Performance doesn't always pay

Recent debate over the pay-for-performance plan proves that little will change after the May 4 council elections

Today’s college students have a cute term to explain away their lack of preparation, and resulting poor performance, on exams. The call it the “Big Oopsy.”

It seems a number of current and potential members of Roanoke City Council believe in the “Big Oopsy” as much as my students.

On April 17, The Roanoke Times posed a question to council candidates concerning low police morale. Many directly linked, or alluded to, the disastrous pay-for-performance plan implemented by City Manager Darlene Burcham as the primary cause of police officer job dissatisfaction. Several wanted to get rid of this innovative pay plan altogether.

Their responses were understandable. But wrong. Numerous research studies show that pay-for-performance plans work well when properly designed and implemented. This research also shows that successful innovations improve work performance and increase job satisfaction. In a book I wrote several years ago on this topic, such plans worked in Baltimore County and Indianapolis, Ind.

As I wrote in a column several weeks ago (“Requiem for the city manager”), the problem with this new pay plan in Roanoke was in the design of the intervention.

These same design flaws are glaringly evident elsewhere. In a series of peer-reviewed journal articles covering an 8-year period (1994-2002) published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration, I accurately predicted that a pay-for-performance plan would fail in the Virginia Department of Transportation because of the same poor design features that characterized the Roanoke plan. That fiasco cost Virginia taxpayers millions of wasted dollars and alienated the majority of VDOT workers.

In Roanoke, much of the blame should go to the city manager. Yet, council members are also part of the problem. They approve the city manager’s policies but provide no intelligent oversight once those policies are implemented. It’s easy for council members to point at the city manager, but they are public stewards, too, and should also be held accountable for such administrative blunders.

It’s time to end city council’s “Big Oopsy” excuse when it comes to the efficient management of Roanoke.

Council members depend on the city manager’s expertise when approving management policy. However, because most members of council don’t have any professional knowledge or experience in managing complex public organizations, they are easily co-opted by the city manager. When policies they have approved fail, council members then can make the city manager the scapegoat. This usually occurs at election time. They want to be rid of the whole mess and pretend they were never part of the policymaking and budgetary process.

Roanoke City Council should, in the words of Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, become “investment-centered” at the inception of the city manager’s proposals. They should bring in their own independent experts to provide them with an understanding about costly proposals submitted by the city manager. Council members would gain a contextual knowledge, working background and different perspective of the management proposals. They would then become true partners, as opposed to rubber stamps.

The Congressional Budget Office plays this vital role for the U.S. Congress. This nonpartisan group does not make policy recommendations, but prepares analyses and estimates relating to the budget and economy for Congress to consider. Otherwise, congressional budget committees would produce self-serving economic projections and the full Congress would have no counterweight to either challenge or support projected assumptions. The CBO allows congressional members to become informed players in the budgetary process.

Until 2002, C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger was the county executive in Baltimore County. In 1994, he implemented a pay-for-performance program that was so successful it was listed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The success of the pay/performance venture led to a second program: pay-for-knowledge. Two years ago, Ruppersberger successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. His platform was a track record of efficient governmental operations in Baltimore County.

The success of Ruppersberger’s pay plans was no fluke. He brought in experts to train his entire human resources staff in pay/performance strategies. He designated one employee to be the “policy entrepreneur” for the county. That person’s job was to develop the expertise to advise him (and his executive staff) on design and implementation of the plan and to answer questions about the process from taxpayers, interest groups, politicians and the media. Ruppersberger also made the unions co-partners in the process.

We don’t have leaders on city council with the vision and knowledge of a Dutch Ruppersberger. Most of the people now running for council are single-issue candidates.

Kanter describes them as “segmentalists” who only see part of the problem and feel no need to worry about the other part. Segmentalism leads to the type of over-specification that has long been a hallmark of Roanoke’s city council.

Failed policies, wasted resources, unresponsive government and dissatisfied city workers are the end result. If council members knew what they were talking about, they wouldn’t be micro-managing the city. Instead, they could take on the oversight responsibility that is an integral part of the checks and balances that ensure efficient public management. There is no checks-and-balance process between the council and the city manager.

A political maxim is that “people get the leaders they deserve.” As a taxpayer in Roanoke, I believe I deserve a more informed leadership on the city council.

Yet from what I’ve seen and heard, it will be business as usual in City Hall after the May elections.

That means more “Big Oopsy.”