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EPA management
Q: Were there any particularly effective managers or management styles that you saw in operation?
MR. COSTLE: I have seen a lot of different management styles work in different contexts. For instance, Dave Hawkins was very effective, but his style was entirely different from Tom Jorling's -- which was also very effective. Tom led by being a very dynamic, charging person, and people just wanted to be around that bright light. There was an intensity about it. David was much more cerebral, laid-back, but he brought about fundamental re-thinking in the air program. Two totally different styles and both equally effective. So I don't think there is any one style.
I do think that administrators at that level of government have to be very conscious of managing their time. You have to understand the competing demands on your time, and you have to make choices. The more thoughtful you can be about that before you suddenly find yourself on the fast track, the better off you are. It's pretty hard to set priorities as you go along daily.
I had to force myself, rigorously, to say, "What do I want to be able to point to a year from now as an accomplishment? I am going to get my share of crises and midnight oil. But are there systematic things I want to get done, and how do I measure my own progress?" Each year I would write a note to myself, setting my goals out. Then at the end of the year I would review it and say, "I didn't get that one done; I did better than I thought on this one."
This became something I felt even more strongly about as time went on, because of the competing demands on my time. It is not enough to be just a good manager who hires good people and turns them loose. Government service is not like that. You have got to build time into nurturing your relationships with the White House, OMB, the rest of the executive branch. You have got to have enough time for the Hill. You have got to have time to get out and explain to the hundreds of interest groups what you are trying to do.
It is really almost a hopelessly large job to do really well. Not only do you need a real sense of discipline about your time; your assistant administrators need to have the same kind of disciplined focus. Every year, I'd sit down with each of them and ask, "What do you want to get done this year? What are the foreseeable crises going to be? What role do you want me to play?"
I make this sound much more orderly now than it was but, actually, underneath all the surface crises, there was a fair amount of that structure. I had learned this management focus at the State level, but it was a whole different world at the federal level. After I had spent a half-hour with a State senator, we would develop a relationship. You can't do that with a member of Congress, or with the number of members that you have to deal with. Washington imposes a much more institutional, formal set of relationships that takes much more work.
Q: You would create short-term or ad hoc work groups. What role did they play in your administration, first of all? Second, do they or can they take the place of reorganization?
MR. COSTLE: They certainly can. If you really want to change thinking, then you have got to find a way to include the permanent bureaucracy. But you need to create an environment that forces them to consider other ideas and ways of doing things. We often used the Science Advisory Board for that. Once the internal staff came to realize that they weren't expected to have all the answers and that they could get help from other people, it was -- I think -- liberating.
You can't run a government by ad hocracy, but there is going to be a certain amount of ad hocracy in every successful government. Many problems cut across jurisdictional lines, and you need an ad hoc group to deal with them. I think structured outside advice is a great tool. But you have got to be careful in seeking it. You can't strip agency staff of their sense of ownership or of responsibility. It is how you seek advice that matters as much as anything. I thought the more of a reputation EPA got for consulting widely, the better. It would provide an antidote to EPA's growing reputation as a very insular bureaucracy. I felt that we could not afford this. We had to be, and to be seen to be, open and flexible and receptive to other ideas. We were still going to be criticized; there was no way to avoid it. But I thought that a very important antidote to that criticism was to reach out and talk to people.