Commentary: Sharing Power to Amplify Influence and Results

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12229
• Date: 01 May 2014
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Author: Michelle Moore

Commentary

Michelle Moore is a former White

House political off‌i cial and social enterprise

entrepreneur who helped build the U.S. and

global green building movement as senior

vice president of the U.S. Green Building

Council. She has developed and launched

programs for the Clinton Foundation,

created multibillion-dollar public–private

partnerships for the Barack Obama admin-

istration, and cut red tape and bureaucracy

to get legacy infrastructure projects built.

She is board advisor to Groundswell, senior

fellow at the Council on Competitiveness

on infrastructure and energy, and strategic

advisor to Delos Living and the International

WELL Building Institute. She holds a

bachelor’s degree from Emory University

and a master of science in foreign service

from Georgetown University.

E-mail: mmoore@compete.org

318 Public Administration Review • May | June 2014

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 3, pp. 318–319. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12229.

Michelle Moore

Council on Competitiveness

Joe C. Magee and Clif‌f ord W. Frasier have written

a thoughtful and instructive article on the use of

status and power.

I have always believed that the good you do gives

you the only real power that is obtainable. Sharing

that power and creating a sense of shared purpose

among peers and colleagues amplif‌i es inf‌l uence and

drives results. Learning how to share power toward

a common purpose is particularly critical to exerting

inf‌l uence across fractured government agencies whose

formal organizational structures do not neatly align

with crosscutting policy priorities.

For example, the White House Council on

Environmental Quality (CEQ) sits within the

Executive Of‌f‌i ce of the President and has statu-

tory responsibility for implementing the National

Environmental Policy Act as well as responsibilities

for coordinating environmental policy across the

federal agencies.  e CEQ has fewer than 20 full-

time employees, compared with the approximately

1.8 million civilian employees and 1.5 million men

and women in military service employed within the

rest of the government. Within the CEQ is the Of‌f‌i ce

of the Federal Environmental Executive, a three-

person team I led for two years that is responsible

for advancing sustainability across the entire federal

government.  ree people responsible for driving

organizational sustainability for a 3.2-million-person

institution: even with plenty of status and power, it is

an absurd proposition. And yet, it can work when the

inf‌l uence of the of‌f‌i ce is used to engage, involve, and

share power with men and women across the fed-

eral government who may have no formal reporting

responsibilities to the of‌f‌i ce but who are aligned with

its purpose.

One way that using inf‌l uence to share power and

amplify results was implemented in practice was

through the GreenGov Challenge. Announced by

President Barack Obama, the challenge invited all

federal employees and men and women in military

service to share and vote on the best ideas for achieving

the administration’s policy objectives for greening the

government.  ousands of individuals participated and

shared hundreds of ideas, many of which were adopted

through formal policy-making processes within agen-

cies. Moreover, many individuals who were identif‌i ed

through the challenge became part of volunteer “green

teams” at the facility level or within agencies, augment-

ing the formal coordinating committee at the head-

quarters level and vastly expanding the very modest

team at the CEQ charged with implementation.

What were the results?  e GreenGov ef‌f ort, which

is def‌i ned by Executive Order 13514, doubled the

federal hybrid f‌l eet, is on track to cut greenhouse gas

pollution from federal operations by 28 percent by

2020, and promises to cut the government utility bill

by as much as $11 billion. (Full results can be found

at http://sustainability.performance.gov/.)

Not only does this approach expand results, but also

the inf‌l uence conveyed by status and power can be

fundamentally limited unless it is leveraged to create

informal, power-sharing teams that cut across formal

organizational silos.

 e federal regulatory process for large infrastructure

projects such as bridges and ports underscore this

point. Multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects such

as the Tappan Zee Bridge or the Port of Charleston

are essential for their regions’ economic competitive-

ness and for local jobs, but no one entity is in charge

of the many federal permits that may be required by

environmental and other regulations that originate in

statute.  e result can be bureaucratic gridlock and

years of economically damaging delays. Power, status,

and the resulting inf‌l uence cannot resolve these prob-

lems.  e Secretary of Transportation himself could

not force a local wildlife biologist at another agency to

make a decision any faster.

If inf‌l uence, however, is used to create power-sharing

teams that cut across agencies, multiple permits can

Sharing Power to Amplify Inf‌l uence and Results