For those of you are are thinking of becoming a political appointee or wonder about the process, it is worth reading.

In December, 2008, I wrote a column about what I learned from personally being a political appointee in President Bush’s Administration for FedScoop, http://fedscoop.com/2008/12/lessons-from-a-political-cio/.

I thought it might be useful to repeat it here:

“As one of the chief information officers who was politically appointed and thus will be out of a job January 20, 2009, I have been reflecting on the lessons learned that I might pass on to the CIOs who will have a chance to serve in the next administration. Perhaps a few of these thoughts may be useful to any political appointee.

I mention six of them here. I suspect given time I could come up with many more.

First, respect, reach out, and work with the career staff that report to you at the agency you serve. You will find them dedicated, caring, competent, and tremendously hard-working. You will learn much from them, and it will be only with their support that you have an opportunity to accomplish great things.

One of the real values that a political appointee can bring is to provide broad-based support (“high air cover”) for those career staff who want to cause change but are not empowered to do so. When you can use your connections to the departmental political leadership to provide that support, take advantage of those relationships.

Second, remember that political appointees can never speak in a whisper. A truly wonderful professor, Shelley Metzenbaum of the University of Maryland, who has done work supporting the Department of Transportation, provided me that insight. I have never forgotten it though sadly not always kept in mind. The point is that I have found that most career staff very much want to be as supportive as they can. However, if you are not clear in what you want accomplished, or if you are like me and think out loud, you will unintentionally provide inconsistent and confusing direction, especially until your staff gets used to how you operate.

Third, participate in the various groups that exist within the government to allow the exchange of information. These include the federal CIO Council and perhaps more importantly the committees associated with the Council. Also participate in those groups set up to allow information interchange between the Government and their partners including ACT/IAC, AFFIRM, ITAA/AEA/GEIA, and NAPA. If nothing else, you can learn what all of these abbreviations and acronyms mean and be entertaining at cocktail parties and other events. By attending and perhaps speaking at these meetings, you will meet truly interesting people who will provide advice that will make your job easier.

Fourth, learn to accept that you will not get everything done, and therefore make the hard decision to prioritize. If you have never been in public service before you will find that unlike the private sector where the goals are fairly simple and the stakeholders relatively consistent in their interests, the opposite is true in government. Private company goals are generally to make more revenue and/or reduce expenses. In the public environment, the goals are less distinct and more complex. Your many bosses on the Hill, in the White House, among the public, and within your own organization often will provide contradictory and ever-changing direction. Try telling a congressional committee or the inspector general that their issue was a low priority and let me know how that goes for you.

Fifth, reach upward as much as you can. The CIO position within government is often or even completely focused downward toward technology optimization. While this is important, the real value you bring is in enhancing your organization’s mission by looking upward. One clear emphasis of the next administration — on social networking and the use of the Internet — will provide new opportunities to make IT useful in enhancing the interaction of the government with the American citizen and other key external stakeholders. Seize the opportunity to be supportive of such efforts — become an Internet gardener.

Sixth, and finally, have fun. I can honestly say that the last two-plus years have been the most enjoyable and rewarding time I have ever had as a professional. I would not have traded one minute — well maybe one or two — for anything. You will have the opportunity to have great consequence at a place that itself has great consequence for the American public. Enjoy it and pass on that feeling to all you work with.”

A student wrote:

“Who has time to share information? Codifying one’s knowledge can be a very time intensive task. While many people share their knowledge via blogs, wiki’s and other such tools, getting individuals who are already overburdened to do this can be a challenge.  I’ve seen organizations try to force its employees to do this kind of thing resulting in very shallow products.”

From this conversation, I started to consider how this relates to some of the work my company, Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com, has been doing with knowledge management. It seemed to me that in the end in the simplest sense knowledge management like information sharing solutions are all built upon the foundation of tagging information in a fashion that allows retrieval.

In the interactions I have had with Jeff Jonas, http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/, one of the smartest people I have met who studies all of this, he has impressed on me the importance of tagging information when it is ingested. Doing so afterwards is something liking trying to add the Dewey Decimal coding to a book after you put it on the shelf in the library. It would take so long to find the untagged books you typically wouldn’t get around to it.

If I can digress for a moment, and since this is my blog I guess I can write anything I want anyway I want to, while I was at the Department of Transportation and while watching what Vivek Kundra is trying to do with dashboards, I have pondered a similar issue – what tends to make some performance measurement systems and dashboards successful and some not.

I have come to believe that those dashboards whose metrics are automatically generated by the performance of the action being measured have a greater chance of surviving over time. The reason is that whenever an intermediate step is needed to generate the dashboard entries, organizations have many reasons to reassign or eliminate altogether the resources used to perform the intermediate step. Thus useful and even pretty successful measurement systems often last only as long as their sponsor stays and stays engaged.

So the common thread would be that the ‘sharing’ and ingesting into the knowledge management system, that is the tagging, should be accomplished when the information is created.

Looking specifically at knowledge management implementations that I am familiar with, most do the knowledge management part after, and often long after, the knowledge creation. The question then becomes whether it is necessary, or practical, to move tagging and ingesting to the actual knowledge creation.

I am sure experts in the field already know the answer to these questions, but if so, they often don’t seem to have sufficient impact on the large number of unsuccessful knowledge management implementations.

For most of my professional career I did not particularly think about the differences between management and leadership. I was not in a position where it mattered particularly; I was always ‘in the room’.

Generally I was either managing a single large program generally customer facing or managing people who themselves were managing single large programs. The way one achieved results was to use the importance of the program, either due to the importance of the customer or the size of the program, to leverage the rest of the organization I was working for.

“You need to listen to what I am asking”, a typical interaction would occur, “This is worth $100 million to us this year.” Few had the nerve to say no at that point.

When the projects were small it generally meant the other part of the conversation WOULD have the nerve to say no.

As the years passed, I was given additional responsibilities and had to learn to prioritize and help my staff prioritize better, but fundamentally had the same kinds of responsibilities.

In early 2006, I was appointed the CIO for the US Department of Transportation. Suddenly I was in a situation where I had hundreds of people reporting to me directly and thousands who I had at least nominal impact on through the myriad policy responsibilities that a Departmental CIO was responsible for.

I had sort of very faint dotted line relationships to all of the DOT agency CIO’s, created by the Clinger-Cohen Act, which established what I refer to as the negative authorities of CIO’s. By negative authorities I mean the Act gave CIO’s the authority to prevent results, for example not agreeing to a budget submission, but much less power to implement results, for example, without Department or Agency specific legislation or implementing authority, a CIO couldn’t consolidate or modify the resulting budget.

My ability to get things done was almost completely dependent, not on managing a project, but on providing leadership, whatever that was, to get people to do what I wanted without the direct ability to tell them to do it.

Now that I serve as the Chief Operating Officer at Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com, while a bit smaller than the Department of Transportation, I still have the same issue of having indirect impact.

Having thought about this a lot over the last almost five years, I have come to five thoughts that provide me with some direction as to how be a good leader, or being perhaps a bit more realistic, to be as good a leader as I can be.

THE NARRATIVE. In my opinion the best leaders are storytellers. They explain how they want people to behave and what values are important to them by telling stories of behavior illustrating those values and actions. It amazes me how often I find out that the stories I have told are repeated to others. Amazed and pleased.

If you have read biographies of President Lincoln you will read how many anecdotes he told.

Even people who do not consciously or explicitly do this, they still are conveying a narrative about themselves and what they expect from others. How often they talk about their family, what they wear, the jokes they tell (or don’t tell), how they deal with people, whether they raise their voice or not, and so on.

NIGHT AND DAY. If you are in a leadership position everything you do and how you do it is watched and analyzed. It all becomes part of that narrative thing, whether you like it to or not or intend it to or not.

My father-in-law, a wonderful person I have been very lucky to get to know, used to tell me when he was President of a manufacturing company in Michigan, that when he was feeling sick and acted that way around the office, this impacted negatively the work of everyone at the plant. At first this surprised him, but over time he came to understand how important how he acted every day was.

About a year after I started at DOT, a young woman who worked for me asked for a meeting. When she came in she told me that she had heard that I was in a good mood and thus wanted to go over some difficult issues that she needed to be resolved. I reflected on the fact that never before in my business life had anyone cared about what mood I was in, or generally noticed.

I reached out to a wonderful person, Shelley Metzenbaum, who is now an appointee within OMB, who gave me advice about being a political appointee at DOT. Shelley told me “Political appointees are unable to talk in a whisper.” Wise advice. Over time I have come to recognize that this advice is true for all people in very senior positions in any organization.

BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL. My final comment about narratives is to emphasize that the most important aspect of the narrative is to be true to who you are. Over time people can tell if you aren’t. The rare exceptions being if you are an extraordinary actor or a professional politician. When people detect a false note, everything else you say or do will be much less likely to be paid attention to.

I have read many books about leadership which provide lots of advice on how to act. All the advice in the world is of limited value if it is inconsistent with your nature. Understand yourself and go with that.

ROADRUNNER VERSUS COYOTE. I tell people who work for me that sometimes you have to go running off the cliff without knowing if you are the Roadrunner or the Coyote, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUq9hynzCVo, and not knowing how far down the ground is.

If you want people to attempt great things and run off cliffs for you, you need to be there to catch them and not blame them for trying. Toleration for the occasional failure is a characteristic to me of great leadership.

EMPATHY, NOT SYMPATHY. I read somewhere that leaders needed to show empathy, but not necessarily sympathy.

What I take that to mean is that it is important to understand the motivations of the people who work for you. You want to use those motivations to support your goals. You double the level of energy by having people working toward your objectives both to support you and to achieve their own goals.

At the same time, you have obligations to the entire organization, not just one person within it. Sometimes you are able to scratch individual itches, but often you cannot or at least not in the way that the individual might like.

TREAT PEOPLE WITH RESPECT. I say frequently that people will never act better than they are treated.

If you treat them poorly, not sharing information or objectives, just ordering them around, not empowering them in any fashion, most will act just like they are treated and no more. To have a successful organization you need people to take ownership of their responsibilities.

IN SUMMARY. So there you have it my five rules of leadership, reworded slightly:

• Understand and articulate a coherent narrative that explains to everyone what kind of person you are and what kind of organization you want to lead
• Recognize that everything you do regardless of the setting impacts on that narrative
• Be authentic, people will see through a false story over time
• Tolerate risk taking and its inevitable partner, the occasional failure
• Treat everyone with respect

I divide leaders into two types, those that want to win and those that want to avoid losing. These rules will help you be the first type, the winners, who are much more enjoyable to be around and build the best organizations.

Despite my decision to move, CSC, the company I am leaving, continues to be a  great place to work  with committed and talented employees, many of whom have become friends over the last year. So why did I leave?

Simply put, it became clear to me that my need to help grow something and bring about change within my workplace is greater than I had realized. While I valued my time at CSC, my fundamental worth there was related to what I was not what I did. It brought home the fact that my happiest times were when I was valued for the changes I helped bring about.

At the US Department of Transportation I had in many ways the perfect position, at least for me. I was able to take advantage of my experiences to provide strategic insight into the use and management of Information Technology. I used my capital-P political experiences to work with the small-p organizational politics of being a Departmental CIO. At the same time I was lucky in that the DOT CIO had responsibility for a significant operational segment of the Department, managing the desktops and telephones for headquarters and a growing percentage of the field offices as well as a data center for the non-FAA agencies.

I tell people that during my three years at the Department of Transportation, no-one ever felt that any one person was in charge of Information  Technology BUT they agreed that IF someone was in charge it would have been me. I was able to use that general opinion to cause more change than I had expected.

Powertek provides a comparable opportunity to the one I had at the US Department of Transportation. This is a chance to bring my background in the public and private sector to support the development and implementation of a strategic vision, and to utilize my leadership skills to mentor employees who have less experience and to provide operational and tactical direction. I feel very lucky and privileged to be part of a company that has been very successful thus far but with hard work has the potential to make even more of a difference in the future.

As usual I am always interested in receiving input from the larger community. If there are people out there who are willing to provide advice regarding growing and transitioning an 8a company and/or would be interested in talking about business opportunities or partnerships, please feel free to reach out to me at dmintz@powertekcorporation.com or my personal email at dmintz@ourownlittlecorner.com . You can also find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter at technogeezer.

For references to this, see the end of the interview I gave for the DotGov Buzz, http://www.usa.gov/Federal_Employees/USA_Buzz/Newsletter_0522.html#dotgovspotlight, and the reference from a column in Federal Computer Week, written by then rising star Chris Dorobek, http://fcw.com/Articles/2007/09/16/Circuit_633659049783559373.aspx.

I even ran into Firefly fans when in China this last summer when we went to see a solar eclipse, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/21/serenity-on-the-yangtze/.

I was glad to observe a Firefly reference last night in the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory, http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/. In it the two leads, and roommates, Sheldon and Leonard have a big fight over who will get to accompany Leonard to see the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva on Valentine ’s Day, Leonard’s girl friend Penny or Sheldon.

Even when Sheldon points out that in their very detailed Roommate Agreement  it states clearly if one roommate is going to see the Large Hadron Collider and can bring the other roommate with them, they have to; Leonard still insists he will take Penny. Other Agreement clauses include one that if one roommate becomes a Zombie, the other promises not to kill them.

Sheldon tries to embarrass Leonard by saying that Darth Vader, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard were three notorious traitors. Rupert was in the list because he owned Fox and Fox canceled Firefly. And thus the reference.