What Government Selects for in Leadership: Thoughts on the SES

 

In the late 1950s, Soviet geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began breeding silver foxes based largely on how they responded to people. An experiment in Darwinian pacification. Foxes that showed the least fear and aggression were selected to reproduce. Within several generations, some began approaching caretakers, wagging their tails, and displaying other behaviors associated with domesticated animals. The broader scientific claims remain debated, but the experiment still demonstrates a narrower point: sustained selection pressure can change the character of a population.

Organizations also create selection pressure. They do not change people genetically, of course, but they determine which behaviors are rewarded, which people are promoted, and which traits gradually become common among their leaders. Over time, an organization gets more of what it selects for, whether it intends to or not.

The federal government is no exception. Many career senior executives are selected only after years of observation and evaluation in the lower ranks of an agency. The formal process evaluates executive qualifications, competence, and professional accomplishments. The informal process also teaches aspiring executives which behaviors help a career, and which ones bring it to a stop.

What often gets rewarded is not rebellion or experimentation. It is reliability, agreeability, institutional loyalty, a flexible worldview, and an ability to keep difficult situations from becoming crises. Successful candidates learn to preserve their options, accommodate changing political leadership, and finesse the rough edges of decisions made above them. They become skilled at keeping the machinery running without creating unnecessary conflict.

In and of itself, none of this is bad. The federal government needs continuity, institutional memory, and leaders who understand that a change affecting millions of people should not be made casually. Innovation is not automatically progress. An executive who asks what might go wrong before changing a payment system, dismantling an organization, or replacing proven technology is not resisting change. That executive may be protecting the public from a poorly understood risk.

Federal executives also operate under pressures that do not exist in most private organizations. Congress may demand immediate action while withholding stable funding or providing conflicting direction. Political appointees may want visible results within the short life of an administration, while career executives must live with the consequences long after those officials have left. Procurement rules, appropriations law, inspectors general, litigation, unions, auditors, the press, and congressional oversight can each turn a failed experiment into a career-ending event.

The incentives are therefore uneven. Money does not make the pain go away. An executive who preserves a flawed system may face years of criticism, but an executive whose attempted reform disrupts benefits, compromises sensitive data, or violates a statutory requirement may face an investigation, a congressional hearing, or removal. Successful prevention is largely invisible because the feared outcome never occurs. Failure is public, attributable, and often permanent. Under those conditions, caution is not simply a personality trait. It is a rational response to the environment.

The problem comes when the system over-selects for stability. Caution becomes the dominant definition of judgment. Delay becomes deliberation. Preserving the existing system becomes more valuable than asking whether the system still works. The organization becomes very good at maintaining the steady state and finessing its rough edges, but much less capable of changing direction when that steady state is no longer sustainable.

This matters because the Senior Executive Service was not created merely to produce senior subject-matter experts. Congress established the SES to strengthen executive management, hold executives accountable for results, and provide flexibility in how senior leaders are assigned and used. OPM has similarly described the goal as a “corporate SES” with a government-wide perspective that extends beyond one agency, program, or profession.

In practice, many SES positions have become the final promotion for successful specialists. Someone spends a career mastering disability policy, procurement, information technology, finance, human resources, law, or another discipline. That expertise is valuable and may be essential to the mission. Yet technical mastery does not automatically prepare someone to manage an unfamiliar organization, balance competing enterprise risks, or lead a workforce through major change.

The result is a senior executive corps containing many people who know one part of government extraordinarily well but cannot necessarily perform any major executive job placed on the table. They know their program, its history, its stakeholders, and its internal politics. They may not know how to run the entire enterprise or challenge the assumptions upon which their own program was built. The government has often treated the SES as a collection of elevated specialists when it was supposed to be a corps of adaptable executive leaders.

That does not mean every senior executive should be a generalist. Some positions genuinely require deep legal, scientific, medical, technical, or national-security expertise. Government would be weaker without people who understand the substance beneath the management charts. The failure is not specialization itself. The failure is pretending that technical expertise and enterprise leadership are the same capability, then using a single promotion structure to recognize both.

This selection process has also contributed to the reputation that career senior executives are sycophants. That label is generally unfair. During nearly 20 years in government, I worked with many career executives who were serious public servants. I watched people quietly protect employees, preserve lawful processes, slow down reckless decisions, and give political leaders advice they did not want to hear.

What looks like personal loyalty from the outside is often an attempt to preserve institutional influence. A career executive may conclude that remaining in the room is more valuable than making a dramatic objection and being removed from the discussion. Agreement may actually be negotiation. Compliance with the final decision may follow weeks of argument that employees and the public never see.

The difficulty is that quiet resistance and personal submission can look exactly alike from outside the room. Employees see the directive that ultimately reaches them. They do not see the options that were rejected, the damage that was prevented, or the lines an executive refused to cross. When senior leaders repeatedly adapt to the person above them without explaining the principles guiding their decisions, a reputation for sycophancy becomes understandable even when it is wrong.

The problem is therefore not that the SES is filled with weak or dishonest people. The problem is that the system rewards behaviors that can become indistinguishable from obedience. Those qualities may help an executive survive several administrations, but they do not always prepare that executive to lead transformation. When an institution faces technological disruption, declining public confidence, workforce losses, or an unsustainable operating model, preservation is no longer enough.

Reform should begin by recognizing that government needs both executive leaders and senior experts. Technical specialists should have a respected, well-compensated career path that does not require turning them into general managers. SES positions should be reserved primarily for people who can lead across functions, manage unfamiliar problems, and accept responsibility for enterprise results. The government already has senior-level and scientific or professional classifications that could support a more honest distinction, but agencies must use them deliberately.

Candidates for the SES should also be required to demonstrate breadth before appointment. A future executive should lead outside his or her home program, serve in both mission and support organizations, and complete a meaningful external assignment elsewhere in the agency or government on a rotational basis every 7 years. OPM’s development framework already values rotations and experience beyond a candidate’s profession. The requirement should become a central part of executive preparation rather than a box checked through a short detail. One CDP rotation to an external agency, and a few internal transfers are no longer a good enough standard.

Selection should test judgment, not simply the ability to tell a polished success story. Candidates should be placed in realistic exercises involving incomplete information, an unreasonable demand from above, competing legal and operational risks, and employees who disagree with the proposed direction. Evaluators should examine and reward whether candidates ask hard questions, explain risk honestly, make a decision, and accept responsibility for the consequences. The system should select for principled judgment under pressure, not simply for familiarity with the language of executive qualifications.

Performance plans should reward disciplined innovation, cross-organizational results, talent development, and candor with leadership. Executives should not be punished simply because a controlled pilot failed. A well-designed experiment that produces useful evidence may provide more value than another year of preserving an ineffective process. Accountability should distinguish between an intelligent risk that did not succeed and a careless decision that ignored known consequences.

Reform must also address the pressures surrounding the SES. Agencies need protected space for controlled experimentation, clear legal guidance, stable funding for multiyear reforms, and agreed measures of success before a project begins. Congress and inspectors general should continue demanding accountability, but they should distinguish between misconduct and a good-faith effort that produced an unexpected result. Political leaders should be required to acknowledge the risks they accept rather than leaving career executives to carry sole responsibility when a political decision fails.

Political leaders also have responsibilities. No executive-selection system can produce candor if agency heads punish every messenger who delivers bad news. Career executives should implement the lawful policy choices of an elected administration, but their loyalty must remain rooted in the Constitution, the law, the public, and the agency mission—not in the personality of an individual leader. Political officials who want honest advice must demonstrate that disagreement offered in good faith will be heard rather than treated as disloyalty.

The answer is not to purge the SES, strip away career protections, or replace experienced executives with political loyalists. That would intensify the very selection pressure we should be trying to correct. It would reward personal obedience, drive out institutional knowledge, and make honest advice even more dangerous. Reform should strengthen accountability while preserving the independence required to provide lawful, professional advice.

The federal government gets more of what it promotes. For decades, it has often promoted specialists who preserve stability, manage conflict, and smooth the implementation of decisions made above them. Those capabilities remain valuable, but they are not sufficient. If government wants innovation, enterprise leadership, and principled courage, it must begin selecting, developing, protecting, and rewarding people who demonstrate those traits.