Please, Mike, No Room at Top For Unqualified

By BRANDON WARD

We know we are in a "silly season" when the Bloomberg administration is, following the resignation of the Department of Buildings Commissioner, Patricia Lancaster, pushing legislation (Intro. 755-2008) to eliminate the requirement that the DOB Commissioner be a licensed engineer or registered architect.

Brandon L. Ward is president of the New York City Municipal Chapter of Blacks in Government, an employee advocacy group. He is a Mechanical Engineer with the Department of Transportation. He can be reached at brandonward@nycbig.com.

Certainly, the ghost of Iris Weinshall (the recent past Department of Transportation Commissioner) - who stated that "qualifications are guidelines only, and it is common for hires not to meet all such requirements provided they excel in other areas" - haunts the Mayor's bullpen.

After all, testifying before the City Council's Governmental Operations Committee, the Mayor's representative was channeling the same Weinshallian mumbo-jumbo. As the administration argued, the Commissioner of DOB need not be a licensed professional, since the licensed professionals working under the commissioner would address technical issues.

When Expertise at Top Matters

Let's 'fess up; serving as the technical professional to a Decider in Charge (DIC) who is technically challenged requires accepting their power logic: might is right. After all, before the U.S. decided to invade Iraq in 2003, the then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell (a former Army General and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), reminded the President of the "Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you own it!"

This translated in political terms to mean: If American forces overthrow the Iraqi government, we will have to take over the governance of that country until a new order can be imposed. Could it be that five years later we are still fighting this senseless war because the President - a manager with an MBA from Harvard no less - refused to listen to the professionals like Richard Clarke, the reigning terrorism czar in the administration, and retired intelligence experts like former 27-year CIA veteran Mideast analyst Ray McGovern?

While it is not my intent to insult or demean our Mayor's leadership, the fact is, what happens at City Hall does not stay at City Hall. As quiet as it's kept, like all addictive vices, bad ideas have a way of progressing from moderation to excess. Before you know it, former Highway Repairers (plural, it happened twice) without a college degree, like Tom Whitehouse, become the Executive Director of engineering-based and decision-driven units. It's called the dumbing-down process.

Certainly as one who has witnessed and written about the dumbing-down of the professional leadership in my agency, DOT, I am well aware of the power logic of commissioners/managers. In 1999, a coterie of agency DICs (primarily non-engineers) appointed the agency's first super-chief - both Chief Engineer and Chief Bridge Officer - whose engineering and managerial abilities were neither adequate nor super. In fact, the super-chief's kryptonite is transportation and bridge engineering. Then, to top it off, his leadership has not been good for engineers. After all, how else does one explain his 1) demoting a competent engineer for exercising the temerity to do his job by evaluating an agency consultant's work as "unsatisfactory;" 2) removing a competent Engineer In Charge (EIC) from the Manhattan Bridge reconstruction projects because he refused a managerial title; and 3) overseeing the transfer of 22 pedestrian bridges to the jurisdictions of another agency, the Department of Design and Construction.

Long before this controversy of non-engineers supervising engineers first hit the fan in DOT, the chief's response to the American Engineering Alliance (following the appointment of a non-engineer as the executive director of engineering units) was: "The executive management of this agency and this division have the responsibility of determining what organizational structure is preferred at any given time and which personnel appointments are appropriate." From this observer's chair, such managerial actions meet the definition of a sellout.

It's an unspoken truth: when it's foggy at the top, it's misty at the bottom. To put it differently, an agency/profession will not rise above its leadership. Certainly, from the perspective of this engineer, and as one who deigns to challenge the assumptions of what constitutes qualified leadership, the pursuit of Intro 755-2008 by the administration is short-sighted and absurd. Wisely, however, according to the City Charter, the core leadership qualification requirement for DOB's commissioner is to be a professional engineer/architect. This can be loosely interpreted to mean: we have nothing against clowns provided that they stay in the circus.

Agency Heads Can Inspire

Professionally speaking, there is nothing more stimulating than working for someone who has a distilled understanding of the job and whose decision-making is informed by his or her experience and consequent professional qualifications. Unfortunately, more and more it seems that there is something in the zeitgeist about elected leaders/commissioners appointing non-traditional managers to head up agencies/divisions that require a professional degree and industry expertise.

Hurricane Katrina washed up Michael Brown, the former horse-trainer appointed Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency by President Bush. Mayor Bloomberg assigned us Joel Klein, a former anti-trust attorney known for breaking things up (i.e. Microsoft), to reform the nation's largest public school system. And how about my agency's super-chief, who would encourage us to believe that appointing erstwhile Highway Repairers (again, not once but twice) without college degrees to supervise engineering decision-driven units is "appropriate."

The fact is, the issue of non-engineering managers managing agencies/units requiring a licensed professional raises two thorny questions. First, are engineers the best-qualified to lead such agencies? And the second and more perplexing question is, does an engineer/architect bring more insight than a non-engineer to the management of an agency like DOB?

I must confess that on the latter question, one of the ironies of my persistent criticisms of the current engineering leadership of my agency is that a rat in a cookie jar is considered a cookie. Indeed, any objective review of the job duties of the DOB Commissioner will reveal that qualifications, the right professional qualifications and managerial experience, are required for the position.

Embracing Mediocrity

It is disgusting as well as intellectually insulting that the professional staff, in this case engineers and architects, who deal with the agency's "complex" issues, are in effect required to be, according to the administration's argument, booster rockets to launch the career of another managerial entrepreneur of dubious qualifications.

Unfortunately, most professionals' acceptance of such leadership mediocrity is generally done on the altogether specious premise that an individual is "not so bad" after all. As some rationalize it, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. Consequently, employees succumb to the most-pernicious form of an agency's dumbing-down: embracing mediocrity. And in the parlance of Thelma and Louise, "Ya get what ya settle for."

Against this backdrop, here's my advice to the administration for identifying the next DOB Commissioner.

Advice #1: There are those professionals who know squat about a subject but are forceful in presenting their views, especially to a non-technical supervisor. They are BS artists; ignore them.

Advice #2: There are those professionals who don't know what they are doing and know they don't know what they are doing. Forget about them.

Advice #3: There are those professionals who don't know what they are doing and don't know they don't know what they are doing. They are dangerous; avoid them.

Advice #4: There are those professionals who know what they are doing and know they know what they are doing. They are leaders; select the next commissioner from that pool.