent message. Finally, some administrators have succeeded in winning national recognition for their innovations so that discontinuing them is a perceived political risk. As important as these approaches are, innovations also can be sustained by cabinet secretaries or agency heads engaging in succession planning, even though these people are as vulnerable to shifting political winds as their superiors. In fact, this level, where so much actual and potential innovation resides, represents a real opportunity for both preserving innovations and transferring them to subsequent regimes -- provided the agency heads can, and will, extend their strategic vision beyond their own tenure. It is no longer sufficient to achieve change, difficult as it may be. The public-sector leader must learn to consider not only what can be but what will be, how what is achieved can be sustained. This requires future-oriented strategic thinking, which I argue must include attention to succession planning. Succession planning done well involves preparing the agency for a change in leadership, but it also includes assessing what has been valuable and how that can be preserved and transferred to the subsequent regime. It is this strategic, sustaining innovation aspect of succession planning that I focus on in this article. First, I shall look at how research on succession in the private sector is both helpful and hindering for public-sector succession planning, especially in the realm of sustaining innovation. …

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