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Management style
Q: How would you define your management style?
MR. REILLY: My management style was to work very hard to ensure that I had the right people in the right jobs and that they understood me and how I like to proceed. I believe very strongly in loyalty and in openness. I have no patience whatever for back-biting or for staff working at cross purposes with each other. I think conflict within an institution that itself is subject to a lot of exterior pressure and criticism can be very costly. The friction costs of having a son-of-a-bitch on the staff are very high and almost never worth it, no matter how good the son-of-a-bitch, so I try to weed them out. I like personal congeniality and smarts. I really value frankness. I try to make it painless for people to bring bad news to the boss and I often ask questions to elicit it, to see if there is any, even if it's not brought to me.
I believe in delegation - really believe in it. I think that people ought to be allowed to make mistakes and if they're good, they'll learn from them. An Agency as large as EPA, if it does not delegate, will become very slow to make decisions and actions. To the extent that decisions funnel up to the top, they will get focus and high-level attention and maybe eventually priority, but they will also require time. There is no way that you can put that many decisions on the plate of an Administrator and expect the daily lives of Americans to benefit from prompt solutions to their problems. I believe that with respect to the Regional Administrators as well. I was a little surprised, frankly, to find the degree of delegation at EPA when I got there. It is one of the most decentralized agencies of the Federal government. Since you're dealing with so many location-specific problems, that is probably inevitable, but it is unusual. It used to be upsetting to some other agency heads or Congressmen who didn't quite understand that a decision that they wanted to influence would be made in the field. They didn't understand why I just wouldn't pick up the phone and order that something be done in a certain way. Well, if you respected the structure that we had, you had to trust it to produce the right consequences. Generally speaking, I did and didn't interfere that much, other than to ensure that the right criteria and priorities were being applied and the processes being respected in the field.
There were exceptions to that. I reversed my Regional Administrator on the Two Forks Dam. I also withdrew authority from my Regional Administrator in Chicago to oversee wetlands implementation in the state of Michigan where I thought more discretion should have been given to the one state to which that authority had been delegated. Those were rare decisions, quite unpopular in their regions - in some quarters of their regions. Reaction among the Denver Region staff to my action on Two Forks Dam actually was mixed. There were a lot of EPA staff in Denver who thought that was the right decision, but there were some who certainly didn't.
Finally, I believe in a clear exposition of purposes and priorities, to focus energies and to ensure coherence. It's also vital to morale and Agency effectiveness for everyone to understand what the key objectives are. I think my own management style is one of trying to create a sense of purpose and significance and even excitement and hoping that that will be infectious. Trying to dignify the effort which, after all, if you're protecting peoples' health and their ecology, shouldn't be that difficult. And then, letting good people get on with their work. I necessarily had to protect them from the Congress or the White House from time to time and didn't mind that; they were worthy of it.