SES Mobility

The Partnership for Public Service in conjunction with McKinsey & Company issued a report this week on mobility within the Government’s Senior Executive Service. The Senior Executive Service is the core of people who manage the many agencies of the Federal Government in the United States. The primary thesis of the report “Mission-Driven Mobility: Strengthening Our Government Through a Mobile Leadership Corps” is that there is not enough mobility within the SES. The original vision for the SES when it was created in 1979 under President Carter wa a flexible and mobile management group.

As I read the report and the some of the media coverage of the report I fail to see how the report makes the case that there is a problem. I am not saying that they are incorrect in their assessment of the situation. Rather I am saying they have not done the analysis necessary to demonstrate their claim.

The key figure that drives their conclusion and which has shown up in the media reports is on the right. Here we see that 45% of the current members of the SES have never held a second SES position during their career in the Federal Government. The claim of the report is that this is a problem. But is it?

To answer this question it is useful to look at some of the other data in the report. On further reading we see that among current members of the SES:

3.4 years is the average time they have spent in their current position and
6.4 years is the average time they have spent in the SES.

But who are these people? Remember that the universe is all current members of the SES. That includes those who have just entered the SES as well as those who have been in the SES for a number of years. Consider those who have been in the SES less than a year. Certainly one would expect those people to have occupied only one position during that first year. This group would be part of the 48% who have never changed positions. The key question then is how long should a new member be in the SES before one would expect them to rotate to a new position. This is essential information needed to decide if the 48% figure is too high or is too low. It is not an easy question to answer and there will always be disagreements on what is the best answer. To further complicate the issue the answer will vary by agency and by position with an agency. However without this consideration the 48% figure provides no real useful information.

That is only the first question that must be considered. The entire analysis is much more complicated than it seems at first glance. Basic to the analysis is that this is a case of trying present results using simple means when what is needed is the distribution of the statistics involved. I want to see a table of the number of SES members by years of service cross tabulated by the number of moves they have made within the SES. But even that data has it shortcomings as some of the moves are simply promotions to higher level positions within an agency. It is not at all clear how those changes in positions should be viewed. So even this tabulation needs to be further broken down by the type of move involved for each SES member.

An additional problem with using just the means is that the data is a right truncated. We do not have data on what happens to these members later in their careers. They may just have not yet switched positions yet. The cross tabulation I suggested above would help to alleviate that problem. Otherwise using the mean is like calculating life expectancy by calculating the average age of those still living. I believe that would give us a number in the low 30s.