Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People To Help Government Do Better

by Dan Honig

This book argues that the performance of our governments can be transformed by managing bureaucrats for their empowerment rather than compliance. Aimed at public sector workers, leaders, academics, and citizens alike, it contends that public sectors too often rely on a managerial approach which seeks to tightly monitor and control employees, and thus demotivates and repels the mission motivated. Mission Driven Bureaucrats suggests that better performance can in many cases come from a more empowerment-oriented managerial approach, which allows autonomy, cultivates feelings of competence, and creates connection to peers and purpose. This enables the mission motivated to thrive.

Arguing against conventional wisdom, Honig asserts that compliance often thwarts public value and that we can often get less corruption and malfeasance with less monitoring. He provides a handbook of strategies for managers to introduce empowerment-oriented strategies into their agency and describes what everyday citizens can do to support the empowerment of bureaucrats in their governments. Interspersed throughout this book are featured profiles of real-life mission driven bureaucrats, who exemplify the dedication and motivation which is typical of many civil servants. Drawing on original empirical data from several countries and the prior work of other scholars from around the globe, Mission Driven Bureaucrats argues that empowerment-oriented management will cultivate, support, attract, and retain mission driven bureaucrats and should have a larger place in our thinking and practice.

Genres: Politics

264 pages, Paperback

Published July 3, 2024

Reviews

[bookblogjourney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Dan Hoing talks about how easing up compliance can make space for ‘mission-driven bureaucrats’ - government workers who enjoy their jobs, and who are more efficient and effective at helping citizens. He talks about how a shift in a management style, from ‘management to compliance’ to ‘managing to empower,” can lead to a re-building of trust in governments and the world. Hoing asks in his book: How can bureaucracies best be managed to deliver positive outcomes? Does compliance get in the way of building trust between citizens and governments?
In Mission Driven Bureaucrats by Dan Hoing challenges the status quo in public sector management, arguing that true transformation comes from empowering bureaucrats, not just monitoring them. Hoing’s groundbreaking book is causing a stir, and shows how an empowerment-oriented approach (focused on autonomy, competence, and purpose) can unlock motivation and boost government performance. Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empower People To Help Governments Do Better by Dan Honig offers a roadmap for how governments can break from the status quo and cultivate a workforce of dedicated, empowered public servants.
What are Mission-Driven Bureaucrats? Mission-driven bureaucrats are dedicated public servants who are deeply committed to the public good, beyond simply following a job description. They have the potential to drive institutional transformation and improve government performance while throughout the book presents four challenges and solutions to the empowerment-oriented approach. The first question Hoing addresses are the bureaucratic and organizational constraints such as rigidity, a compliance and enforcement focus, and overall resistance to change. Hoing secondly discusses the exception of political and institutional barriers namely political instability and the lack of support from leadership. Hoing thirdly dives into the objections of resource limitations surrounding insufficient funding and resources and an overburdened workforce. Hoing lastly understands the cultural and structural difficulties of gender and diversity barriers and the lack of institutional support for professional development.
Dan Hoing argues in Mission Driven Bureaucrats that a compliance mentality has pervaded that interaction between the citizen and the bureaucrat and it has undermined the ability to form trust. Now trust in the government is not just about the government giving you stuff. It’s about the government feeling accessible to you. It’s about the people who are governing or the processes that are governing are making sense and seeming supportive to the citizen. And you can’t have a process that supports citizens unless those bureaucrats are themselves supportive.
Compliance rolls downhill, right? When you know the US Department of Housing and Urban Development was required to document, to dot every I and cross every T, in hurricane response. What happens as a result? Well, they need citizens to provide loads of paperwork so that they can demonstrate that they made the payments accurately. But there's just been a hurricane, who has the documents?
The people who have the documents are disproportionately the wealthy and even they are pissed off at the end of the day because they have had to go through a compliance process that undermines their trust in government even as the government delivers services to them. And so, I agree we are at a moment of low trust and people of this idea say "because we’re at that moment, maybe this can’t be a solution” and Hoing argues that “we are at that moment because we haven’t used this solution and if we think it the other way we will get there.”

[Tony Senanayake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mission driven bureaucrats brings the world of organisational development to the public sector context. It is particularly relevant to leaders of non-profit organisations who are thinking about how to set up management systems to take advantage of intrinsically motivated talent.

The book makes a strong, empirically grounded argument for why an empowerment based management system as opposed to a compliance management system lead to more effective bureaucracies and how that will fundamental drive better public sector outcomes for society.

The author is pragmatic in recognising the value of easily measurable outcomes and risks associated with giving bureaucrats greater autonomy. However, they are able to provide large scale, experimental evidence to back their claims for a rethinking of management approaches.