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Terry Gerton Being an agency deputy secretary is a tough job. As the chief operating officer, this person is the essential link in the agency performance chain. But they also face unique dynamics that can make operational effectiveness a real challenge. A new paper from McKinsey offers some suggestions, and two of the authors are here to discuss their recommendations. I’m joined by Scott Blackburn, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Washington, D.C. office, and Jesse Salazar, an adviser for McKinsey. Scott and Jesse, thank you both for joining me. You’ve got a new paper out on the importance of deputy secretaries. Let’s start with a little background. Scott, how is the Trump administration coming in filling these really important positions?
Scott Blackburn The deputy secretary is absolutely critical. It’s the COO of the agency and getting the deputy secretary in as quickly as possible, as early in the administration is absolutely important. Right now the Trump administration has nominated almost all deputies, and probably about 60% to 70% of the major administration deputies are in place now.
Terry Gerton Is that having any impact on how quickly they get the various agencies up to speed?
Scott Blackburn It absolutely is. And I think they’re still in the “storming and norming” phase. You know, it’s a lot to take on when you’re entering a new organization, you’re learning the organization, you’re trying to get things done quickly, trying to runs on the board. It is drinking from the fire hose early on, and that’s the stage that most deputies are going through right now.
Terry Gerton Well, Jesse, the paper makes the point that the deputy position may be one of the most important in the federal management structure. What do you say that their significant responsibilities are?
Jesse Salazar So as the COO of the department, deputies oversee almost all of the major management functions of an agency: procurement, contracting, technology, and personnel, of course, which is really critical to execution. And so in this role, overseeing operations, they really focus on taking any policy idea and making it meaningful through implementation.
Terry Gerton A lot of hats that they wear. They’re often the performance management officer, they’re the performance improvement officer, they have all kinds of responsibilities. How do they integrate all of those?
Jesse Salazar It’s challenging. It’s a very challenging task because they typically have small staffs. They rely on the secretary’s staff as well as the agency sub-directors and directors or undersecretaries to implement these various functions. But even something like the budget requires significant time and attention from a deputy secretary because it has implications for every aspect of how a department is run.
Terry Gerton Scott, the paper offers five different strategies for managing large federal agencies and for deputies to consider to make their function or their performance most effective. What are they?
Scott Blackburn Well, the first one is aligning your role, then building your operating model, setting up the front office, mastering the budget, and shaping the culture. And to start with aligning your role: In most cases, the secretary does not pick their own deputy. So very quickly, you need to build a team, right, between the secretary, the deputy, the chief of staff. And aligning on your role and setting your agenda and what are you actually going to accomplish and how you spend your time is absolutely critical. Sometimes there’s things that you have to do, they’re mandated by law. Some things you have do because it’s the president’s priority or the secretary’s priority that you have to do. And then there’s also room for, you’re coming and serving federal government. This is your one shot to really make a difference in a key role in a key agency. What do you want to tell your grandkids? What are those things that you want to be your legacy, that you want to say, look, when I had a chance, I took a shot and I made a difference. And how you squeeze those things into only 100% of time is absolutely critical. So that’s aligning your role.
Terry Gerton Just to think about that for a minute, as the secretary doesn’t get to pick their deputy and the deputy may not know exactly when they’re coming in or who they’re going to work with, how does that team — the secretary, the deputy, and the chief of staff — get together and think this through? Do they have an opportunity to do that prior to confirmation?
Scott Blackburn Very little prior to confirmation, and it’s often awkward for the deputy because the secretary is in place already. They’re trying to get things done. They’re feeling performance pressure. They’re dealing with Congress and White House and press and different stakeholders. So by the time the deputy gets in there, the secretary usually turns to him or her and says, thanks for being here, I’ve already been here trying to this stuff. The train’s already kind of going. So, setting your agenda, getting to know the organization, begin gelling as a team with the secretary and starting to take that step back of, how do we actually work together? If you don’t do it deliberately, it sometimes leads to kind of a rocky start.
Terry Gerton Jesse, Scott here has mentioned aligning your role. What do you think the second-most important one is?
Jesse Salazar It’s building a team. Making sure that you have advisors who can help you navigate the building. Most successful deputy secretaries immediately find a career civil servant to come and help them translate the building and understand the architecture, where the walls are, where the plumbing is in the building, so that they can then fill it with the policy ideas and the implementation priorities of the administration.
Terry Gerton This administration’s not been a big fan of career civil servants. How do you think the deputies are going to take that step?
Jesse Salazar I think all deputies, regardless of what is said in the media, have to embrace best management practices when thinking about how to lead in these organizations. And sometimes the priorities of deputy secretaries get chosen by the needs of the building. So you might need to do a modernization of a finance system. You might need embrace cloud computing. You might to deal with a cybersecurity crisis. So deputies need to make sure that they have the right people in place to be able lead on big initiatives that are affecting sprawling, large organizations.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Scott Blackburn. He’s a senior partner in McKinsey’s Washington, D.C. office. And Jesse Salazar is an advisor at McKinsey. All right, Scott, back to you. Jesse’s just started to talk about these cross-government priorities that are going to be important for the deputy. The deputy’s counsel is a big piece of a deputy secretary’s responsibility because the interagency is so important. How does the paper address those sorts of concerns?
Scott Blackburn Well, we spoke to 12 prior deputies, and I myself was a deputy for Secretary Shulkin back in 2017 at the VA. One of the things that we found is it can be lonely at the top. And having a common network of other deputies that you tend to meet through the President’s Management Council, at least in the first time. But having them on speed dial, having that, “hey, here’s where we can actually collaborate.” I remember meeting with the Department of Energy, for example, on the Million Veteran Project and around cancer research in which we were using their supercomputers and being able to kind of create those connections. I was the chair of the JEC, as an example, which is a committee between the DOD and the VA where they collaborate on healthcare and benefits and military-to-civilian transition. Establishing those relationships to get things done between the silos of the organizations has to be a top priority of every deputy.
Terry Gerton And Jesse, your experience as a DASD in DOD.
Jesse Salazar One of the things that was so interesting to me about this research, when we sat down and spoke with deputy secretaries, so many of them said that they hadn’t invested early on in the interagency. They didn’t know the deputy secretaries in the other places. They were going to meet them in the meeting room instead of having a relationship that they could draw on to do the informal work of Washington that gets things done. And so one of the prime pieces of advice I have is that these new deputies should invest early on in the interagency-deputy secretary relationships.
Terry Gerton And so how does that relationship across deputies help each one of them with their decision-making processes inside their agency, Scott?
Scott Blackburn I think sharing those best practices and how people are getting things done through others is an art of every kind of deputy. And just understanding how other organizations are able to do that is absolutely critical.
Terry Gerton Jesse, the paper makes some suggestions for deputies going forward. If they’re reading this, what do you hope they take away?
Jesse Salazar I think the first thing is to really understand how to build alignment with their secretary and with the chief of staff, because those two other stakeholders are really critical for success. Having clarity on where the deputy will lead, where the secretary will lead and where the chief of the staff will lead allows for the organization to get strong signals. Because when they hear that priority resonated in multiple places, it reinforces its importance. And then secondly, I would say that they really should focus on two to three top priorities. So be very clear to the organization what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to measure, using data and accountability against those priorities. And in some cases, these are big things like improving cybersecurity or modernizing technology. And in other cases, they’re very specific policy orientations.
Terry Gerton Scott, I want to piggyback on Jesse’s comments there because the paper also talks about performance management and performance metrics related to some of those big goals. But it also talks a little bit about what we used to call management by walking around. How does a deputy balance those two things?
Scott Blackburn I think two quick stories on that. On the management by walking around, I remember one thing that Beth Cobert, and she was one of the 12 deputies, but she once gave me the advice of “play away games.” Because if everybody is coming to your office, you don’t actually understand what’s going on. So play away games. Go as a deputy, go have meetings in their offices, see what their workspace is around. Talk to the people. And figure out what is actually going on, and are you getting something that is filtered? Another example was from Sloan Gibson at VA. You can get overwhelmed with just the amount of stuff that is on your plate when you’re in the senior role as the deputy. And Sloan took on six priorities that he wanted to get done. He spent one hour problem-solving with the team every other week. That’s only three hours a week. Then an hour and a half every week coordinating across those in the senior management team, and a half-hour prep meeting that he and I and Bob McDonald and our chief of staff, Rob Neighbors and Bob Snyder all did together. And that’s five hours a week to drive six priorities that became his legacy, that he just needed to carve out and prioritize over all the other incoming that he had to deal with. And setting that discipline around driving your priorities is imperative to getting things done.
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